Cherry

“Cherry,” a debut novel from Nico Walker, was hard to put down for all the wrong reasons. I told myself that this was research. I was reading about the reality of war today. Discovering the circumstantial nuances that create today’s opioid addict. But the binge reading went down for far more base reasons. A less noble part of me just devoured this book.Walker has crafted the perfect slow motion train wreck. You can’t look away. The narrator is an anti hero with a heart. Cherry is an anti love anti war anti drug anti true crime story. An absolute must read. Cherry woke my dormant desire to gape at misfortune right in the first paragraph.“Emily’s gone to take a shower. The room’s half dark and I’m getting dressed, looking for a shirt with no blood on it- not having any luck.”Like smelling salts, the words forced my voyeur aspects out of bed. Sleeping giant arise! Three sentences in and it was coffee at hand, glasses on, and dig in.Did you catch the captivating cadence of that quote above? That tempo is kept up through the full 319 pages. Walker brings to mind the short, clipped, just-the-facts narrative style of Holden Cauffield,* and the results kept me glued to the book.The similarities go past the cadence. Our protagonist in Cherry is his own person, well, as much as a true blue junkie can be, and his story is unique to today, but he articulates an intelligent dissatisfaction which rings so much like the prose of Catcher in the Rye it feels like a distant sequel.“... so why wasn't I happy? I didn’t know. All I’d figured was the world was wrong and I was in it.”Reading Cherry was like encountering a friend unseen for decades, but out of context, like in traffic court or on a trampoline. Uncanny.Walker shows the main character in high school, amid smart philosophical angst. We come to love our man’s earnest hopelessness as he delivers all the unbridled optimism of a Bukowski character.“There are countless women in the world. At times it’s more than I can bear to think about: that there should be so many and they all start out the way they do, with all the brightness and their own invisible worlds and secret languages and what else they have, and that we ruin everything.”He leaves you no choice but to love him.The arch takes our hero to Iraq, and we get a long walk along the “war is hell” path. (It’s not fun. I was reading some to my girlfriend and actually put it down because, well, war.) But the rapid-fire writing keeps us in for the full journey, and it is soon apparent how very real is PTSD. War trauma paves the way to opiate addiction, bank robbery, and straight into the jail cell from which the book was written.The book matters for it’s successful and bold narrative style. It matters because it delivers heart on a most unusual platter. And it matters because we need to see into the workings of the mind of the addict, and open our minds to the possibilities inherent in such an understanding.I’m not saying the empathy this book imparts makes a great case for prevention, decriminalizing, harm reduction approaches and needs-based crime assessments, but, oh wait, I am saying that. Cherry is all that and a bag of almost clean needles. Pick up a copy.*(In what we can only assume is a tip of the hat, the story trots out a serviceable old bit from “Seymour, an Introduction,” one of Salinger’s lesser known works, and gives full credit. Delighting.)

Nicon Walker's novel Cherry captures the low life of the nameless narrator in simple, direct and often vulgar language appropriate for a character so lacking in the discipline necessary to lead a self-directed life defined by beliefs, goals, integrity, and the consideration others. The narrator, self-absorbed from the beginning, shirks responsibility for his own development and seeks only the instant gratification of his base desires rather than pursuing any lofty achievement with his obvious inherent though unrefined talents. He'd rather be a do nothing, know nothing scum bag than actually give himself over to the expectations of the society that has so much to offer him if only he'd take advantage of the options available. That alcohol, sex, and drugs are more appealing to him than education or any kind of gainful employment is not surprising: he is a lazy hedonist who eventually pays dearly for his insatiable appetites and consummate lazyness. He emerges as a symbol, an archetype of youth corrupted by too many possibilities from which to choose in an affluent and free society.Ironically, he tries to break his inevitable fall by joining the military. That's what his kind--the ones who are lost without values or direction--often do in the hopes of having someone else impose the discipline and direction upon their otherwise too weak and inept selves. Of course, his stint in the army and his tour in Iraq do not reform his character, nor do they redeem him of his already long list of crimes against himself and his love objects (the young women in his life). What he experiences in war, though documented in his usual first person narration, happens more to others than to himself. He admits he's a fuck-up as a medic and seems to blame the army for not preparing him better. That may be the case, but by this time his credibility has sunk as low as his character.Upon return to civil society, he continues rejecting opportunity and civility itself, spiraling on his continuum of addiction and misanthropy, bringing the woman he appears to love down with him. That he ends up robbing banks to support their mutual addiction to whatever mind and body altering drugs they can get from any available source is not surprising given the decline from just below normal adolescent development to subnormal adulthood precipitated by lack of self-responsibility.That this novel has been heralded as a modern classic debut is not surprising, for the narrator tells his story with a degree of ownership of his demise as a human being. A reader may not enjoy the story of the dregs of society, but this story certainly qualifies as proof positive that what is lacking in character development in the home needs be addressed elsewhere if this society is going to save young people from their base inclinations. Public, secular schools run by well-educated, respected, value-centered teachers who love young people and wish to serve this nation must be recruited to fill the void left by parents not doing the job, abdicating their duty for whatever reason.The tragedy of human waste is the main theme of Cherry. And of our time.

