The Nickel Boys

     The novelist Colson Whitehead is in that category of modern writers that I read or plan on reading to figure out why I hear about them so much. I've been aware of him at least since an interview in which he discusses his then-latest novel, Sag Harbor (2009). His popularity has increased slightly in the interim. And yet, year after year, I've put it off. He once wrote an essay in which he listed all the possible novels to write next and I formed a suspicion: Maybe he's merely a skilled imitator of other styles, not an originator of a style, or at least a writer who makes a valiant effort to become one. When I finally did order a book of his last year, nothing special had swayed me, it was simply time. Though he's written a number of acclaimed books, I started where I'd always intended to start, Sag Harbor, an autobiographical novel about the days of his youth spent vacationing with his family. Seeing as that I have my notes handy, I'll copy-and-paste a couple:

The first chapter is over fifty pages (in my large print edition). It's more personal history and local history and anthropological study and travelogue in freewheeling essay form than novel. There are few scenes. Only one is extended. 

Alarm: He packs in so much material - a loosely connected digression about movie theaters, a paragraph-length run on shoelaces, a multipage description of frozen foods - that it drifts. Close to formless.

I remember thinking he was overeager to please, wearing the reader down with how clever he is. At about 100 pages, I was out. That's too long to wait for a vivid character to emerge. I recited a Lichtenberg aphorism: "The lines of urbanity and humanity rarely coincide." Even so I wasn't done with Whitehead. The thing about a writer who writes so many different kinds of books is that I can't feel satisfied that I learned about what he or she does by reading just one. Sneaky. 

The Underground Railroad was checked out so I chose another book of his that got my attention, the novel that came after, The Nickel Boys (2019). It's about Elwood Curtis, a black kid growing up in Florida during Jim Crow. Raised by his grandmother after his parents abandon him, he eventually develops into a fine student with dreams of answering Martin Luther King's call to action and joining the civil rights struggle. But one day he's found guilty of a crime he didn't commit and thrown in a juvenile reformatory school, the Nickel Academy. There, he befriends a fellow student, the more streetwise and cynical Jack Turner, who, out of necessity, has spent his life living by his wits. The novel tells the story of their two fates. 

The Nickel Academy is based on the notorious Arthur G. Dozier School, which operated for about 100 years before closing down amidst controversy. Here's a way to tell that the book is based on research. One stretch involves a boxing match between a black kid and a white kid. It's not badly written, just lacking. Whitehead doesn't display a grasp of the action and atmosphere of the sport, leading me to conclude that he isn't even a casual boxing fan. FX Toole seems to set the standard for boxing fiction with his only completed book, Rope Burns. He knew everything there is to know about the sport. He may have turned that fight into a story or novel. Compare the two: One is the outsider who applies a general approach to the material, the other is the insider who brings the reader into the fight. Or compare Whitehead with Whitehead, the boxing match with a later scene, at the NYC Marathon. He glides over the events of the ring but he's clearly seen his fair share of marathons, knowing precisely how the action plays out and who attends and what it means to a character philosophically. I flipped to the back to confirm: Whitehead lives in New York City. The same demarcation can be found between his NYC and Florida. One is an imagined place, filled in as necessary with details that can be picked up by doing homework. The other is the real deal. It makes for a spotty read, back and forth between varying degrees of connection and magnification.

Whitehead also shares a quality with a couple of other writers who were once and perhaps still are on the same list, George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen: Contrivance. Fiction one cannot get lost in, as Harold Bloom observed, is that in which everything is known. It's the acid feeling of being unsurprised by what happens because the writer is unsurprised. I won't say any more than I already have about the plot of The Nickel Boys because I guarantee that most any reader (or anyone who watches movies or shows) could correctly guess the book's every last twist and turn. His characterizations are frequently formulaic too. Introduce a character with a name plus a quirk: A with the smelly hair. B with the bass voice. The - back to my notes - "fat kid who burped up breakfast in powerful gusts."

Yet, as with Nicholas Nickleby, I finished this novel and without dragging myself to the final page. There's something I like about it: the book's spirit, the writer's palpable anger and disgust and defiance and fragile hope. In his examination of the past, Whitehead shows how racism infests every aspect of his characters's lives. It can be as petty as holding a door for someone that doesn't make eye contact, doesn't say thank you. It can mean having castoff textbooks from the white school filled with racial slurs. And, most crucial of all, it means your life is cheap. The law assumes your guilt. Can't contest if you can't afford a lawyer. And if you can somehow afford a lawyer, despite meager pay and limited opportunities, and one is willing to represent you, there is no authority to file a complaint with if he absconds with your money. This is what happens to Elwood, who winds up stuck at the Nickel Academy, the respectable name of a state-sanctioned facility that exists to profit off children when they aren't being sexually abused, tortured, and murdered.

If I read Saunders and Franzen again, it'll be with resignation. And I doubt their books are the sort to be banned. But if anyone disturbed and threatened by all this talk of "racism" and "historical injustices and depravities" bothers to learn about The Nickel Boys, it will have the honor of being at or near the top of any such list across the country. Whitehead is older and not so eager to please (he refers to it as one of his "serious" books). He can write a well-structured, polished, readable novel. I'll be looking to see if he's capable of more.

