Harvey Freedenberg

NonfictionPolitics

The People, No

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Anyone looking for a compact, highly readable history of the American political movement known as populism, and the determined efforts from both right and left to squelch it, will enjoy prominent progressive journalist Thomas Frank’s The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.

Frank (What’s the Matter With Kansas?) describes how, despite populism’s brief formal life—from the founding of the People’s Party in 1891 to the crushing defeat of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896—its ideals have persisted through more than a century of American political history. Their influence, as he describes it, reached its zenith during the New Deal when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while not expressly invoking any populist lineage, nonetheless “talked constantly about the urgent need to take power away from economic elites and return it to the average American.”

But after World War II, as Frank points out in perhaps the most intriguing portion of his argument, the opposition to populism subtly shifted from obvious enemies, like the robber barons of the Gilded Age, to the “technocratic, elite liberalism” that came to dominate the Democratic Party. In the hands of these professionals and intellectuals, populism became a code word for “demagoguery and intolerance,” as their interests diverged from those of the working class.

The disdain of this “highly educated leadership class” for the populist impulse turned out, in Frank’s candid assessment, to be nothing less than a “liberal folly,” opening the door for what he calls the “phony populism of the right” that flourished in the Republican Party beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It climaxed in Donald Trump’s unlikely victory in 2016, when a candidate whose true agenda would have made William McKinley smile successfully harnessed popular hostility to elites and rode it into the White House.

Credit goes to Frank for this admirable effort to reclaim the noblest parts of the populist legacy and make them relevant for contemporary Americans, but there’s good reason to doubt we’ll see this platform realized soon, no matter who prevails in November 2020.

Anyone looking for a compact, highly readable history of the American political movement known as populism, and the determined efforts from both right and left to squelch it, will enjoy prominent progressive journalist Thomas Frank’s The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.

FictionComing of Age

The Lightness

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Emily Temple’s moody debut novel, The Lightness, follows the lives of four bright but troubled teenage girls through a strange summer as they explore some of the dangerous outer reaches of young life and love.

The “panspiritual contemplation community” known as the Levitation Center is no ordinary overnight camp. Located high in the mountains, this “Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls” is home to some 60 girls: “shoplifters and potheads, arsonists and bullies, boy crazy and girl crazy, split and scarred.” Eager to escape her needy, abusive mother and haunted by the disappearance of her estranged father—last seen at a retreat at the same center the previous year—Olivia Ellis, the novel’s narrator, soon finds herself in an uneasy alliance with three bunkmates: Laurel, Janet and their putative leader, the enigmatic Serena, who has her own painful associations with the center.

Over the course of the summer, the foursome engages in a series of increasingly dangerous experiments designed to allow them to both realize the fantasy of flight and transform themselves into what Serena calls “beautiful, wrathful, whole new creatures.” Their nightly explorations are complicated by the involvement of the camp’s young gardener, Luke, a would-be mentor whose interactions with the girls, both sexual and otherwise, heighten the tension that skillfully builds over the course of the story. As Olivia reflects on these events from the perspective of early adulthood, her tone is one of mingled fascination and regret, seemingly aware that she has yet to fully comprehend all that happened to her and her friends during those fateful few weeks.

Temple liberally seasons her story with informative bits of Buddhist philosophy, Greek mythology and descriptions of how, throughout history, humans have attempted to satisfy the yearning to defy gravity. For both its mystery and its psychological insight, The Lightness will appeal to readers who enjoyed works like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl. It’s an admirable addition to the body of fiction that helps illuminate why adolescence, for all its thrills of discovery, can be one of life’s most challenging stages.

Emily Temple’s moody debut novel, The Lightness, follows the lives of four bright but troubled teenage girls through a strange summer as they explore some of the dangerous outer reaches of young life and love.

NonfictionBusiness & Finance

Monopolized

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The economic consequences of pandemics, disasters and recessions during our lifetime will be far-reaching and profound. And as David Dayen explains in his disturbing polemic Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, they’ll play out against the insidious trend toward concentrated corporate power.

Blending professional rigor with journalistic flair, Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, takes readers on a comprehensive tour of the American economy, revealing “the collections of monopolies encircling our every move.” As a consequence, “we toil in this age of monopoly, this age of plutocrats, this age of soaring inequality and broken democracy, this age of middle-class despair and sawed-off ladders to prosperity.”

