Let me say first of all that Colson Whitehead’s latest novel is brilliant: the story of boys locked up in a juvenile facility, mainly because they’re Black or inconvenient or both. 

Protagonist Elwood Curtis in The Nickel Boys is a finely-realized, decent and intelligent kid, nerdy when the word has just been invented, although the type is surely eternal. As the book opens, Elwood is being brought up by his grandmother. She isn’t with us for long, but like other minor figures in the novel, she’s far from a stock figure. Whitehead has a gift for creating characters in a few swift details. Elwood’s grandmother gives him a 10-cent record of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speeches for Christmas, but is among the last to take her rightful place on the bus after others have put themselves on the line. 

The message of the King record is crucial for Elwood, and it’s reinforced by the arrival of a new teacher at his high school, Mr. Hill. A civil rights activist, Mr. Hill gets Elwood accepted into classes at a nearby Black college. Elwood seems to be on his way, even if it’s not clear where, yet the entirely well-meaning intervention of his teacher leads to Elwood’s incarceration in the Nickel Academy, the juvenile detention facility.

Whitehead is very fine on the way things happen. Listening obsessively to King’s speeches, Elwood develops a dislike of Black kids who shoplift from the convenience store where he works after school, even though the store’s white owner has decided not to care. In Elwood’s mind, the kids aren’t showing self-respect, and when he calls them out, they beat him up and wreck his bicycle. That means Elwood has to hitchhike to college for his classes, and only succeeds in getting a lift from a Black man who may or may not be a car thief, but in any case gets pulled over by the cops. As happens. 

One of the things that makes it possible to read this tragic novel is the gaps Whitehead leaves. Part One ends with a cop walking up to the car, his gun drawn.

Jump cut. Part Two. Elwood is on his way to the Nickel Academy without an excavation of the trial, the injustice of which we understand, or should, since we still see it every day. There’s no hand-wringing. No suffer-porn, no tear-jerking, none of those overdone hyphenated things. Instead we get unvarnished cause and effect, this leading to that with the inevitability of a math equation, except that in this case 2 plus 2 is never going to equal 4, since the characters are Black and there’s no equality involved. 

The Nickel Boys is a novel about systemic racism, and how the game is rigged. This is made explicit when Elwood arrives at the abusive Nickel Academy, where he learns that to “graduate” he needs to compile a record of merit points, and no one can tell him how to get them. There are no rules, just the whims of the white men who staff the academy, and who pick and discard favourites at will. 

Whitehead usually writes in a magic-realist manner, where uncanny things routinely happen. In his last novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Underground Railroad, the historically metaphorical railroad stations are made of bricks and mortar, and Black passengers ride a train north through some pretty bizarre terrain. The Nickel Boys is entirely realistic, yet the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of the academy gives the novel a familiar air of illogic to which Whitehead’s characters are forced to respond, the idea being, I think, that Black people live in an illogical world.

At the academy, Elwood makes an important friend named Turner, a more cynical and practical boy who tries to help him find a path through the system. Turner advises Elwood to keep his head down to avoid the routine beatings—torture, really—that can and do end as murder. The fact that Elwood remains persistently Elwood means he has the classical hero’s tragic flaw: his pride. Elwood refuses to become servile, meaning that his story takes on a fatal inevitability, saying what all great art says, usually with controlled anguish: This is what it’s like. 

It’s an essential work. Read it.

The review concludes here.