Publishers Weekly
06/25/2018
A man who likens himself to a “stray dog with the mange” descends into addiction in this frustrating debut. Walker’s unnamed narrator begins the novel as “a soft kid” from a stable home, a vegetarian shoe store employee dating a college classmate named Emily who likes Modest Mouse and Edward Albee. But when Emily transfers, he fails out of school and enlists in the Army as a medic, reasoning “I don’t have any other ideas.” He wastes time in Iraq “waiting for the war to happen” and grows further apart from Emily. Upon returning home to Cleveland, the narrator starts “getting into the OxyContin pretty hard.” He traipses through a parade of new women before Emily reenters the picture, having started using drugs herself. “There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin,” the narrator writes. Some readers may find the innumerable descriptions of the Sisyphean life of an addict suitably transgressive. For everyone else, the insistence on Emily’s culpability for the narrator’s degeneration, as well as the depiction of other women as useful only for sex, make the novel feel like it’s willing to describe the catastrophe of its narrator’s life, but not truly examine it. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Cherry is a miracle of literary serendipity, a triumph. . . . [Walker’s] language, relentlessly profane but never angry, simmers at the level of morose disappointment, something like Holden Caulfield Goes to War. . . . His prose echoes Ernest Hemingway’s cadences to powerful effect. . . . Cherry is written without an ounce of self-pity by an author allergic to the meretricious poetry of despair. In these propulsive pages, Walker draws us right into the mind of an ordinary young man beset by his own and his country’s demons. In the end, his only weapon against disintegration is his own devastating candor.” —The Washington Post
“The rare work of literary fiction by a young American that carries with it nothing of the scent of an MFA program. . . . The voice Walker has fashioned has a lot in common with the one Denis Johnson conjured for his masterpiece Jesus’ Son. . . . A novel of searing beauty.” —Vulture
“A singular portrait of the opioid epidemic. . . . [Walker] writes dialogue so musical and realistic you’ll hear it in the air around you.” —The New York Times Book Review
“[An] unforgettable mix of doomed and dazzling. . . . There’s a vivid, repulsive truth in the way Walker renders his subjects—a sort of social truth, stripped of morality, which is rare and riveting when it comes to the subjects of opioid addiction, intimate everyday cruelty, and endless, meaningless war.” —The New Yorker
“One of the summer’s most exciting literary breakthroughs, Cherry is a profane, raw, and harrowingly timely account of the effects of war and the perils of addiction.” —Entertainment Weekly
"A buzzsaw of a novel. . . . Bracingly original." —The Wall Street Journal
“A raw coming-of-age story in reverse. . . . Cherry touches on some of the darkest chapters of recent American history.” —The New York Times
“Walker tells the story in a biting staccato, by turns shrewd, heartfelt, and repellent. . . . Cherry's descriptions of Army life are as acerbic and unsparing—and often darkly hilarious—as the boot-camp scenes from Full Metal Jacket.” —Mother Jones
“Walker’s raw confessional novel, aptly compared to Jesus’ Son and Reservoir Dogs, is a devastating example of art imitating life.” —Esquire, “The Best Books of 2018 (So Far)”
“Heavily indebted to the profane blood, guts, bullets, and opiate-strewn absurdities dreamed up by Thomas McGuane, Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah, Cherry tells a story that feels infinitely more real, and undeniably tougher than the rest.” —The A.V. Club
“With an unforgettable voice, the narrator relates his hellacious military service in Iraq, PTSD, and descent into addiction with desperation and propulsive intensity, sustained by a dark humor and associative structure evocative of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.” —The National Book Review
“Unsparingly raw and utterly gripping. This is an astonishingly good novel, written by someone who clearly has a gift for storytelling. Walker’s characters, even minor players and walk-ons, are beautifully drawn. His dialogue rings achingly true. . . . A masterpiece.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Nico Walker’s Cherry is a wrenching, clear-eyed stare-down into the abyss of war, addiction and crime, a dark tumble into scumbaggery, but it’s also deeply humane and truly funny. That is one of the reasons I love it so much: it makes you laugh and ache at the same time, in the manner of the great Denis Johnson.” —Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
