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Cherry
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.
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.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published August 14, 2018
1793 people are currently reading
30373 people want to read
About the author
Nico Walker
2 books489 followersNico Walker is originally from Cleveland. He served as a medic on more than 250 missions in Iraq. Currently he has two more years of an eleven-year sentence for bank robbery. Cherry is his debut novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,749 reviews
October 10, 2018
I don’t care for addiction fiction. I pretty much hated this book. Repetitive. Nothing particularly new. There are indeed some good lines and some humor. The ending is interesting in what it doesn’t offer. The misogyny is so thick it’s almost funny. Almost. People are terrible and it’s great when they are free to be terrible in fiction so I am not saying the men in this book have to be not sexist. But I am saying I don’t enjoy reading about men who hate women for hundreds of pages.
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March 25, 2021First posted: http://brianvanreet.com/2018/08/22/a-...
I have a lot in common with Nico Walker, author of the recently released debut novel, Cherry. We both partied too hard and failed out of college in the early 2000’s, both then enlisting in the wartime army at twenty years old. After basic training we were both stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. We didn’t know each other but it is possible we rubbed shoulders in one of the nightclubs in Killeen or at the 24-hour gas station near the entrance of post where you could buy liquor and smokes at any hour of the day or night. We would have appeared as two pissed-off looking kids, sunburned in desert camo, waiting in line after work to buy some relief from boredom and toil. No one in a position to make such judgments would have pegged us as budding literary novelists.
It would have been in 2005 that our paths unknowingly crossed in Texas, if they did. I would have been just returned from Iraq, and Walker would have been on his way. Each of us was deployed as part of a combat arms unit at a time when the war was particularly deadly for U.S. troops. He spent a year as a medic with an infantry company in the Triangle of Death, and I made my bones as a tank gunner in Sadr City. We both saw and did our share of awful shit. From the descriptions I’ve read, Walker saw and did more. Neither of us did more than one tour over there. One was plenty. Neither of us had kids. We had options.
After we left Texas our lives maintained surface similarities even as they began diverging in radical ways. I went back to school on the G.I. Bill, studied English, and this time did well, grade-wise, though the transition to civilian life was not always smooth. Walker also went back to school on the G.I. Bill, studied English, and did even worse than he had before—much worse, in fact. He became addicted to heroin and robbed ten banks before crashing his car while eluding police. Around the same time that was happening, I was a graduate student publishing short stories in literary journals. I kept at the writing game and hustled my butt off for the decade it took me to land a book deal. Nico Walker has one, too, but not much else. He is a convict who resides in a federal prison in Kentucky.
When I first heard of him and his autobiographical novel, I confess my reaction to it was not-so-gentle bemusement. Oh great, I thought. An Iraq-veteran-junkie-bank-robber novelist. We have truly jumped the shark in this genre. Blame our sensationalistic media culture, which often functions to seek out and reward the very worst people. I feared the rest of us, in the wake of his book, would now have to deal with its confirmation of a damaging stereotype about this generation of veterans: that we are no more than mindless thugs who, by virtue of our participation in a criminal war, are criminals at heart, if not by the letter of the law.
On top of that, it seemed to me a dizzying moral abdication that so many literary journalists and book critics had taken it upon themselves to celebrate work by a convicted violent criminal from an affluent background, in a cultural moment when any number of male authors and editors have been lately accused of inappropriate behavior, which may not rise to the level of criminal offense, but which is nevertheless deemed toxic enough to warrant the ruination of their careers. Meanwhile, some of the same institutions and people most responsible for tearing down these “shitty men” in literature were now elevating Walker to literary celebrity, his career launched precisely because of his outrageously bad behavior.
The genesis of Cherry has its roots in a 2013 BuzzFeed profile on his robberies and military service. After reading this piece, a book editor reached out to Walker, writing him letters in prison and eventually soliciting a novel from the inmate. In the acknowledgements section at the end of Cherry, Walker claims he had to be convinced and encouraged by his editor to start writing the book in the first place. If we take him at his word, it would not exist otherwise. Needless to say, most first-time novelists cannot expect this kind of treatment. They struggle for years to get a foot in the gatekeepers’ door. Even the talented give up and fail. Walker joined the army and robbed a string of banks, and the gatekeepers came to him.
