Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, reviewed.

The longtime Colson Whitehead fan faces a quandary. The publication of his new novel, The Nickel Boys, has been greeted by a cover story in Time magazine, its headline declaring him “America’s Storyteller” blazoned across a photo of Whitehead looking off into the distance with the slight frown of weighty destiny on his brow. That’s how he saw it, how he’d always seen things.” The heart of The Nickel Boys is this extended dialogue between Elwood and Turner. … Nobody is going to get you out—just you.” It’s possible to read the novel naïvely, as a wrenching exposé of the barbarism of so-called reform schools like Nickel, places where boys, black and white, were abused and exploited, just as it’s possible to read The Underground Railroad as a lightly fictionalized report on the atrocity of slavery. As irksome as such generalizations can be, Whitehead has always struck me as one of the most Gen X novelists around, with his passion for trashy ’70s horror films, his almost reflexive self-mockery, and his tendency to employ what he calls “my stock ironic black man character.” His avatar in this novel is not Elwood but Turner, and The Nickel Boys often feels like Whitehead’s conversation with both the idealistic forerunners of the civil rights generation and, by implication, the woke youth of today.