Era un regalo e piaciuto

capa linda, história interessante, chegou rápido e em ótimas condições

:)

This book came in clean with no issues. After seeing the movie I had to read the book. Glad to have this part of my collection

This electrifying novel is set during the first decade of the twenty-first century in small-town America and occupied Iraq. It begins as an account of the emptiness and aimlessness of the lives of young Americans, with lots of casual sex and drug-taking, and then moves to the Middle East after the narrator joins the army. At the end he returns to the States and resumes life with his girlfriend. As he sinks deeper into heroin addiction he takes up bank robbery as a means of funding an addict’s lifestyle. The novel begins with him on the brink of being caught by the cops and the rest of the book is a flashback to how he reached this low point in his life.Cherry is basically a brilliantly accomplished work of neo-realism, which supplies a very plausible account of how a lot of young Americans at the lower end of the social scale live their lives. It’s also probably the greatest war novel to come out of American writing since that generation of writers who served in the Second World War and published fiction like The Young Lions and The Naked and the Dead.The prose is stripped-down and laconic. It creates a world which is simultaneously both bleak and comic (one chapter begins: “There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin.”) This novel is not for readers who like elegant polished writing, plots as perfect as a jigsaw, and affluent characters whose appearance, clothes and homes are described in exquisite detail. Nico Walker’s characters have no inner lives, apart from the narrator. They have crappy jobs and eat junk food. They exist largely as names and dialogue. There is an emotional blankness as one thing follows another: more sex, more drugs.The central section of the novel, set in Iraq, is remarkable. It shows the reality of the American occupation. Bored troops pass the time taking drugs or watching porn or torturing mice. One female soldier sells herself for dollars. The troops look forward to killing Iraqis. Some hustle for a medal they don’t deserve. One thing happens after another but nothing adds up to anything. People quarrel. People lose limbs or die. A soldier called North, disappointed that he’s missed the chance to kill anyone, fires his weapon across a river into an island overgrown with date palms: “That was just North acting out.” It’s a futile gesture which calls to mind the ship firing blindly at the African coast in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Another scene involving cheerleaders visiting the troops is reminiscent of a scene in the movie Apocalypse Now.The prose is stripped-down and laconic. The novel name-checks two writers - J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut - who were plainly inspirational for the deadpan, emotionally distanced voice of the narrator, and for the whimsy and irony that nudges the surface of the action. If you like your comedy very bleak and very dark than you’ll enjoy this book, which is often painfully funny. I found it far more compelling than almost everything which passes for literary fiction nowadays. But if your idea of a good novel is something by Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan or Kazuo Ishiguro, then Cherry probably isn’t for you. It is not a comfortable read or one which offers relaxing beautifully written entertainment and a gripping, page-turning plot. Cherry is a picaresque tale of daily survival involving lives which don’t seem to be going anywhere. It is also probably the first genuinely classic novel to come out of the twenty-first century United States of America