To drive home that point, Dayen grounds his portrait in vivid illustrations of how a handful of companies have the power to profoundly affect people’s daily lives. One example is the story of Dave and Carolyn Horowitz, of Lenoir City, Tennessee, who, like millions of Americans living in rural areas, lack essential access to broadband internet because the six dominant companies who could provide it refuse to upgrade to high-speed service in areas of low population density. 

Similar stories are repeated across the spectrum of commerce in the United States, from pharmaceutics to journalism to financial services. In each instance, Dayen argues, a small group of companies and individuals have skillfully exploited privileged positions to benefit themselves and harm Americans. He reserves special scorn for revered investor Warren Buffett (America’s “premier monopolist”) and the “greed-stuffed titans” of the private equity industry. 

Dayen concludes with a glimmer of hope that some of the early successes of what’s been called the “New Brandeis” movement (named for the late Supreme Court justice, an avowed foe of monopolies in the early 20th century) will energize a consumer backlash against these concentrations of wealth and power. It’s a fight worth waging, but not one that will be easily won.

The economic consequences of pandemics, disasters and recessions during our lifetime will be far-reaching and profound. And as David Dayen explains in his disturbing polemic Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, they’ll play out against the insidious trend toward concentrated corporate power. Blending professional rigor with journalistic flair, Dayen, executive editor of the […]
NonfictionMemoir

Stray

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

With the success of her novel, Sweetbitter, which spawned a television series, it might seem like Stephanie Danler has led a charmed life. Anyone who reads her fierce, unsparing memoir, Stray, however, will be quickly disabused of that notion.

From a rental house in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon where some members of Fleetwood Mac may have once lived, Danler ranges over the whole of her life as the daughter of two parents who failed in the most essential task: providing their offspring with a safe and loving home. Danler’s mother’s alcoholism is complicated by her near death from a brain aneurysm in her 40s, forcing Danler to confront her obligation to care for someone who repudiates her attempts at care. Her father, who abandoned Danler when she was 3 years old and later brought her into his Colorado home when she was 16, spirals toward ruin in the grip of an addiction to crystal meth, his life a cloud of lies and neglect. Out of this “veritable sea of alcoholism and narcissism,” Danler is flung ashore, ill-prepared for the demands of adulthood.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Stephanie Danler talks to BookPage about returning to California, making peace with a painful past and taking the leap from fiction to memoir.

As if the struggles of her parents’ illnesses and addictions aren’t painful enough, in the wake of her own short-lived first marriage, Danler also finds herself in a destructive affair with a married man she nicknames the “Monster.” As she oscillates between the seemingly irresistible pull of her desire and her understanding of the toxicity of that relationship, she simultaneously draws closer to another man she calls the “Love Interest,” whose self–imposed mission is to introduce her to some of the bleaker features of Los Angeles’ landscape, like a lake that’s turned into a dust bowl, “yet another god forsaken place.”

In Danler’s evocation of California’s complicated history and the darkness that lurks under its sunny exterior, Stray brings to mind the work of Joan Didion, and her frank portrayal of the nightmare of addiction is akin to Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. But in its painful candor and hard-earned wisdom, Stray is every bit its own vivid creation.

With the success of her novel, Sweetbitter, which spawned a television series, it might seem like Stephanie Danler has led a charmed life. Anyone who reads her fierce, unsparing memoir, Stray, however, will be quickly disabused of that notion. From a rental house in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon where some members of Fleetwood Mac may […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Days of Distraction

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Alexandra Chang’s debut novel, Days of Distraction, offers a thoughtful reflection on gender, relationships and racial and ethnic identity in 21st-century America, as seen through the observant eyes of a young Chinese American woman.

Employed as a Consumer Technology Reporter for a San Francisco-based publication, Chang’s narrator Alexandra (Jing-Jing to her family) writes “about gadgets for people with money to spend.” Between her dissatisfaction with the emptiness of her job and the not-so-subtle discrimination against women working in the tech world, she’s ready for a change.

With her white boyfriend, identified only as “J,” Alexandra embarks on a cross-country drive from the West Coast to Ithaca, New York, where J will enter a Ph.D. program in biochemistry at Cornell. She abandons her writing for a part-time job with a “major social media company that shall not be named” that pays her $30 an hour to do nothing more than “keep an eye on tech news and upload stories into the app.”

