3 and DA: Notes on the 2022 Conference Finals

     Following NBA basketball more closely, I've been stunned and saddened by the extent to which injury shapes the game. One day a team is putting on a show. Then, after what initially looks to the viewer like any other landing or stumble on the court, a key player screams in pain. It's a torn ACL. His season is over, he faces a long recovery, he may not return the same player he once was, and in the meantime the team has to compensate for his absence somehow. Then another player gets injured: out for weeks. Then another player gets injured: out during a crucial stretch. Losses mount. The team falls down the rankings. The show is over. They were contenders, fully healthy. Maybe next year. Or maybe age and contract intricacies and other circumstances put last year's contenders in the shadow of this year's contenders. From a distance, I thought it was the better team that eventually wins the championship. That's not exactly right. It's the better team that isn't too battered by the end of a long regular season and a high intensity postseason to prove it. 

The Heat, the number one seed in the East during the regular season, on the verge of elimination, limped into Boston for game 6. Tyler Herro, a player who achieved his stated goal of being named (almost unanimously) as the 6th Man of the Year, was shut down by the Celtics when he was healthy and on the court. Now he was out entirely with a groin injury. Kyle Lowry was in but not at 100% as he recovered from a hamstring injury. And their star, Jimmy Butler, struggling with a knee injury, hadn't been able to make much of an offensive impact in recent games in the series, and no one else on the team could score like he can. I didn't watch but I heard all about it the next day: I, along with most everyone else, had made the mistake of counting out Jimmy Butler, who scored 47 points to beat the Celtics on their home court. That's a star for you. (Compliments went out to the Heat medical staff.) 

Game 7 back in Miami. I made sure to watch. Boston looked healthier. They have a marquee tandem in Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. And that defense, led by the Defensive Player of the Year, Marcus Smart. Yet with Jimmy Butler on the floor, one couldn't be so sure anymore. Could he do it twice in a row?

He came close to his hero numbers, leading in scoring for both teams again. Tyler Herro made a brief appearance somewhere in the middle of the game and never returned. The team didn't do so well on free throws, overall. Max Strus stepped out of bounds just barely so the refs took away his 3. But Bam Adebayo was fairly aggressive on the offensive end. Little by little the Heat came back from being down seventeen - a clutch 3 from Lowry, a clutch 3 from Strus, drawing offensive fouls, forcing turnovers - and had a chance to take the lead. It's the next part that is the subject of some debate: There are about 20 seconds left in the 4th quarter. Jimmy Butler, rather than attack the basket against Al Horford, who was on his heels, and Jaylen Brown, who had five fouls, took a 3. He's not the best 3 point shooter but a 3 would put the Heat ahead by 1 in the closing seconds. The ball hits iron and bounces off. Al Horford collects the rebound. Boston wins the series and the Eastern Conference Finals.

The Celtics are now heading West to face the Western Conference Finals champions: the Warriors. 

Oh, seems I forgot to mention the Warriors's success.

Years ago, when the Warriors, the hometown team, were first headed for the Finals, I wasn't there. I heard about it from a friend. He never talked basketball but suddenly he was criticizing the game like a veteran coach. I said: You fair weather fan! He heard the Warriors were winning so he slipped on a jersey! I told that story to everyone we knew. But it wasn't until I moved East that I bought my own team merchandise. The bubble playoffs finally hooked me - LeBron James's dunk on Russell Westbrook that sent him to the parking lot, Jamal Murray's perfect Jordanesque layup on James, along with the prominence of Black Lives Matter messaging - though the Warriors were nowhere to be seen that year. The team didn't make it to the postseason the next year either. I came into the fold as the organization was dealing with catastrophic injuries to key players. Steph Curry, the face of the franchise, was making a comeback after an extended period spent recovering. But Klay Thompson, another star and fellow 3 point shooting master, had just suffered a second injury that would keep him out another year. 

Even so, as I followed along in that first season after Curry's return, the franchise didn't seem completely adrift like certain others, I didn't fall into despair or frustration. Somehow it felt like there was a plan, moves being made in the background. And Thompson, who seemed pretty skilled based on the highlights I found, would return one day. Steph Curry won the scoring title. He spoke of the special distinction of sticking to one franchise for his entire career. The team ended the regular season strong. And after they lost in the first ever play-in tournament, he said farewell with a warning: "You don't want to see us next year." 

