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It's pretty rare for a writer to produce a novel that wins the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and, then, a scant three years later, bring out another novel that's even more extraordinary. But, that's what Colson Whitehead has done in following up his 2016 novel, 

. It's a masterpiece squared, rooted in history and American mythology and, yet, painfully topical in its visions of justice and mercy erratically denied.


By Whitehead's own admission, the disturbing true story that informs 

derailed him from the crime novel he'd been planning to write. A few years ago, Whitehead read news reports about The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a segregated reform school in Florida that opened in 1900 and was finally shut down in 2011. Unmarked graves of boys brutalized and even possibly murdered at the school were discovered — and are still being discovered — by forensic archaeologists. In Whitehead's novel, The Dozier School is renamed "The Nickel Academy" and it's at this house of horrors that his main character, an African American teenager named Elwood Curtis, winds up.


It's the early 1960s and Elwood has been listening to a record album of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches that his grandmother gave him for Christmas. Elwood has absorbed Dr. King's message that he "must walk the streets of life every day with [a] sense of dignity and ... somebody-ness."

The other kids in high school think he's a goody goody, but industrious Elwood believes in the meritocracy and, in fact, he's already been offered an opportunity to take classes at a "colored college" miles away from his home in Tallahassee. To get there he has to hitchhike. That's when Fate steps in in the form of a black man driving a bright green Plymouth Fury, which turns out to be stolen. Even though Elwood is but a clueless passenger, he's sent to the Nickel Academy for car theft.



Whitehead's novel is short and intense; its chapters as compact as the isolation cells that Nickel boys are thrown into and sometimes never leave. One way that Whitehead uses the narrative spareness of 

 to devastating effect is by tightly juxtaposing scenes and images and letting the contrasts silently sink in.


For instance, Elwood's arrival (in handcuffs) at The Nickel Academy is made all the more wretched by the fact that the school — all green lawns and red brick — looks like his intended college, at least on the outside. And a shattering chapter about a rigged and vicious boxing match that nods to 

 is followed by a description of the annual Christmas Fair at The Nickel Academy. The child-friendly displays of Santa and gingerbread houses are constructed by the forced labor of the Nickel boys — boys, who, we're told, years later:




At Nickel, Elwood makes a friend whose name is Turner; Turner is an expert whistler, often breaking into the theme music from 

. (Another disorienting juxtaposition.) He's also more skeptical, especially about the civil rights movement and the chances of justice within the walls of Nickel or beyond. Turner goes along to get along and, as Elwood begins to do the same, he feels his spirit dying. We're told that Elwood wakes up at night and realizes that:




Before he gives up, Elwood resolves he'll make one last gesture of faith in the possibility that someone in power cares about correcting injustice. You may think you can guess how that effort ends, but you'd only be partially right. 

 issues a complex and deeply affecting verdict on whether or not the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice. But my "verdict," so to speak, on 

 is much more straightforward: It's a great American novel.  

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The Thread® - Books and Literary News

The Thread

Maureen Corrigan

Author

Colson Whitehead's deeply affecting new novel is based on the true story of a segregated reform school in Florida where African American boys were brutalized and possibly murdered.

Rooted in history, 'The Nickel Boys' is a great American novel

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