Cherry by Nico Walker

A fashionably late review.

Aug 10, 2021

Hi y’all,

Book Notes—the blog once described by Important Editor and Man of Taste Jesse as “lambent gossip”—will now resume its regular coverage of fiction. Which promises to be much more enjoyable for everyone involved.

…Well, maybe enjoyable is the wrong word. IDK, you can tell me after you read my review of Nico Walker’s Cherry.

I loved Cherry. Loved it! It’s “fiction,” but not really. It’s one of those autobiographical first novels that reviewers almost always consider completely true to life. In that tradition, I will too.

In 2006, Walker joined the army and was deployed to Iraq, where he served for a year as a medic in an infantry company. After he returns home to Ohio, he starts college, but quickly becomes addicted to heroin. Although it’s only briefly and occasionally mentioned, he definitely suffers from PTSD. When his money runs out, he starts robbing banks to fund his and his girlfriend’s habit. And eventually, he gets caught: Walker wrote this novel from federal prison.

Walker doesn’t glamorize or dramatize. Rather, he does a strange sort of magical realism—the horrible becomes boring, the boring becomes horrible. His time in Iraq is monotonous, pointless, repetitive. While deployed, he spends most of his time patrolling the countryside in Humvees, breaking into civilian houses (as ordered), and watching his peers get suddenly dismembered by IEDs. Being a heroin addict back in the states is almost as dangerous, and just as monotonous. Dangerous: his dealers are unstable and occasionally violent, and the risk that he ODs is ever-present. Monotonous: whenever he isn’t actively shooting up, he is consumed by the task of buying more drugs. The “plot” of each chapter during this period is nearly identical—He uses all his drugs, he calls a dealer who has heroin, or who doesn’t have heroin, who sends him to another dealer, who lives two hours away, who has heroin but he needs a ride to pick up his kid, who cheats him out of his money, who sells him shitty drugs, who steals his money, who sells him Oxys, who sells him enough to get him through the weekend, and then the process starts all over again.

Probably I was kicking some doors in somewhere. Nothing dramatic or whatever. Just doors. I’d kicked a hundred doors in. More like two hundred doors. Nothing ever came of it. Not once.

And:

We felt so fucking horrible that we had to shoot some more pills. We each did an 80. Then we felt better. It had only cost us $90, and we could make it through the night. Tomorrow it would only cost us another $90 to get out of bed.

And:

This is what happened to them: they hit an IED up north of Checkpoint 9, during some big operation. I don’t remember which operation. There were so many. All the big operations had names. They had names so you knew they were big operations but nothing ever happened. Just IEDs. Just kicking doors. More IEDs. More doors.

Some writers are best at the sentence level, some at the paragraph: Walker is a paragraph writer. Cherry’s voice isn’t overwritten, it reads as natural and authentic— it’s earnest, smart but not sharp, likable but not pandering or affected or (worse) cute.

(A brief aside: How could a book about war and opiate addictions ever be “cute?” Oh, you’d be shocked by the abject horror that annoying millennial writers can make cute. 9/11, abortion, assault: all are fair game for millennials writers who got their MFAs at Columbia for $60k a year (who are mimicking writers who got their MFAs at Iowa) to cover in a quirky, “outsider” voice. I’m clearly sick of this style, and luckily it’s going out of vogue.)

Cherry is in some ways the male version of the “gross girl” books I’ve read in the past few years. I’m not sure if I read the name “gross girl” in a magazine or what, but I’ve been using it for a few years now. “Gross Girl” Book: it’s a book about a smart, underachieving, quirky, depressed woman, told in a comically understated and alienated voice. Some of these are genuinely great (The New Me), but a lot are “cute,” overwritten, phony, and boring (Pizza Girl, Pretend I’m Dead) and the rest are orders of magnitude longer than they deserve to be (My Year of Rest & Relaxation).

