The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead. It was based on the real story of the Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and had its history exposed by a university's investigation. It was named one of TIME'S best books of the decade. It is the follow-up to Whitehead's 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, which won the 2017Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Nickel Boys won the 2020 Pulitzer Prizefor Fiction. Judges of the prize called the novel "a spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption." It is Whitehead's second win, making him the fourth writer in history to have won the prize for fiction twice.
Plot
Set in the 1960s, the novel follows Elwood Curtis, a studious African American from Tallahassee with a sense of justice, who is adjudicated delinquent and sent to Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory in Eleanor, Florida, after riding in a stolen vehicle to attend university classes. He befriends Jack Turner, who goes by his family name and who has a less optimistic viewpoint. Elwood attempts to serve his time without incident, but is seriously beaten on two occasions, once for intervening to help a boy being attacked by sexual predators and once after writing a letter complaining of poor conditions. The time at the school is interspersed with accounts of an older Elwood in New York City. After Turner overhears of a plan to have Elwood killed by the administration, the two attempt an escape. Elwood is shot dead while Turner escapes; the latter had in fact falsely adopted Elwood's name to live up to his ideals and had established a business in New York City. When an investigation in the 2010s finally begins to expose the now shuttered school's secrets, Turner flies to Tallahassee to give testimony to his friend's fate.
Characters
Elwood Curtis
* Whitehead described Elwood as one of "two different parts of my personality", in this case being the "optimistic or hopeful part of me that believes we can make the world a better place if we keep working at it."
Jack Turner
* Whitehead described Turner as one of "two different parts of my personality", in this case being "the cynical side that says no—this country is founded on genocide, murder, and slavery and it will always be that way."
Development and writing
After dealing with slavery in his Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Underground Railroad, Whitehead did not want to write "another heavy book." However, he felt the election of Donald Trump compelled him to do so. Whitehead deliberately narrowed the scope of the book and grounded it for the sake of realism, choosing not to include the speculative or fantastic elements of his other novels Zone One or The Underground Railroad. The Nickel Boys is set at a fictionalized version of the Dozier School for Boys, dubbed Nickel Academy. Whitehead first heard of the real life Dozier School on Twitter in 2014. The school opened in 1900 and closed in 2011. The state of Florida ran Dozier, in Marianna, as a reform school. After decades of allegations against the school for allowing the beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by guards and employees, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement began an investigation of the claims in 2010, followed by additional investigations by the United States Department of Justice in 2011, and an ongoing forensic investigation by the University of South Florida which began in 2012. The Department of Justice investigation revealed “systemic, egregious, and dangerous practices exacerbated by a lack of accountability and controls.” The University of South Florida investigation discovered some 55 graves on school grounds by December 2012, and has continued to identify potential grave sites as recently as March 2019.
Reception
At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the novel received a cumulative "Rave" rating based on 53 reviews: 41 "Rave" reviews, 10 "Positive" reviews, 1 "Mixed" review, and 1 "Pan" review. Parul Sehgal, writing in The New York Times, said "Whitehead has written novels of horror and apocalypse; nothing touches the grimness of the real stories he conveys here." The Washington Post critic Ron Charles wrote, "It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment." Writing in NPR, Maureen Corrigan said "It's a masterpiece squared, rooted in history and American mythology and, yet, painfully topical in its visions of justice and mercy erratically denied." The New Republic exclaimed, "The Nickel Boys is fiction, but it burns with outrageous truth." Meanwhile, The Guardian wrote, "He demonstrates to superb effect how racism in America has long operated as a codified and sanctioned activity intended to enrich one group at the expense of another."