Along the way, relying on an accumulation of narrative fragments that defines Chang’s style, Alexandra gradually begins to unearth stories about the lives of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. when they began to arrive in large numbers in the 19th century, especially the unsubtle prejudice against them that included bans on interracial marriage. Among the most interesting is the story of Yamei Kin, the first woman of Chinese descent educated at an American university (Cornell), who went on to carve out a distinguished career as a nutritionist. Kin’s marriage to a white man provokes Alexandra to ruminate on the challenges in her own interracial relationship, ones that transcend the ordinary tensions that accompany the young couple’s uprooting and relocation.

Days of Distraction is less noteworthy for its action or plot twists than it is for Alexandra’s precise, fresh insights into life in a country where people who look like her have ultimately thrived. But as the novel reveals, that eventual acceptance sometimes has a steep price.

Alexandra Chang’s debut novel, Days of Distraction, offers a thoughtful reflection on gender, relationships and racial and ethnic identity in 21st-century America, as seen through the observant eyes of a young Chinese American woman.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Amnesty

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Along with climate change and the rise of populist nationalism, immigration is one of several subjects that have dominated the news in the first two decades of the 21st century. It’s no surprise, then, that an accomplished novelist like Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga would turn his attention to this challenging topic. Amnesty, the story of a brutal crime and its reverberation in the life of a self-described illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, is the tension-inducing, morally complex result of that effort.

Four years after dropping out of a fraudulent college and overstaying his student visa in Sydney, Dhananjaya “Danny” Rajaratnam, originally from Sri Lanka, lives in a storeroom above a grocery store, performs occasional odd jobs and also runs a small home-cleaning business. When one of his clients, a married woman, is found stabbed to death, Danny quickly realizes that her lover, a man named Prakash—an immigrant like Danny, but who obtained Australian citizenship—is likely the killer. 

Over the course of a single day, in a series of text messages and cellphone conversations, Prakash and Danny engage in a cat-and-mouse game over whether Danny will share with the police the knowledge he possesses that could implicate Prakash in the crime. In an effort to deter Danny, Prakash threatens to expose the young man’s illegal status. Danny’s situation is complicated by the fact that he’s a member of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. Before fleeing the country, he faced detention and torture and knows he risks that fate if he returns.

Though Adiga’s sympathies clearly lie with Danny, he’s careful not to telegraph the result of this dramatic confrontation. As Danny roams the streets of Sydney and wrestles with his conscience, we see glimpses of the anxiety of life in an “archipelago of illegals, each isolated from the other and kept weak, and fearful, by this isolation.” Add to that troubling reality the weight of an ethical crisis of life-changing dimensions, and the result is a work of deeply consequential fiction.

Along with climate change and the rise of populist nationalism, immigration is one of several subjects that have dominated the news in the first two decades of the 21st century. It’s no surprise, then, that an accomplished novelist like Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga would turn his attention to this challenging topic.

NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

The Splendid and the Vile

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

When a body of historical literature is as vast as the one on Winston Churchill in World War II, it’s fair to ask whether the world needs yet another entry. But when the author is a master of popular history like Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz—the engrossing story of Churchill’s first year as prime minister—needs no additional justification.

Larson (Dead Wake) begins his account with Churchill’s assumption of power on May 10, 1940, on the eve of the British evacuation of Dunkirk, and continues for exactly one year. That highly consequential span saw, among other events, the fall of France, the London Blitz (Germany’s relentless aerial bombardment that killed nearly 45,000 Britons) and Churchill’s tactful but persistent courtship of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that culminated in the securing of material assistance vital to sustaining Britain’s war effort. It was also a year in which Churchill time and again displayed his unsurpassed gift for inspiring a beleaguered nation—through his oratory and through the sheer force of his personality—to persist through some of the darkest days of the war, when German bombs rained death nightly on Britain’s cities, and invasion seemed imminent.

But The Splendid and the Vile isn’t merely a story of war and diplomacy. Larson devotes considerable attention to daily life inside the Churchill household, including frequent weekend excursions at the prime minister’s country retreat, Chequers, where social gatherings often stretched into the early morning hours amid intensive war planning. Larson also humanizes the prime minister through stories of his teenage daughter, Mary, struggling to make the awkward transition into adulthood in the midst of war’s chaos, and his son Randolph, whose marriage was crumbling under the weight of a gambling addiction.

