Weeks 14–15: Colson Whitehead's "The Nickel Boys" (2019)

Our semester started nearly a hundred years ago with the Jazz Age lyricism of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it ends with one of this year's most highly-anticipated releases, Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, which even made it on to President Obama's summer reading list. One major reason that so many readers are eager to get their hands on this latest book is that its predecessor, The Underground Railroad, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and the 2016 National Book Award (two of the nation's three major book prizes), as well as the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and made numerous year-end best lists. 

Like The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys serves as a reckoning with our nation's inhumane history towards African Americans. This time, the subject matter is a little closer to our present time, namely Florida's Dozier School for Boys, a reform school known to locals as Nickel Academy. Despite persistent rumors of mistreatment of residents by staff, the school remained open for more than a century, finally being closed by the state in 2011, after which 55 bodies were found buried on the grounds. While Whitehead first heard the story of the Dozier School in 2014, he was reluctant to begin work on another serious project. As he tells Vanity Fair, "I didn't want to do another heavy book. The Underground Railroad took a lot from me. I didn't want to deal with such depressing material again."  The 2016 election changed his mind, however. Faced with a sudden, alarming change in our nation's direction, Whitehead confessed that he "felt compelled to make sense of where we were as a country." Finally, while Whitehead has made use of science fiction and fantasy tropes in some of his previous books like The Underground Railroad and Zone One (a zombie apocalypse novel), he made the conscious choice to work in a more strict realist mode this time around.

Here's a breakdown of our final classes on The Nickel Boys:

• Tues. November 26: Prologue, Chapters 1–4
• Thurs. November 28: No Class — Thanksgiving
• Tues. December 3: Chapters 5–12
• Thurs. December 5: Chapters 13–16, Epilogue

And here are a few supplemental resources related to the novel:

• Frank Rich, "In ‘The Nickel Boys,’ Colson Whitehead Depicts a Real-Life House of Horrors" in The New York Times [link]
• Maureen Corrigan, "Rooted In History, 'The Nickel Boys' Is A Great American Novel" on NPR's Fresh Air: [link]
• Michael Schaub, "For The 'Nickel Boys,' Life Isn't Worth 5 Cents" on NPR [link]
• Tim Adams, "The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead – Brutal Justice" in The Guardian [link]
• Ron Charles, "In Colson Whitehead's 'The Nickel Boys,' an Idealistic Black Teen Learns a Harsh Reality" in The Washington Post [link]
• Constance Grady, "Colson Whitehead's Spare, Riveting, Horrifying Nickel Boys" in VOX [link]
• Art Edwards, "The Carrot and the Stick: On Colson Whitehead's 'The Nickel Boys'" in Los Angeles Review of Books [link]
• "Colson Whitehead Talks Hope, Despair, and Fighting the Power in 'The Nickel Boys'" in Vanity Fair [link]

Weeks 12 and 13: Valeria Luiselli's "Faces in the Crowd" (2012)

As I stated in my opening note, a true survey of "American Literature" would include (at the very least) work from Canada and Mexico if not the Americas as a whole. At the same our country's tastes have grown increasingly multicultural, both within and beyond our national borders. Zadie Smith, Marjane Satrapi, Sally Rooney, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård are all fine examples of foreign books that captivated large American audiences, and the work that trailblazing international authors did in past generations has helped set the state for today's breakout voices, including Mexico's Valeria Luiselli.

Luiselli has taken the literary world by storm: in 2014 she received the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" award, and still not having reached that age, she published four books in two different genres — the essay collections Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends: an Essay in 40 Questions (2017); and the novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) along with her debut, Faces in the Crowd (2012) — all of which have been well-received, with Teeth being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This year's Lost Children Archive — a narrative version of Luiselli's experience doing aid work for immigrants first explored in Tell Me How It Ends — is sure to be a favorite for all of the major literary awards. It's also 400 pages long, which is why we aren't reading it, but that doesn't mean that Faces in the Crowd isn't a fascinating book that offers startling insights into the immigrant's experience of America.

Because it's the new millennium, books and authors make trailers now, and in the film above, Luiselli offers her own introduction to Faces in the Crowd, telling us that the novel "is told in four different times and by two different narrators." She continues: 

The first narrator is a woman, probably in her early forties, with two children in a house in Mexico City and a husband, whom she's slowly drifting away from. And the other narrator is a Mexican poet, who in fact existed and lived in New York in the 1920s, his name was Gilberto Owen. He narrates, almost from his deathbed in the 1950s, and he tells the story of his youth in New York, as does the woman narrator, the first narrator, tells the story of her youth in New York when she was working in a publishing house and trying to find the new Bolaño, and she comes across Gilberto Owen's poetry. He recorded the minute details of his everyday life in Harlem, which was a neighborhood that I had arrived to, and it was a neighborhood that sorta didn't have any depth for me — I had just arrived, I was a newcomer to it — and his letters became a sort of mirror for my own experience of the beighborhood and gave that neighborhood a depth it didn't have.  

I started writing a novel from the viewpoint of Gilberto Owen, sorta trying to record and imagine that area in the 1920s. At some point, I got married, I became pregnant, I planted a tree, and the rest of the chicles attached to growing up. When I finally went through the phase of pregnancy, which was a for me a very traumatizing phase because I didn't write, I didn't read, I didn't even watch movies, I just slept, basically. When I finally got through that I started writing again and I took out this material from the archives I had but it didn't seem as alive as it had once seemed. It sorta seemed absurd to carry on writing as nothing had happened so I had to find a viewpoint and a different tone to somehow go back into that material and I started intervening in it.

From there she goes on to discuss the essential multicultural nature of Harlem, which was only starting to develop — alongside the Harlem Renaissance — as Owen found himself in New York. Nevertheless, he found himself caught in-between cultural circles, and this spirit is a big part of what Luiselli tried to cultivate in her novel.

Here's our schedule for Faces in the Crowd:

• Thurs. November 14: pgs 1–53 
• Tues. November 19: pgs 54–105
• Thurs. November 21: pgs 106–146

And here are a few additional readings that might be interesting:

• Mina Holland reviews the novel for The Guardian: [link]
• Hector Tobar reviews the book for The Los Angeles Times: [link]
• Stephen Piccarella reviews the book for Electric Lit: [link]
• "Smashing Snow Globes: A Writer On Essays, Novels And Translation" on NPR's "All Things Considered": [link]
• Luiselli on translating the stories of detailed immigrant children in Rolling Stone: [link]