It felt unseemly, unfair, and hypocritical, and I know it’s difficult these days to find objective moral standards we would all agree on. But perhaps we might agree it’s fundamentally wrong to stick a pistol in a pregnant woman’s face and demand money from her to fund one’s drug habit. Walker did just that in real life, yet most of the discussion surrounding his book is not about his victims. I can’t help but wonder, if he had made a lewd comment to that woman or exposed himself to her while robbing her, would that have been enough to preclude glowing reviews? What are the standards here, anyway? Why condemn one variety of toxic masculinity while celebrating another? Is there something especially romantic for Americans about bank robbers and broken veterans—so long as they’re clean cut and white?
The answer of course is yes.
And all of that is to say how I came to Cherry. Skeptically, to say the least. Moved by annoyance as much as curiosity, I sat down to read, finding within its clipped cadences something even more offensive than I’d expected: a litany of selfishness, sexism, casual racism, cruelty, pointless graphic violence, squalor, perversion, self-abuse, nihilism—more or less all the bad things in contemporary American life. To my surprise, I enjoyed reading it very much. Not because I always revel in bad things, but Walker’s telling of them struck me as remarkably truthful. At one point in the book the unnamed narrator is in a college classroom, attempting to explicate Keats’ famous lines—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—and while his interpretation fails to convince a jaded English professor, it revealed to me the animating purpose behind this book. Simply, to tell the truth. No matter how brutal and awful it was, especially then, to tell the truth.
Cherry succeeds admirably well in this project, insofar as it makes a pleasing form out of one man’s particularly ugly truth. It’s a solipsistic book with a narrow perspective, but it intends to be, and the chapters set at war read like a more honest accounting of what an Iraq deployment circa 2005 felt like to a lower-enlisted grunt in a bad spot than almost anything else I have read on the subject. It’s miles closer to the truth of that experience than anything written by the generals and most of what’s been produced so far by journalists and historians. Some people will not want to admit that. They won’t like hearing that significant numbers of American soldiers were huffing Dust Off in Baghdad, were watching the vilest kinds of pornography on duty, were pilfering, were abusing detainees, were smuggling illegal drugs into theater, and generally speaking, cared as much about killing Iraqis as they did about helping them.
Uncomfortable or not, nasty or not, those are truths of how it was over there, no denying. If there’s a flaw in the Iraq chapters it’s that they are so unrelentingly bleak that civilians with little first-hand experience of the military may get the wrong idea. Not everything was darkness and depravity, even in a warzone. There was lightness and tenderness there, too. Compassion, self-sacrifice, nobility of spirit—fathers and mothers trying to do right by their families and country. None of that was enough to tip the scales, though. The darkness predominated by a long shot. In this way, Walker’s vision of war is correct.
The second thing about Cherry that subverted my expectations in a good way was how poorly it conforms to the simplistic narratives others are trying to impose on it. What I mean may best be shown by example. Here’s one where the editors of Esquire, while introducing an excerpt from the novel, frame it in these terms:
On a similar note but with more sophistication, in her author profile for the New York Times Alexandra Alter writes:
These descriptions of the book (which I am reproducing because they are representative, not extraordinary) imply a strong link between Walker’s PTSD, his addiction, and the robberies he committed. That link could be strong and real in his case, but maybe not, and it could be that there are relationships between these problems, though not so direct a line from one to the other as some might assume. According to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, PTSD correlates with (but cannot be said to cause) an increased risk of violence among those who suffer from it. When studies on this question control for alcohol and drug abuse, however, PTSD no longer associates with violence at all.
Alcohol and drug abuse, it turns out, are much greater predictors of violent behavior than PTSD is. It should be said that the vast majority (around 90%) of post-9-11 veterans who suffer from the disorder are nonviolent, and that all veterans, including recent ones, are on average less likely to be incarcerated than civilians. The association of PTSD and criminal violence is problematic, to say the least, though you wouldn’t know any of that by reading any of the big reviews or promotional materials for Cherry, which fail to mention these complex interrelationships.
Thankfully, they are at the heart of Walker’s story. It’s a descent, a dissolution, yes, but one that begins from an already low place. The narrator’s drug use, thrill-seeking and criminality predate his PTSD. They predate even his enlistment in the army, perhaps by years; his problems begin long before the war. They begin for us on the first page of the first chapter as he tells us he was “going through a blotters phase,” in other words, doing large quantities of LSD. So much so, he shows up to class and to his job at a shoe store while tripping on acid. He drinks heavily. He does cocaine. Ecstasy. Pharmaceuticals. He sells drugs to his classmates. “But it wasn’t like I was bad or anything,” he tells us wryly. “I wasn’t bothering anybody; I didn’t even eat meat.”
