EVEN WHEN WHITEHEAD seems to be playing it straight, he has an ace up his sleeve.
As I was getting into this short novel, it seemed a timely response to Black Lives Matter/New Jim Crow issues around policing and incarceration, as well as a fiction-as-reportage look at the revelations about Florida's Dozier School for Boys. Praiseworthy, relevant, but a bit by-the-numbers. It's the mid-1960s. Elwood Curtis, young, gifted, black, and MLK-inspired, hitchhikes to his first day of college classes; the driver he accepts a ride from gets pulled over...and has pot in the glove compartment. The next thing Elwood knows, he is off to the Nickel Academy, the novel's version of the Dozier School, an inferno of exploitation and sadism.
Whitehead depicts life at Nickel and the relationships among the boys as swiftly and skillfully as he did life on the plantation in Underground Railroad. But remember when Cora and Caesar head for the Underground Railroad station and actually board a train? Whitehead is going to pull the tablecloth out from under the dishes here, too, a move he sets up with occasional flashes forward to Elwood's life as an adult in New York City, glimpses that create the feeling that, hey, Elwood had a traumatic experience, but at least he made it out, and seems to be having a good adult life...well, I shouldn't say any more. But then the last chapter whips the tablecloth off...or whips the rug out from under you, and you're suddenly mid-air over an abyss.
Whitehead's versatility is amazing. Every novel a new sort of a thing, and each of them a gem.
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