This year: Every Warriors player seemed to bring their best game to close out the Mavericks, making it the best Warriors W of the postseason. Luka Dončić didn't have an easy time, no smiling through the night here. Spencer Dinwiddie made me a little nervous, draining shot after shot. But Klay Thompson drained a few more, ending the night with 32 points. Draymond Green, another star, flexing. Andrew Wiggins, who had the play of the series and the dunk of the playoffs and a career highlight all in one: the dunk on Dončić. Jordan Poole, Kevon Looney.... And Steph Curry: The inaugural winner of the Western Conference Finals Magic Johnson MVP award.

Severe injuries presented major setbacks to the team's title aspirations. But they overcame them and, after another gentleman's sweep, now return to the NBA Finals, their sixth trip in eight years. Let's go, Warriors.

3 and DA: Notes on the 2022 Playoff Season

     I think it's safe to say that winter is gone, no fakeouts. Sunday in the 70s. A breeze pressed a cherry blossom into my hand. By the time I returned home from work, the fog had dissipated. I opened the front door, letting in the birdsong. I had leftover spaghetti with a glass of lemonade. Then I grabbed a beer and an ice cream and settled in for some PLAYOFF BASKETBALL ACTION, BABY! TWO! second round game sevens: Bucks and Celtics. Suns and Mavericks.

I hadn't watched a full game of the Milwaukee-Boston series. Milwaukee: The defending champs led by an MVP candidate. Boston: An interesting story. The team struggled early in the regular season. From my own amateur observation, they seemed disorganized, ineffective on offense and defense. Saddled with a losing record, there was talk of breaking up their two stars, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Then in the second half of the season, they became one of the best teams in the league. Marcus Smart won Defensive Player of the Year. And they secured a spot in the playoffs. The outcome of the game didn't come as a shock. The Bucks were missing a star, Khris Middleton (knee injury). Giannis Antetokounmpo didn't put up his usual superstar numbers: missed layups, a crowded interior. Barely any of the team's 3s went down. The Celtics, on the other hand, had several players in double figures (the leading scorer was a role player named Grant Williams, who had the biggest game of his life). The team made many 3s and never stopped applying defensive pressure. For a moment, it looked like a Celtics bench player had managed to seriously injure himself at the end of the game, when the victor was already clear. Then he came back and made a 3. Now they're off to Miami to face the Heat. Prediction: Jayson Tatum will be looking for revenge against Bam Adebayo.

As for the Suns and Mavericks, I doubt any game will be more shocking. The Suns, the team that dominated throughout the regular season and ended it as the number one seed, were of course favored but there was a note of caution from most every basketball expert: Luka Dončić, the current face of the Mavericks franchise, is a superstar, the best player in the series, known for being at his best in the clutch. So maybe, just maybe. Still, I expected a hardfought, back-and-forth game decided in the final minutes or seconds of the 4th quarter. Instead the Mavericks went into Phoenix and stomped the Suns. Jawdropping. At halftime, Dončić had as many points as the other team (27). Let me repeat: The Suns had 27 points at halftime. 27. The Suns contained no one - not Dončić, Spencer Dinwiddie, or eventually Jalen Brunson. The Mavericks rained 3s. On the other side: For a long stretch, Deandre Ayton, Devin Booker, and Chris Paul, star players, had a combined 0 FGs. All three would end up having a bad night. No one on the Suns showed any life. When the Mavericks had possession of the ball, I began to think: that's going in. When the Suns had possession: that's not. Dončić smiled through the night, seemingly at ease in hostile (and increasingly quiet) territory. He had the representative play of the night, sending his defender, Cam Johnson, sliding along the floor and draining a 3 as Johnson looked on helplessly. (Dončić didn't need to play much if any of the 4th quarter.) Key commentary: Kevin Harlan remarks on the hot weather in Phoenix. Reggie Miller pauses and says, well, the Suns's shooting is cold. I can't remember any time in the regular season or postseason when the Suns looked like they couldn't take control of the game. And the team, practically unrecognizable, fell apart at the worst imaginable time. The only thing they managed to do was anger Boban Marjanović, a Mavericks player who doesn't seem to get many minutes and is praised every time he steps on the floor for being a nice, gentle giant. A sour ending to a sour ending. It was so bad it erased the previous worst game of the playoff season, which is now lost to NBA history, or should be. 