The Photo Album Novel

     Until last year I'd heard nothing, at least that I can remember, about Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge (1959). It was his first novel and a bestseller. But, in a writing life that generated 18 books, he didn't build on his early success. A New York Times obituary (he died in 2013) suggests it was because he worked in various genres, whatever piqued his interest, without perfecting any one thing. His first book was a short story collection. He waited perhaps too long to write a sequel to his breakthrough, Mr. Bridge, that could fully capitalize on it. Another bestseller came decades later. It was a history book, Custer's Last Stand. He'd had trouble finding a publisher and its popularity caught everyone by surprise. He wrote a biography of the painter Francisco Goya. And, through it all, he didn't seek the spotlight or positions of authority. He took odd jobs to pay the rent while he wrote and researched.

The novel, his most celebrated work, doesn't have any sort of hook to grab the reader. There's no plot. The language is unadorned. It's average in length. The title is forgettable. (I mistakenly wrote "Bridges" throughout my notes, like the last name of the Charlotte Hornets basketball player.) His main character is a sheltered, privileged housewife who makes a virtue of normality, doesn't do anything in particular that'd stand out, and doesn't once manage to examine herself very closely. It can almost seem designed to get lost among other books. All it needs is a beige dust jacket. As I read I thought of Richard Linklater's film Boyhood. The director once explained that, in depicting his subject, he chose unexceptional micromoments over big dramatic moments. The hook is that he filmed little by little over a period of years to correspond with the story's passage of time, enabling viewers to see the actors age naturally, along with their characters. It's about three hours long. I stopped watching after about two. Stitching together those unexceptional micromoments across an entire work is hard to pull off. Real can mean true but insipid, forgotten or abstracted for good reason.

What did I do today? There's an accurate, socially acceptable answer to the question that can persuade someone to never ask again.

The difference between the novel and the movie is that Connell chooses his micromoments better. Initially I wasn't sure he had. In over a hundred brief, titled chapters, it ranges from the start of Mrs. Bridge's marriage to after the death of her husband. Though it's not stated outright, it's her most baffling kid, the youngest, her son Douglas, that narrates in third-person. And the first third or so of the book is noticeably heavy on chapters that amount to a series of complaints. Mrs. Bridge, you see, is a nag. Take your elbow off the table. Don't put too much gravy on your mashed potatoes. You sit in your seat weird. You used the guest towels in the bathroom (towels that no one uses, not even her, because they're too nice). She sincerely can't understand why a kid would be messy, silly, unruly. Eventually, as one skirmish followed another and another, I paused and wondered if this would be the whole book, if Connell had written prosecutorial or revenge fiction, keenly observed from within, no shortcoming or mistake left unrevealed. And, given the trivial nature of the complaints, I hesitated to continue.

But I'm glad I did. Right where my doubts arose, the book begins to exhibit a more mature outlook, shifts in tone and emphasis gracefully, then does so again and again: sympathy for Mrs. Bridge's loneliness, gentle amusement tinged with sadness about her struggles to find something to do, loving frustration with her inability to probe the mysteries of her family. As I kept reading, I came to admire what Connell does in that first third, acknowledging - at the risk of overdoing it, to achieve the proper aggravating effect - a common aspect of having parents. One might be reluctant to say it out loud except behind closed doors to siblings and maybe close friends for fear of seeming unappreciative and disloyal: that daily dose of annoyance. Sometimes, as the adult making rules and enforcing them, annoying the children (and being annoyed by them, for that matter) is unavoidable. Same goes for sharing a space with other people. However, there's also annoying behavior that they can avoid and never will, no matter how many times you sigh or go dead-eyed or let your soul take a seat somewhere while your body does whatever it's going to do, I'll catch you later. That's what you get for allowing yourself to be born. This is a truth Connell bravely and eloquently portrays. Can I eat in peace for once? Can I dry my hands on a towel that was made for that purpose? To escape mom's relentless nitpicking, Douglas wisely chooses the safest option, climbing higher up a tree. 

(Oh, yours was a blissful family? Congratulations. Tell me: Where was your hiding spot? You fucking liar. I sort of understand, though. It's also worth acknowledging, for the sake of making an important distinction, those who'll read that previous paragraph and think: annoyance if you're lucky.)

One of the benefits of creating a book out of micromoments is that they're manifold, in two senses of the word, many and diverse. So Connell has the freedom to choose all kinds and, combined with his structure, goes further in fewer pages. There are chapters about how Mrs. Bridge parks a car and chapters about her polite racism, chapters about the state of her marriage and chapters about the dullards in her social circle, chapters that are like those immortal in-joke stories repeated through the years and chapters with revelations handled delicately by a son who cares deeply for the woman who raised him. (And Connell makes use of what he doesn't write about too. Silence, absence.) Right now I'm reading a book written, to some extent, from a distance. Certain passages are dutifully supported by broad details that can be gathered by doing homework but, on the everyday and human levels, they turn vague, all-purpose. Connell's book contains strangeness, the kind of strangeness that's lived, not invented. And it takes place in Kansas City and is clearly written from Kansas City, which brings the reader closer to it. For instance: Douglas discovers abandoned building materials in a vacant lot. He decides what he must do is spend a significant chunk of time and energy painstakingly turning it into an immoveable tower of garbage. It eventually gets taller than the surrounding fencing. Neighbors whisper. It's not hurting anyone and yet his mother finds it unseemly and feels the need to step in. Then, from the mind of a fixture: "The next morning as soon as Douglas left for school she telephoned the fire department. Everyone called the fire department when there was a problem that defied classification."

The word I scribbled between chapters, the first word I thought of upon finishing was completion. The reader gets a complete portrait of an individual and a family. Or maybe living, breathing photo album in prose would be more apt. Connell's feat is the best hook I can come up with: Mrs. Bridge is a novel about the unexamined, unspectacular life that works - and works beautifully.