The Nickel Boys

Last week Colson Whitehead won his second Pulitzer prize in three years for The Nickel Boys, following his 2017 win for The Underground Railroad. This was very thoughtful timing on the part of the Pulitzer committee, as I finished The Nickel Boys on the day the announcement was made. I was somewhat put out that they forgot to consult me before making their decision, but we must make allowances given the current coronaviral times we live in.

I have a somewhat mixed relationship with the three Whitehead novels I’ve read. I thought Zone One was total horseshit and liked The Underground Railroad quite a bit...but not nearly as effusively as a lot of other people liked it. In both of those cases my problems stemmed largely from the magical-realist/metaphorical/whatever dignified name we’re giving fantastical elements in literary novels this year parts, which in both cases felt awkwardly grafted onto the more straightforward literary material. So when The Nickel Boys came along, I was hopeful that a more down to earth story would let me get on board the Whitehead Experience in a way that had so far eluded me.

Skipping around between the 1960s at the tail end of the Jim Crow era and various points afterwards up until 2014, The Nickel Boys focuses on Ellwood Curtis, an idealistic young black teenager who dreams of joining the anti-segregation protest movements raging across the country. It seems as though he’s well on the way to getting that chance at the age of sixteen, until a random bout of misfortune sees him arrested for a crime he didn’t commit.

Ellwood is sent to the Nickel Academy, a supposedly-progressive reform school in Florida that’s hiding all manner of brutality and predation. The story begins in 2014 with an adult Ellwood deciding to return to Florida after a secret graveyard is discovered, then goes back to fill in the events leading up to that point.

The Nickel Academy (named after a guy called Nickel, in case you’re wondering) is fictional, but institutions like it are sort of an open secret in America: there were—and very much still are—a whole lot of places where errant children and teenagers can be quietly vanished away to, and the things that go on behind closed doors in those places can be pretty harrowing if the testimony of survivors is anything to go by. I would wager more people than you’d expect are aware of places like this, but most don’t pay them any particular attention.

There are a number of directions that you could go with this premise. Whitehead revisits the stark racial commentary of The Underground Railroad. White and black “students” alike are treated to Nickel’s violent discipline, but the latter have it far worse as the academy functions as a last, defiant outpost of the Jim Crow era—and in the case of its ultimate punishment, reserved for the black boys and kept hidden even from the other students, the antebellum south. If you’re at all familiar with the discourse around American racial injustice over the last few decades then the basic point—that legal and socially-acceptable institutions stepped in to fill the role of the plantation and the Jim Crow laws—won’t be novel, although here Whitehead is positing that this process started before segregation had even ended (I don’t know if the Nickel Academy was inspired by research into real places that existed at that time, but I would not be at all surprised if it was).

Whitehead’s views on race and its place in America as expressed in The Underground Railroad were extremely pessimistic, and that negative outlook continues here. This makes for similarly bleak (although probably more honest) reading, but in The Nickel Boys Whitehead offers an unexpected note of hope right at the end of the story. The specific way this is achieved is a bit contrived on a narrative level, but it’s undeniably touching even if you can see the strings a little too easily.

I think it works so well in part because the rest of the book is surprisingly bloodless given the subject matter. I went into this book expecting some level of tragedy porn, but it resolutely steers away from that direction: most of the horrors of the Nickel Academy are only glancingly mentioned or implied, and even when Whitehead depicts them on the page he doesn’t rub the readers’ nose in it the way other writers might have. At first glance this can come across as dispassionate, but the more you read the more the anger that animates the story becomes evident; it’s just a quiet, weary anger, the type that’s up against an injustice that seems too great to actively fight against.

On the other hand, the book does maintain an emotional distance from its characters even as it engages with its themes. Ellwood, as an intellectual and calculating sort, is never really moved to a great degree by anything and this can give the impression that he’s not actually as bothered by the things happening to him as the book insists that he is. We’re told that his first beating at the hands of the Nickel staff breaks something fundamental inside of him and leaves him changed, but we’re not really shown this until he becomes disillusioned with MLK’s speeches, which doesn’t happen until much later.

On the subject of Ellwood, the book’s early chapters spend a great deal of time sanctifying him: he’s more intelligent, a better student, better behaved and more polite than all the other uncouth boys in his neighbourhood. This, coupled with the fact that he’s completely innocent of the crime that sends him to Nickel, had alarm bells ringing for me. Any suggestion that Ellwood’s tragedy is heightened by his not deserving to be there would have instantly torpedoed the story, because the inescapable conclusion, intentional or not, would be that the other boys do deserve what’s done to them, or at least deserve it more. But it turns out I wasn’t giving Whitehead enough credit: when the book engages with the reasons why the other boys are in Nickel at all, it’s to point out that most of them are bullshit.

(This was meant to be longer but my migraines are acting up so I’m going to skip to the end DOOTLE DOOT HERE WE GO)

I was surprised that The Nickel Boys won the Pulitzer, not because I don’t think it deserves it but because it’s not the sort of book that invites descriptions like “devastating” or “raw” (not that that’s stopped critics from applying them anyway). Pulitzer winning novels have always seemed to belong to a certain type: stories that are sweeping and epic in scope and that are written in a way that calls attention to themselves. To see the prize go to a book that’s quietly unpretentious and which contains only those components necessary to tell its story and get its points across--this is a quick, brisk read--is a refreshing change of pace.