They closed out, losers.

The cat is so clingy! Can't be petted enough. I've been using a pillow as a shield and my D is good. I'm hoping the same is true for the Warriors. Let's go, Warriors.

The Test of Rereading: Kafka on the Shore

     Going into my third reading of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (2005), translated by Philip Gabriel, it sits on the second tier, alongside one other novel, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle stands alone on the first tier as his greatest achievement (a book that survives, for English readers, getting cut down from the original). Three books, all novels, what he does best. On the third tier is his short fiction and some good but lesser novels, in the same vein and not. My doubts began after 1Q84, a novel superficially of a piece with his earlier works but without their vim or vigor or quotidian pleasures. An effective combination for smothering enthusiasm: long and mediocre. Then I read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage and decided he'd blown out all four tires at once. The only thing to be said in its favor is Chip Kidd's nifty cover art. A new writer trying to publish a book of that quality would get nowhere. At which point the brand has taken over. So I'm reluctant to read anything he's come out with since, instead testing the earlier books (and my earlier judgments) with rereads, hoping the magic will still be there. 

One thing that continues to distinguish Murakami from most every other fiction writer I've encountered, even now, is how weird and disorienting he is. Few attempt it and those who do wink at the reader, aren't quite as committed, or simply aren't as good. Something about realism is that, though not realistic, the material for it is readily accessed and the basic reality of the work is unlikely to be questioned. Cormac McCarthy's criticism of magical realism: It's already hard enough to get the reader to believe the fiction without making it impossible. This is one aspect of Murakami's work his early critics scoffed at. In Kafka on the Shore, a kid converses with an imaginary companion, Crow. Another voice, an omen, interjects in bold type. An introduction that leads to the first chapter: A break from the usual pattern of a life to go on a mysterious (planned, fateful) journey. As the air of fantasy thickens, the kid, Kafka Tamura, tells us that it all sounds like a fairytale but it isn't. What is it, then? Murakami is a fan of Catcher in the Rye and one may also anticipate a take on the bildungsroman. Then the novel jumps way back, to post-WWII Japan, a government document seemingly having nothing to do with Tamura's journey.

I may have unconsciously reached for Murakami's work as I found myself thinking about the subject of contrivance again. A shibboleth of fiction is that it's like a sort of waking dream. And yet rarely is fiction truly weird like a dream. Last night I dreamed Michael Douglas had gelled his hair into spikes. Awaking drenched in sweat, I asked: Why? Why? Fiction tends to be too neat and logical to resemble Michael Douglas's cool new haircut, precisely. These qualities become defects in contrived fiction, turning it into something more like the opposite of a dream. Instead of the scary, unfamiliar, alluring feeling of surrending control to the mystery of the mind and whatever springs from it, the writer of contrived fiction exercises overt control through readymade scenes, obvious lines, predictable directions, a scarcely concealed agenda, the futile pursuit of perfect symmetry. To a certain reader, that's reassuring, like waking up safe in bed. To be perceived as weird is shameful, so the crude life lesson goes, a mark of social deviance. That was Murakami's position in the literary world for years and that is Murakami at his very best: a sui generis writer of truly dreamlike fiction, weird and unpredictable (and warm and playful and down-to-earth all at the same time). He lends attractive form to what's repressed, sometimes so thoroughly that it's forgotten, giving the reader the okay to loosen up and tap into a hidden freaky side. And it's not either/or but both: student and translator of Raymond Carver, he's celebrated for his appreciation of the mundane too. More than that, he widely inspires fascination and love. 