While Britain didn’t defeat Hitler in Churchill’s momentous first year, it unquestionably stared down annihilation and survived. Enlivened by Larson’s effective use of primary sources and, above all, by his vibrant storytelling, The Splendid and the Vile brings a fresh eye to a familiar story of courage, determination and hope.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile.

When a body of historical literature is as vast as the one on Winston Churchill in World War II, it’s fair to ask whether the world needs yet another entry. But when the author is a master of popular history like Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz—the […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Run Me to Earth

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The Vietnam War has generated a substantial body of literature since its end in 1975, but the same can’t be said of the civil war that raged simultaneously in the country of Laos. Paul Yoon’s novel Run Me to Earth, a pensive tale of war’s savage toll on innocents during and after the conflict, partially remedies that absence.

As Yoon explains in an author’s note, more than 2 million tons of ordnance rained down on Laos, a country half the size of California, between 1964 and 1973. That’s more than was dropped on both Germany and Japan during World War II. Thirty percent of these cluster bombs failed to explode on impact, leaving a residue of lethal, baseball-size “bombies.” 

Amid this version of hell on earth, three local teenagers—Alisak, Prany and his younger sister, Noi—are recruited to work for a doctor named Vang who ministers to the war-ravaged civilian population. When these well-meaning but untrained children aren’t struggling to aid the doctor in an abandoned farmhouse converted into an ill-equipped government hospital, they’re navigating speedy motorbikes across bomb-strewn fields, guided only by “safe lines” of sticks and their own daring. 

When helicopters arrive to evacuate the three young characters (as well as the hospital’s remaining patients, save for the dying, who are left behind), Yoon follows them to a prison camp run by Laotian rebels, a small town in southern France and even New York’s Hudson River Valley. Their subsequent acts of revenge, self-sacrifice and profound courage all resonate with their wartime experiences, when they were, in the words of one character, “still just children. Children hired to help others survive a war.” 

Run Me to Earth is a melancholy reminder that valor isn’t limited to those who win medals on the battlefield, and that to many noncombatants, the question isn’t who wins or loses, but whether one will survive the madness.

Run Me to Earth is a melancholy reminder that valor isn’t limited to those who win medals on the battlefield, and that to many noncombatants, the question isn’t who wins or loses, but whether one will survive the madness.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Girl, Woman, Other

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In surveying Britain’s social history over more than a century through the interconnected lives of 12 characters, all of them black women (save for two exceptions), Bernardine Evaristo has set an ambitious agenda for herself. Both in substance and style, her vibrant novel Girl, Woman, Other, co-winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2019, achieves that goal with a striking gallery of the lives and loves, triumphs and heartbreaks of these dozen memorable human beings and the world they inhabit.

Bookended by the story of Amma Bonsu, a lesbian playwright whose drama, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, is making its debut at the National Theatre, Girl, Woman, Other follows each of Evaristo’s characters through independent, short-storylike sections, while subtly linking each portrait to provide depth and texture. Farmer or banking executive, schoolteacher or cleaning-business proprietor, the novel’s characters cut across many levels of British society, with a focus on a span of time from the Margaret Thatcher era to the days of Brexit.

Some of these women wrestle with questions of sexual identity, while others must deal with incidents of physical violence and emotional abuse. Whether it’s Shirley King, whose idealism has curdled into cynicism after a lifetime of teaching high school history, or her former student Carole Williams, who fights to rise in the male-dominated world of international finance, Evaristo never stumbles in her ability to portray these figures with empathy, honesty and, at times, sharp humor. In every case, she skillfully reveals their struggles to define what it means to live meaningfully as spouses, lovers, friends and simply good people.

One of the principal pleasures of Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s energetic, at times playful style. Hers is a unique sort of prose that nods in the direction of poetry in both format and occasionally in content. She dispenses with the use of some conventions of punctuation without ever sacrificing readability. This exciting, often unsettling novel succeeds by respecting both the dignity of its subjects and the intelligence of its readers.

