Review: The Nickel Boys

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For most of the time I read this, I liked it but I felt it didn’t quite live up to the hype. And there was so much hype that I still thought it was pretty good, just not necessarily ‘the best book of the year’ hype. And then (view spoiler)[

The final reveal, that Elwood died in the escape attempt and that Turner has adopted his identity to help him go onto live a full (and somewhat redeemed) life, changes everything.

Start with the title. The further we got with this, the more I wanted to complain: how is this about “boys” since so much of it turns on Elwood? It’s his story entirely and, as such, is powerful. But the title promises a story that stands for more than just one person’s experience.

The end, of course, makes clear just that. A world that sees these “boys” as marked by their skin color, to which “they all look alike,” has confused Elwood and Turner. And no one has ever really noticed.

It’s chilling, and it functions like a coda: I find I have to revisit the entire first parts of the novel to see what I missed just as the administrators at Nickel have missed so much of what they should have seen.

And there’s more. The fact that we are called on to see Elwood’s/Turner’s story as embracing both of them – as revealing (with the literal unearthing of the graves – right at the start! In a way a way I can’t appreciate until the end) that this singular experience is collective – makes this a more dramatic appeal for racial reckoning than it seemed for so long.

There’s a soaring anger here, and it leads me to admire this as much – perhaps exactly as much – as The Underground Railroad (which I thought was superb). The reckoning there is intriguingly metaphoric, but here it’s more abrupt, more confronting of actual violence. I think it says something that Whitehead shares as much of an afterword as he does, pointing us to the records of the “school” on which he has based Nickel. He’s more directly exposing wrong here, but he’s going far beyond nonfiction reporting.

He's transformed the story of the Dozier Academy into a mask that hides and reveals more than any straightforward account might. I think back to the great Paul Laurence Dunbar poem, “We Wear the Mask,” and I see that playing out here.

Turner, the angrier and more violent of the boys, assumes the meeker and wronged ‘mask’ of Elwood. He hides the anger that led him almost inevitably to the world of Nickel behind the too-sweet for this world Elwood. As such, this is a fresh extension of one of the central metaphors of African-American fiction. (hide spoiler)]

So, put me down on the long list of big admirers of this work. I still have more Whitehead to get to, and I look forward to it all.


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