Along with his relationship to a young woman, drug abuse is one of the major through-lines that connects the before-war, war, and after-war sections of the novel. Though he doesn’t get hooked on heroin until after he returns from Iraq, Walker’s narrator is most definitely an addict at every stage of his development in the book. It follows a progression of addiction that includes war, is complicated by war, but is not fundamentally a result of going to war. It would be more correct to say Nico Walker went to war because he was an addict, not the other way around. At any rate, the relationship between trauma, addiction, and self-destruction is not so cut and dry as some might think. He tells us so himself:
We might add that the war sure didn’t help matters, and that his participation in the fighting could be more than a coincidence, that maybe being “fucked in the head” predisposes a certain kind of reckless young person to want to join up during wartime. And to heroin use. And in extreme cases, to bank robbery.
“Because I was born that way” might be the truth, but it won’t be a satisfying one for many readers who have been raised on characters that are supposed to ooze with “agency,” the ability to make a clear bold choice that changes their world. In this novel, Walker suggests we may not have as much of a choice as we think. External forces, substances and genetics shape the lives of these characters as much as choices do. This underlying logic to the novel places it in a tradition of literary naturalism, including work by writers like Zola and Frank Norris, both of whom also tended to chronicle the seamier side of life.
From contemporary book critics, Walker’s voice has drawn comparisons to Hemingway and Salinger, and while his terse prose recalls the former, and his youthful disaffection the latter, to my mind he has more in common with Bukowski or Burroughs. With its themes of meanness, degeneracy, intoxication, and its lacerating black humor, Cherry ranks up there with Junkie or Post Office. Fans of those books will almost certainly appreciate this one, but if readers are looking for a heist novel, they may be disappointed. This is much more a story about drugs and war than about robbing banks; those crimes form the crux of Cherry’s marketing materials, but only a small fraction of its pages. This feels right to me, though. Walker was not an effective thief, taking on average only a few thousand dollars at each of the banks he hit. The way these crimes are described in the novel feels, again, more truthful than we usually get in fiction about such things. His robberies come off as impulsive acts of desperation, little more than smash-and-grab jobs, doomed to fail. He was no master criminal, and his take was far from lucrative, given the risks.
Not lucrative, that is, unless we count Cherry as part of his haul. If he hasn’t already, he will soon make more money from royalties than he ever took from a teller’s drawer. It’s been reported that he has used some of his publishing advance to make restitution to the banks he robbed. I wonder which of his human victims might also want a cut. While lawyers from Knopf have expressed their opinion that the novel does not conflict with laws prohibiting convicts from profiting off depictions of their crimes, that opinion could be challenged in court, perhaps successfully. It might well be challenged if Walker sells enough copies. To paraphrase John Dillinger, people seem to know where the money is.
Despite my initial skepticism and some lingering extra-textual reservations about how and why this book is being sold, I hope it is widely read. I hope its author keeps writing and that he keeps his nose clean when he is released from prison in a couple years. By all rights, his debut should have then become widely known. It’s got all the ingredients for a bestseller: a love story (albeit a twisted one), vivid yet accessible writing, enough suspense to keep you going, and that based-on-a-true-story quality of authenticity that is hard to duplicate. It’s an especially timely read on the opioid epidemic. Those who have had a loved one go down that terrible road may see his or her despair in this book. For those of us who fought in Iraq, you will recognize that place, too. It’s mostly a destroyed place, and we were the ones to destroy it—we finished the job, anyway. Cherry tells us something bitterly important about how, if not why that happened. It reveals, in one man’s process of self-destruction, a nation’s. In this case, I mean ours.
I have a lot in common with Nico Walker, author of the recently released debut novel, Cherry. We both partied too hard and failed out of college in the early 2000’s, both then enlisting in the wartime army at twenty years old. After basic training we were both stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. We didn’t know each other but it is possible we rubbed shoulders in one of the nightclubs in Killeen or at the 24-hour gas station near the entrance of post where you could buy liquor and smokes at any hour of the day or night. We would have appeared as two pissed-off looking kids, sunburned in desert camo, waiting in line after work to buy some relief from boredom and toil. No one in a position to make such judgments would have pegged us as budding literary novelists.
