Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead's new novel, The Nickel Boys, creates a fictional Nickel Academy based on an actual reform school in Florida where generations of boys, particularly African Americans, were brutalized. Through this novel, Whitehead rejects abstraction and insists on the individuality of those trapped in this system. In both The Nickel Boys and his previous novel, The Underground Railroad, Whitehead lays bare the racialized violence that threads through U.S. history.

Whitehead is such a good storyteller that you are drawn into the narrative right away. He starts in the present with a University of South Florida student on an archeology project discovering Nickel Academy's secret graveyard. This unmarked graveyard is where Nickel buried students - mostly black students - who'd died under their brutal treatment, usually through extreme punishments. Whitehead brings this piece of history to life through fiction and makes you care about the story immediately. When he shifts to the story of Elwood Curtis, a young man who's grown up listening to Martin Luther King and living with his grandmother in Tallahassee, the scene has been set for the horrors of Nickel to be revealed.

But then Whitehead takes his time letting it unfold, starting with Elwood's youth and fully developing him as a character. By the time Elwood is sent to Nickel, the groundwork has been laid to reveal the extent of a racially-based miscarriage of justice that has cut short his education and promise. The reader is presented both with the spiteful brutality of the institution, as well as the brutality that comes of robbing black young men of a future. There are both white and black inmates at Nickel, but those on the black "campus" come in for the most vicious mistreatment.

Alongside the tale of Elwood's horrific experience, and a post-Nickel storyline, Whitehead interweaves stories of other students at Nickel. I won't give away the details, but Whitehead gives a wide angle view of the institution's racism, corruption, and viciousness. Because the stories are wide-ranging, the novel can feel a little disconnected at points, but it all comes together in the end.

This is an incredible book. It tells a crucial history that has been long buried and tells it in a compelling way. I completely recommend it.

I received an ARC of this novel from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.