Cherry by Nico Walker

Cherry

by Nico Walker

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Cleveland, Ohio, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily. They share a passion for Edward Albee and ecstasy and fall hard and fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school and joins the army.

Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him. His fellow soldiers smoke; they huff computer duster; they take painkillers; they watch porn. And many of them die. He and Emily try to make their long-distance marriage work, but when he returns from Iraq, his PTSD is profound, and the drugs on the street have changed. The opioid crisis is beginning to swallow up the Midwest.

Soon he is hooked on heroin, and so is Emily. They attempt a normal life, but with their money drying up, he turns to the one thing he thinks he could be really good at - robbing banks.

Hammered out on a prison typewriter, Cherry marks the arrival of a raw, bleakly hilarious, and surprisingly poignant voice straight from the dark heart of America.

Reviewed by clementine on

2 of 5 stars

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This is, I think, a case of a book not being for me more than it is a case of a bad book. I mean, it's clear this is not the work of an accomplished professional writer; there are sentences and phrases that I admired, but generally the writing style is amateurish. The voice of the narrator feels authentic, but I guess that's because he's essentially Nico Walker. In the acknowledgments of the novel, Walker talks about how his editor helped him turn the narrator into a likeable asshole - but I really struggled with the likability. That's not to say that I didn't sympathize with his trauma, addiction, and desperation. But the way he talked to and about women was hard to stomach. I think I wanted this to be a more pointed critique of the military industrial complex and the way governments and big pharma manufactured the opioid crisis, but it stopped short of that. (I mean, that's fair; not every novel can be written to appeal to my specific political agenda, and I can't ask a book to be something it's not. This is just a reason that I failed to connect with it fully.) I find the author's backstory fascinating, and I wish this had just been a more introspective memoir rather than a fictionalized narrative based on his life.

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  • Started reading
  • 18 November, 2019: Finished reading
  • 18 November, 2019: Reviewed