The reader can't guess where Kafka on the Shore is going, can't venture a list of possible directions with any certainty. At best: Two characters will meet. Somehow. In this sense, the "Kafka" in the title is earned. But there are drawbacks of truly dreamlike fiction that more controlled fiction aims to avoid or soften. Rough edges, loose ends, drift. While traveling to his next destination, Kafka meets and accompanies a woman, Sakura. Later, he needs to lie low and stays the night at her apartment. Thus far they've been friendly. Then, noticing he's tense, she casually offers him a hand job and obliges. Afterward they have the following exchange:

She thinks for a while, then says, "I was thinking how nice it'd be if I was your real sister."

"Me too," I say. 

Not only does the...strangeness of that go unexamined and unremarked, it turns out to have no bearing on the novel. It's just there. 

And I'd forgotten or hadn't noticed in prior readings Murakami's attempt at satirizing feminists, notable because he rarely goes in for satire and because of the criticism of his female characters generally, how they often aren't full characters in their own right, are little seen, or are felt merely when missing. The feminists who show up at the library are a type recognizable among any group of people who consider themselves politically engaged warriors fighting the good fight: petty, dogmatic, rancorous. Preaching to (or performing for) the converted while alienating anyone who would otherwise be open to what they have to say. A senseless, self-defeating strategy for catalyzing actual positive change that can be met with ridicule but also with patience. However some people choose to communicate, their grievances may be legitimate and their beliefs sincere. In certain situations, it's better to keep a cool head, listen, and work through the problem carefully. The other party, seeing someone cares, may respond by adopting the same attitude. What starts as a seemingly hopeless conflict turns into the ideal exchange. Oshima, the librarian, could have done just that. The feminists are part of the community and patrons of the library. Why don't they get a say? Instead, Oshima treats them like fools with absolutely nothing worthwhile to complain about, cowing them with weak humor and pedantry. He can't stand their intolerance. 

(For Murakami's part, he once responded to a complaint, a silly complaint concerning a miniscule detail in his work most writers would have ignored or joked about, by rewriting the offending passage, in a diplomatic spirit, and moving on.)

I could list more, all natural and acceptable byproducts of Murakami's approach, hardly worth mentioning. One major flaw that can't be overlooked, however, is that Kafka Tamura is a bit of a shade, defined not by his personality or voice but by his journey. And it's a journey that, for much of the book, loses rather than gains clarity of intent the more he talks about it, piling on reasons. He's obeying fate, which explains, somewhat, his most discernible characteristics, timidity and guilt (one can argue that he's as much antagonist as protagonist). He's also: searching for mother and sister, escaping home and the potential damage it might cause, accelerating into adulthood, trying to disappear, living freely if clumsily. Finally he says he's "lost." One picks up on the theme of self-discovery, tentatively, in between discussions of literature, music, and history, dim shadows, other halves, spirit projections, murdered cats, cameos by Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders. Hundreds of pages in, the book's dreamlike quality intensifies. It's absorbing, rather bewildering, and close to inscrutable. 

Though ultimately I'm confident in the meaning I derived from the novel as well as why I don't think it withstands a third read. One can say, like John Updike, that it's simply about Kafka Tamura growing up. But that's insufficient. Other characters, adults, go through their own journies on the margins of the book and arrive at the same sort of course-shifting insight into the self. Deeper, deeper, no matter what age, into the darkness within to confront, for Kafka, the source of his pain. Murakami's challenge, then, is to make the reader feel it, so that it matters when Kafka is released from it, so that the reader shares his experience of a brand new world. An unintended irony of the book is that, though it's about delving deeper, that's exactly what Murakami fails to do for his characters, despite the book's length. During a climactic scene, Kafka proclaims what's haunted him through his life. In a better novel, he wouldn't have to.

A couple of images from his best novel are frequently and fondly invoked by Murakami's readers: Toru and his afternoon spaghetti (and, for me, defending his lunch choice to a stranger). Toru sitting at the bottom of a well. To these vivid, humanizing details I would add his reaction to his wife's suggestion to make a living by writing poetry professionally (Poetry!?). One indication that Kafka on the Shore is a lesser work is that nothing comparable sticks in memory. I am intrigued by a couple of ideas. One is that a person can follow a path in life created by art. After watching Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Kafka Tamura, emulating the troubled main character, drinks a bottle of milk in one gulp. (A note from DA of the past jotted beside the passage reminds me that the movie ends on the shore.) The other is Oshima's opinion of Schubert's piano sonatas and the value of boring art: "People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring. Go figure." Still, it's the effect of Kafka on the Shore that lingers more than anything else, making it the sort of dream that startles but dissolves.

