The importance and signficance of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys, just anointed with a Pulitzer Prize (his 2^nd!), is a terrific and sorrowful document about the mistreatment of young men/boys by the criminal justice system, which in many states – the setting of this novel is Florida but the source material, which CW cites in the epilogue, comes from several (mostly Southern) states – considered the youths entrusted to their care to be not only worthless and dispensable but, worse, as opportunities to play out their sadistic and homosexual behaviors and their abject racism (most though not all of the mistretment came down upon the black boys) and to plunder through a system of corruption that was sidely known and about which the so-called authorities and overs-seers turned a blind eye. Whitehead’s novel focuses on one fiction institution, the Nickel training school, but it’s closely modeled on a real Florida institution; the horrors of that place have been written about by investigative reporters and by researchers at a Florida university. CW’s accomplishment is to make these stories into a narrative by focusing on a small cast of abused boys, notably Elwood, one of the most intelligent of the young men whose life was disrupted by a ridiculous frame-up arrest for which he had no competent legal defense. I have to say, though, that despite the good intentions and vital mission of this novel, CW doesn’t develop any of the characters to a full extent and he resorts to a weird narrative trick, which I won’t reveal, in the final section, which I think does little to advance the story. Painful as it may be to read, however, this novel helps us see the horrors of the past and makes us wonder to what extent they remain unmitigated and unexposed today.