It would have been in 2005 that our paths unknowingly crossed in Texas, if they did. I would have been just returned from Iraq, and Walker would have been on his way. Each of us was deployed as part of a combat arms unit at a time when the war was particularly deadly for U.S. troops. He spent a year as a medic with an infantry company in the Triangle of Death, and I made my bones as a tank gunner in Sadr City. We both saw and did our share of awful shit. From the descriptions I’ve read, Walker saw and did more. Neither of us did more than one tour over there. One was plenty. Neither of us had kids. We had options.
After we left Texas our lives maintained surface similarities even as they began diverging in radical ways. I went back to school on the G.I. Bill, studied English, and this time did well, grade-wise, though the transition to civilian life was not always smooth. Walker also went back to school on the G.I. Bill, studied English, and did even worse than he had before—much worse, in fact. He became addicted to heroin and robbed ten banks before crashing his car while eluding police. Around the same time that was happening, I was a graduate student publishing short stories in literary journals. I kept at the writing game and hustled my butt off for the decade it took me to land a book deal. Nico Walker has one, too, but not much else. He is a convict who resides in a federal prison in Kentucky.
When I first heard of him and his autobiographical novel, I confess my reaction to it was not-so-gentle bemusement. Oh great, I thought. An Iraq-veteran-junkie-bank-robber novelist. We have truly jumped the shark in this genre. Blame our sensationalistic media culture, which often functions to seek out and reward the very worst people. I feared the rest of us, in the wake of his book, would now have to deal with its confirmation of a damaging stereotype about this generation of veterans: that we are no more than mindless thugs who, by virtue of our participation in a criminal war, are criminals at heart, if not by the letter of the law.
On top of that, it seemed to me a dizzying moral abdication that so many literary journalists and book critics had taken it upon themselves to celebrate work by a convicted violent criminal from an affluent background, in a cultural moment when any number of male authors and editors have been lately accused of inappropriate behavior, which may not rise to the level of criminal offense, but which is nevertheless deemed toxic enough to warrant the ruination of their careers. Meanwhile, some of the same institutions and people most responsible for tearing down these “shitty men” in literature were now elevating Walker to literary celebrity, his career launched precisely because of his outrageously bad behavior.
The genesis of Cherry has its roots in a 2013 BuzzFeed profile on his robberies and military service. After reading this piece, a book editor reached out to Walker, writing him letters in prison and eventually soliciting a novel from the inmate. In the acknowledgements section at the end of Cherry, Walker claims he had to be convinced and encouraged by his editor to start writing the book in the first place. If we take him at his word, it would not exist otherwise. Needless to say, most first-time novelists cannot expect this kind of treatment. They struggle for years to get a foot in the gatekeepers’ door. Even the talented give up and fail. Walker joined the army and robbed a string of banks, and the gatekeepers came to him.
It felt unseemly, unfair, and hypocritical, and I know it’s difficult these days to find objective moral standards we would all agree on. But perhaps we might agree it’s fundamentally wrong to stick a pistol in a pregnant woman’s face and demand money from her to fund one’s drug habit. Walker did just that in real life, yet most of the discussion surrounding his book is not about his victims. I can’t help but wonder, if he had made a lewd comment to that woman or exposed himself to her while robbing her, would that have been enough to preclude glowing reviews? What are the standards here, anyway? Why condemn one variety of toxic masculinity while celebrating another? Is there something especially romantic for Americans about bank robbers and broken veterans—so long as they’re clean cut and white?
The answer of course is yes.
And all of that is to say how I came to Cherry. Skeptically, to say the least. Moved by annoyance as much as curiosity, I sat down to read, finding within its clipped cadences something even more offensive than I’d expected: a litany of selfishness, sexism, casual racism, cruelty, pointless graphic violence, squalor, perversion, self-abuse, nihilism—more or less all the bad things in contemporary American life. To my surprise, I enjoyed reading it very much. Not because I always revel in bad things, but Walker’s telling of them struck me as remarkably truthful. At one point in the book the unnamed narrator is in a college classroom, attempting to explicate Keats’ famous lines—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—and while his interpretation fails to convince a jaded English professor, it revealed to me the animating purpose behind this book. Simply, to tell the truth. No matter how brutal and awful it was, especially then, to tell the truth.