Democracy, 3

     One of the minor tyrannies of employment is the music, of course. Terrible - the same terrible mix of music day after day, hour after interminable hour. Bad songs, bland, empty, irredeemably square. Bad songs in the taunting "Don't Worry, Be Happy" mold. Good songs that never need to be heard again. The rare classic killed by mindless repetition (another taunt). To customers passing through once a week, it's grease that moves them along, promoting a frictionless consumer environment. To the clerks and cashiers and waitresses and hostesses working full-time, getting underpaid to ensure stores and restaurants run smoothly, it's one of the hazards.

Or so I once thought. And it has to be true for many. But at the business where I'm currently working, the employees actually get to choose and now I'm forced to modify my longheld stance. What's the sound of democracy? Sometimes it's terrible music - the same terrible music that is evidently the inescapable soundtrack to commerce. Usually putting in my hours with mouth sealed shut, I suddenly find myself pinching the flesh at the bridge of my nose and saying aloud: "Someone is listening to this voluntarily. You have the choice to listen to anything, within reasonable limits, and this is what you choose." Deep breath, gigantic sigh, back to the task at hand. A customer standing nearby coughs.

But how can it be any other way? My internal music library is filled with hot tracks because your ears are wasted listening to tracks that are not hot. A lack of taste and discernment, imagination and openmindedness is one of the leading causes of cancer, in my opinion. And yet the wise person realizes that one's hot tracks are not necessarily others's hot tracks. Some but not all. Age has taught me that it's a big world and there are those who looove their wack tracks. The rules for a democratic playlist in this context, devised by me alone:

(1) It must be open to all. I suffer for hours so, if my music plays and you don't like it, it's only fair that you suffer for at least 30 minutes or so.

(2) The majority wins. If everyone truly finds the music objectionable, it immediately changes. No hard feelings.

(3) To minimize the pain, change it up! Thus far I've played nothing twice - Todd Terje, Dusty Springfield, Augustus Pablo, Vivaldi, Depeche Mode....

Every one of these rules no one has agreed to because no one knows about them but me has been broken. Someone shuts off my experimental electronic music after one song. Okay, perhaps an overreach. Then someone shuts off what I always believed was universally accepted, if not beloved, Motown, Diana Ross and the Supremes - before the first song finishes! My jaw drops. "Ugh! Blasphemy!" Back to another hour of musical abuse, verging on tyranny: soporific acoustic country pop. Purely out of spite, as I leave for the day I interrupt whatever is playing and put on the extended version of Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good," a refined jazz pop gouda from the 70s. And, under the baleful glare of my coworkers, I strut out the door. That was for democracy.

The next day I refuse to pick anything. Listen to garbage, see if I care. Then: "Love in an Elevator," "Sharp Dressed Man," "Bad to the Bone," "Cum on Feel the Noize," that last one spelled correctly, unfortunately. I care, all right? In another act of musical protest, I run upstairs and change it to Beethoven. After 30 minutes: "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." 

Sometimes the sound of democracy causes whiplash. And sometimes there's no agreement and the sound of democracy is silence. I suffer but, as a champion of democracy, I ask: "Do you have anything you want to listen to?" 

The number one response: Whatever. 

"Your Body is a Wonderland": Whatever. 

"Gangster's Paradise": Whatever.

I'm 34 years old. I'd estimate that I've spent three of those years listening to Bob Marley. Another day, another spin of that obscure outtake, "Jammin." It's a radical, life-affirming anthem from a musical icon, cheapened by oversaturation and commercialization into a punishment groove.  I think about hearing this song for the rest of my life and - I start laughing. Whatever? Is this not madness? I can't stop. 

Once more, we're jammin. 

And we're jammin by the cleaning supplies.

Possibly a coworker, along with the whole store, overhears because the playlist abruptly changes. Some sort of balearic porno music. I'll take it. Yay democracy.

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.