In surveying Britain’s social history over more than a century through the interconnected lives of 12 characters, all of them black women (save for two exceptions), Bernardine Evaristo has set an ambitious agenda for herself.
NonfictionBiography

Conversations with RBG

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

To anyone who believes Supreme Court justices speak only in pronouncements handed down like chiseled tablets from Mount Sinai, Jeffrey Rosen’s Conversations With RBG will come as a revelation. Drawn from eight public and private interviews conducted over the past decade, these candid and often deeply personal conversations provide insight into the life of a woman who has gracefully navigated the roles of passionate advocate, discerning judge and loving wife and mother.

Rosen, who’s been writing about the Supreme Court since 1992, and who currently serves as president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, is a friendly interlocutor. When Ginsburg sat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Rosen served as a law clerk, they bonded over their mutual love of opera. His questions in this book are well-informed but friendly, designed to draw out the naturally diffident Ginsburg rather than to provoke controversy.

Each of the book’s chapters is structured around a theme, such as Roe v. Wade—a decision whose outcome Ginsburg welcomed but whose reasoning she criticized, almost costing her a seat on the Court—or her 56-year marriage to Martin Ginsburg, a prominent tax lawyer. Rosen provides a brief introduction in each chapter and then proceeds in a question and answer format to explore the pertinent topic.

Though most of the book deals with Ginsburg’s 26-year career on the Supreme Court, where she has evolved from a “judicial minimalist” to the vigorous dissenter lionized as “The Notorious RBG,” Rosen also devotes a chapter to her work as an advocate for women’s rights for the ACLU in the 1970s. In those cases, portrayed in the 2018 film On the Basis of Sex, she successfully pursued a seemingly paradoxical strategy. By pointing out how challenged laws discriminated against men, Ginsburg eventually undermined gender-based discrimination against women.

As she approaches her 87th birthday in 2020, having dealt with several episodes of cancer, Ginsburg maintains her vigorous work schedule. Facing life in the minority in a Court that’s currently divided 5-4 along ideological lines, she nevertheless remains “skeptically hopeful” that a pragmatic Chief Justice John Roberts will act as a check on his fellow conservatives’ more ideologically driven impulses. Ginsburg, ever the optimist, believes we’re “constantly forming a more perfect Union, which is what the Founders intended.” Conversations With RBG is an enlightening look at her vital contribution to that process.

To anyone who believes Supreme Court justices speak only in pronouncements handed down like chiseled tablets from Mount Sinai, Jeffrey Rosen’s Conversations With RBG will come as a revelation. Drawn from eight public and private interviews conducted over the past decade, these candid and often deeply personal conversations provide insight into the life of a woman […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Man Who Saw Everything

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, British writer Deborah Levy’s latest novel is an evocative journey across a shape-shifting personal and political landscape. As Levy peels back each new layer of this at-times enigmatic story, there are new pleasures disclosed at every turn.

Levy’s narrator, Saul Adler, is a young English historian and the son of a passionate socialist. Saul’s specialty is communist Eastern Europe, and in the summer of 1988, he’s embarking on a research trip to East Berlin. Shortly before his departure, as he’s about to pose for a photograph taken by his artist girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau, who plans to capture him navigating the famed zebra crossing on London’s Abbey Road, he’s grazed by a passing automobile, an event that upends his already fragile psyche.

The remainder of The Man Who Saw Everything’s first half follows Saul to East Germany, where he finds himself entangled in a sexual triangle with his translator and minder Walter Müller and Walter’s sister, Luna, a Beatles-obsessed nurse who’s desperate to escape to the West, specifically Liverpool. Levy expertly navigates the complicated geometry of these relationships, all of them shadowed by the menace of the Stasi in the regime’s dying days.

In the novel’s second half, middle-aged Saul lies in a London hospital in 2016, just after the Brexit vote, under circumstances that seem to evoke his earlier mishap. In scenes that slip effortlessly into Saul’s dreams, hallucinations or episodes of pure memory, Levy excavates bits of his painful emotional life and casts a fresh light on some of the novel’s earlier events. Despite the occasional elusiveness of this technique, Levy’s storytelling is grounded in direct prose and vivid images, like the blossoms of a cherry tree that “fall like pink rain” or a copper relief sculpture in Berlin, ironically titled Man Overcomes Space and Time.

The Man Who Saw Everything is both intensely personal and fully cognizant of how the events of a rapidly changing world can alter lives in unexpected ways. Levy’s ability to keep these elements in balance with subtlety and assurance is a testament to her considerable artistic skill.

Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, British writer Deborah Levy’s latest novel is an evocative journey across a shape-shifting personal and political landscape.
FictionComic Fiction

Live a Little

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Even if they don’t live in a nursing home, the fate of most people past age 90 is to become nearly invisible. That’s what makes Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson’s decision to cast two Londoners in their 10th decades as the principal characters in his sly new novel, Live a Little, such a bold one.

As she approaches her 100th birthday, Beryl Dusinbery (nicknamed “Princess”) must confront the frustration of living with memories that often resemble a piece of Swiss cheese. When she’s not stitching morbidly humorous needlepoint “death samplers,” she’s doing her best to gather fragments of her colorful, romantic past in a biting journal d’amour.

Shimi Carmelli, former owner of a shop that sold phrenology busts, at times wishes he suffered from Beryl’s frequent memory lapses. Instead, he’s afflicted with perfect recall, and much of what he remembers about his distant childhood, including the brother from whom he’s been estranged for decades, is a source of deep pain. Residing in a flat above the Fing Ho Chinese Banquet Restaurant, where he appears periodically to engage in the practice of cartomancy (fortunetelling with ordinary playing cards), he’s considered the “last of the eligible bachelors,” at least among the elderly widows of North London.

It isn’t until roughly the novel’s midpoint that Beryl and Shimi meet and Jacobson’s talents as an astute student of human nature and his mastery of witty, acid-dipped dialogue shine brightest. Through an almost continuous conversation that begins in a cemetery and proceeds in a Regent’s Park cafe and elsewhere, the secrets concealed by these strikingly different characters gradually see daylight. 

“We meet to touch nerves,” Beryl tells Shimi, who believes they’ve come together at “the perfect age to enjoy a verbal friendship.” And though Beryl believes they’re “both stuck with the parts we learnt to play a long time ago,” the subtle changes we witness in these characters belie that rueful assertion. 

Live a Little’s message—that life isn’t truly over until it ends—is a refreshingly optimistic one for readers of any age.

Even if they don’t live in a nursing home, the fate of most people past age 90 is to become nearly invisible. That’s what makes Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson’s decision to cast two Londoners in their 10th decades as the principal characters in his sly new novel, Live a Little, such a bold one. […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Nickel Boys

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Though he’s abandoned the magical realism of his 2017 Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead continues to confront racial prejudice in American life. Based on a true story, The Nickel Boys is a blistering exposé of bigotry in a Florida reform school in the 1960s, when the modern civil rights movement was just beginning to awaken the entire nation to the justice of black Americans’ demands for equality.

Nurtured by a loving grandmother after his parents abandoned him at age 6, and with ambitions fueled by recordings of speeches by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., 17-year-old Elwood Curtis of Tallahassee, Florida, has his eyes set on college as the first step on the road to a consequential life. But after he has the bad luck to hitch a ride with a car thief, he finds himself confined to the Nickel Academy for Boys, a rigidly segregated reform school that’s home to some 600 students.

Almost as soon as he arrives at Nickel, Elwood beholds a nightmare world of deprivation and cruelty. Even modest transgressions by Elwood and his fellow black students are punished by savage beatings at a building called the White House, where a giant industrial fan is used to mask the screams of the victims, members of an “infinite brotherhood of broken boys.” Some students face even worse mistreatment, their brief lives ending with burial in a secret campus graveyard and fabrications about their “disappearances.”

As Whitehead reveals in a sympathetic but clear-eyed narrative, Elwood’s idealism is subjected to the ultimate test when it confronts the school’s relentless racism. Determined to expose the misdeeds of Nickel’s brutal administrators, Elwood makes a fateful choice that lays the groundwork for an emotional plot twist in the novel’s concluding pages.

Whitehead pulls no punches in telling this heartbreaking story. The Nickel Boys offers optimists an opportunity to be encouraged by how far the United States has come in the past 60 years in addressing racial inequality, but a careful reading of this disquieting novel leaves one with the feeling that we still have much further to go.

Based on a true story, The Nickel Boys is a blistering exposé of bigotry in a Florida reform school in the 1960s, when the modern civil rights movement was just beginning to awaken the entire nation to the justice of black Americans’ demands for equality.

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