“After page one, only the faint hearted will manage to put down this brilliant screech from a life of war, crime and addiction, a powerful book that declares the arrival of a real writer who has made art out of anguish.” —Thomas McGuane, author of Cloudbursts and Ninety-two in the Shade
“Heartbreaking, unadorned, radically absent of pretense, Cherry is the debut novel America needs now, a letter from the frontlines of opioid addiction and, almost subliminally, a war story.” —Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days and Red, White, Blue
“I’m so jealous about the writing in Cherry that it makes me sick. Nico Walker has written one of those perfect books in the most outrageous voice that I’ve come across in years. Wild and vulnerable and just talking to you in crystal perfect sentences. In a world of literary fakes and watered-down student voices, Nico Walker is like a new-found oracle of our living, breathing life. The world will call Nico Walker many things: drug addict, soldier, bank robber, and inmate. But they’re all fucking lies. After reading this, you’ll say only one thing: Nico Walker is one of the best writers alive.” —Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book and Hill William
“Someone once said there are only two things worth writing about, love and death. Nico Walker may know more about these two subjects than 99.9% of fiction writers working today. Read Cherry instead of the latest piece of fluff—it might be the only time when you truly feel a writer is actually baring their soul to you.” —Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Heavenly Table
“Harrowing, heartbreaking, and sadly funny. Cherry is a terrific book, a cool book, and Walker’s voice is keen and vigilant and uniquely his own.” —Joe Ide, author of IQ and Righteous
Library Journal
★ 08/01/2018
Set in the early 2000s, this work features a nameless narrator telling the story of an intelligent, troubled young man from a middle-class Cleveland suburb who might well resemble the author. It begins as a love story, when he meets Emily, who quickly becomes his high school sweetheart. Directionless and in pain after she splits with him to attend college, he opts to join the army, eventually landing in Iraq as a combat medic. Suffering from PTSD on his return, he again finds Emily, and they take up a tenuous existence together. The PTSD leads to a heavy involvement with drugs, as he moves from Oxycodone to heroin and brings Emily along in his addiction. The constant need for money to support their habits sends him on a downward spiral that culminates in a series of bank robberies. Written by a first-time author currently incarcerated, this is both a sad love story and a raw tale of a young man's downfall owing to war and its aftermath. While the main character is no one's role model, he has enough intelligence and moral sense to seem not totally beyond redemption. VERDICT A raging, agonized scream of a novel and a tremendously powerful debut.—Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-05-15
In this unsettling debut, a young man raised in the middle-class comforts of America encounters war, love, and drug addiction.After the narrator awakens on the first page, he is "looking for a shirt with no blood on it" and then for his rigs—the apparatus of heroin addiction—to get him and his partner, Emily, in shape for the day. She has to be at school by 10 a.m. to teach college students remedial writing. The two met at 18 and now they are 25, living in a Cleveland suburb. Walker opens and closes the story in the couples' present at age 25, while the bulk looks back at how the unnamed narrator found Emily and lost her and went off to war in Iraq in 2005. The writing is raw, coarse, and sometimes forced: "Your new friends would eat the eyes out of your head for a spoon." Yet it often has a brute power, tapping the unadorned, pointedly repetitive language of addiction or battle. The IED "took off both Jimenez's legs and severed one of his arms almost completely. But he was still awake and he knew what was happening. He was screaming." So many patrols deal with bombs or breaking into suspect houses: "Just IEDs. Just kicking doors. More IEDs. More doors." Soldiers look for distraction. Two of them make snuff films with mice. Some do drugs because the Army stops checking urine. On his release from the Army, the narrator reconnects with Emily and copes with PTSD. "In these years I didn't sleep and when I slept I dreamt of violence." Heroin takes over, with its own awful monotony. They are "spending over a thousand dollars on dope, every week." She keeps teaching. He robs banks.A bleak tale told bluntly with an abundance of profanity but also of insight into two kinds of living hell.