Unlike the gross girl books, Cherry has a plot that isn’t just depressed moping. Nonetheless, it still seemed to me to be the brother (or maybe step-brother or distant cousin, I dunno) of The New Me. Both are darkly funny, reflect the nihilistic faux-hope (in Cherry, faux-hope comes in the form of heroin; in The New Me, it’s self-help) of coming of age in the Great Recession, revealing similar feelings of alienation in wildly different experiences.

There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin. Emily and I were living together. The days were bright. You didn’t worry about jobs because there weren’t any. But you could go to school so you could get FAFSA, you could get student loans and Pell Grants. And if you were getting G.I. Bill that’d cover your tuition; then you didn’t need your FAFSA for school and you could go buy dope with it instead. Which was all you really wanted. You could kill yourself real slow and feel like a million dollars. Of course the future looked bad—you went into debt, you got sick all the time, you couldn’t shit, everyone you met was a fucker, your new friends would eat the eyes out of your head for a spoon or twenty dollars, your old friends stayed away—but you could do more heroin and that would usually serve to settle you down, when you were going on 25, back when you could still fake it, and there was nothing better than to be young and on heroin.

(Also, see what I mean about the paragraph thing? Walker is great.)

Anyway, compare it to this miserable litany from The New Me:

I should read a book, I should make some friends, I should write some emails, I should go to the movies, I should get some exercise, I should unclench my muscles, I should get a hobby, I should buy a plant, I should call my exes, all of them, and ask them for advice, I should figure out why no one wants to be around me, I should start going to the same bar every night, become a regular, I should volunteer again, I should get a cat or a plant or some nice lotion or some Whitestrips, start using a laundry service, start taking myself both more and less seriously.

Ok, so at face value, obviously very different. But Walker and Butler use the same structure here to show their protagonist’s complete helplessness and dissociation from their reality: “There’s nothing better than being young and on heroin” quickly jumps to eye-gauging and body-failing, and then right back to “nothing better.” Similarly, Butler begins a litany of self-improvement, but the self-loathing and reproachful, “I should figure out why no one wants to be around me” sneaks in, only to skip right back to the litany. It’s the list of someone who ostensibly wants to “self-improve,” but who, in reality, is too self-loathing to ever move beyond this anxious inaction. Walker’s protagonist is similarly left in a paralyzed cycle.

Both protagonists are allowed such limited agency—the protagonists feel their choices are limited, and this feeling, in turn, helps to create this reality. Jia Tolentino1 points this out in her review of The New Me, comparing the book to Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism2, which describes “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

I’m not gonna yikkity-yak too much about “late capitalism” and neoliberalism and whatever because I’d probably end up poorly plagiarizing Fisher. But like, to keep it short and sweet; if we can agree that war and addiction are functions of neoliberalism,3 robbing a bank lays in opposition to this system, symbolically if not literally. Even in Cherry’s straightforward and unadorned voice, it’s so wild, unusual, like something out of a western. It’s part of what makes Cherry so thrilling to read—in bank robbing, Walker imagines an incoherent alternative to capitalism.

Incoherent, because the bank robbing funds his addiction, so I don’t know that it’s revolutionary, so much as it has some poetic justice to it. 21st century Robin Hood. And maybe this is why we never see Walker get caught. Instead he continues to live in the unbreakable cycle: the addict (the ideal consumer), the war veteran (the “hero”), the bank robber (the “villain”).

Oh, there’s lot more I could say here, especially about masculinity (tbt my full meltdown after reading The Topeka School by Ben Lerner!), but you’ll see that on the page instantly if you read the book. Which I really do recommend you do.

And as an aside, it’s particularly strange to read Cherry back-to-back with Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers.4 Such different visions of war, combat, death and valor. Again, I could write a whole post comparing the two, but it would be fairly easy and obvious, so I won’t.

You can buy Cherry here, and I’ll get a small commission, as I will with any Bookshop link on this post.

Anyway, I am back in Brooklyn, where I have officially joined a gym and a writing class. By Christmas, my body will be svelte and my mind will be swole.

xoxo
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Cherry by Nico Walker

A fashionably late review.

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