"The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether. The only voices were those of the boys below, the shouts and laughter and fearful cries, as if he floated in a bitter heaven."
After exploring emotional heft in "The Underground Railroad," Colson Whitehead somehow managed to top himself with the stunning "The Nickel Boys." A savagely heartbreaking tale of the systematic destruction of downtrodden lives, this novel draws you in, making the tale both absorbing and repelling.
"He admired liars who kept on lying even though their lies were obvious, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Another proof of one's powerlessness before other people."
The might-have-been, unfairly-defined, and reborn lives of Elwood Curtis make him one of the most compelling fiction characters I can remember. Even Elwood's limited idealism is difficult to read, knowing that even the small changes he believed would come were not only improbable but impossible. The contrast between Elwood and Turner -- and how they forge an alliance despite those disparate worldviews -- lends even more power to the plot.
"To see him from across the street -- the serious young lad heaving his freight of the world's knowledge -- was to witness a scene that might have been illustrated by Norman Rockwell, if Elwood had had white skin."
"He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn't have to, and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb. Still -- sturdy."
Drawing heavily from true stories, Whitehead has rendered an all-too-real world where doing the right thing is all at once an imperative, impossible, and lethal. Against that backdrop, the terror of the Nickel school is on par with anything from Stephen King.
"Maybe there was no system at all to the violence and no one, not the keepers nor the kept, knew what happened or why."
"Spencer was fastidious with his dark blue Nickel uniform; every crease in his clothes looked sharp enough to cut, as if he were a living blade."
"To think of those Nickel nights where the only sounds were tears and insects, how you could sleep in a room crammed with sixty boys and still understand that you were the only person on earth. Everybody around and nobody around at the same time."
This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and while this is not important, "The Nickel Boys" would make a stellar movie, with several cinema-friendly scenes already baked into the novel. Even after reading "The Underground Railroad" less than a month before, I was shaken by Whitehead's latest, racing through "The Nickel Boys" in less than three days.
NPR described the book as an "act of witness," while The Guardian wrote that "Whitehead has a gift for summarizing the essence of a person's nature in a few lines." I say that Colson Whitehead has emerged as maybe the most talented and important literary voice in contemporary America.
"The recognition he sought went beyond brown skin -- he was looking for someone who looked like him, for someone to claim as kin. For others to claim him as kin, those who saw the same future approaching, slow as it may be and overfond of back roads and secret hardscrabble paths, attuned to the deeper music in the speeches and hand-painted signs of protest. Those ready to commit their weight to the great lever and move the world."
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