Cherry succeeds admirably well in this project, insofar as it makes a pleasing form out of one man’s particularly ugly truth. It’s a solipsistic book with a narrow perspective, but it intends to be, and the chapters set at war read like a more honest accounting of what an Iraq deployment circa 2005 felt like to a lower-enlisted grunt in a bad spot than almost anything else I have read on the subject. It’s miles closer to the truth of that experience than anything written by the generals and most of what’s been produced so far by journalists and historians. Some people will not want to admit that. They won’t like hearing that significant numbers of American soldiers were huffing Dust Off in Baghdad, were watching the vilest kinds of pornography on duty, were pilfering, were abusing detainees, were smuggling illegal drugs into theater, and generally speaking, cared as much about killing Iraqis as they did about helping them.
Uncomfortable or not, nasty or not, those are truths of how it was over there, no denying. If there’s a flaw in the Iraq chapters it’s that they are so unrelentingly bleak that civilians with little first-hand experience of the military may get the wrong idea. Not everything was darkness and depravity, even in a warzone. There was lightness and tenderness there, too. Compassion, self-sacrifice, nobility of spirit—fathers and mothers trying to do right by their families and country. None of that was enough to tip the scales, though. The darkness predominated by a long shot. In this way, Walker’s vision of war is correct.
The second thing about Cherry that subverted my expectations in a good way was how poorly it conforms to the simplistic narratives others are trying to impose on it. What I mean may best be shown by example. Here’s one where the editors of Esquire, while introducing an excerpt from the novel, frame it in these terms:
In Nico Walker’s Cherry a young veteran returns home from Iraq with PTSD and turns to drugs in order to cope with his demons. When his money runs out, he turns to robbing banks.
On a similar note but with more sophistication, in her author profile for the New York Times Alexandra Alter writes:
Cherry is a raw coming-of-age story in reverse—a young man drops out of college, enlists in the Army and goes to war, but rather than maturing in the crucible of combat, he comes home shattered, unable to function. He becomes addicted to opiates and starts robbing banks almost on a whim.
These descriptions of the book (which I am reproducing because they are representative, not extraordinary) imply a strong link between Walker’s PTSD, his addiction, and the robberies he committed. That link could be strong and real in his case, but maybe not, and it could be that there are relationships between these problems, though not so direct a line from one to the other as some might assume. According to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, PTSD correlates with (but cannot be said to cause) an increased risk of violence among those who suffer from it. When studies on this question control for alcohol and drug abuse, however, PTSD no longer associates with violence at all.
Alcohol and drug abuse, it turns out, are much greater predictors of violent behavior than PTSD is. It should be said that the vast majority (around 90%) of post-9-11 veterans who suffer from the disorder are nonviolent, and that all veterans, including recent ones, are on average less likely to be incarcerated than civilians. The association of PTSD and criminal violence is problematic, to say the least, though you wouldn’t know any of that by reading any of the big reviews or promotional materials for Cherry, which fail to mention these complex interrelationships.
Thankfully, they are at the heart of Walker’s story. It’s a descent, a dissolution, yes, but one that begins from an already low place. The narrator’s drug use, thrill-seeking and criminality predate his PTSD. They predate even his enlistment in the army, perhaps by years; his problems begin long before the war. They begin for us on the first page of the first chapter as he tells us he was “going through a blotters phase,” in other words, doing large quantities of LSD. So much so, he shows up to class and to his job at a shoe store while tripping on acid. He drinks heavily. He does cocaine. Ecstasy. Pharmaceuticals. He sells drugs to his classmates. “But it wasn’t like I was bad or anything,” he tells us wryly. “I wasn’t bothering anybody; I didn’t even eat meat.”
Along with his relationship to a young woman, drug abuse is one of the major through-lines that connects the before-war, war, and after-war sections of the novel. Though he doesn’t get hooked on heroin until after he returns from Iraq, Walker’s narrator is most definitely an addict at every stage of his development in the book. It follows a progression of addiction that includes war, is complicated by war, but is not fundamentally a result of going to war. It would be more correct to say Nico Walker went to war because he was an addict, not the other way around. At any rate, the relationship between trauma, addiction, and self-destruction is not so cut and dry as some might think. He tells us so himself:
I had to take James Lightfoot to the police station in Linndale. James Lightfooot was a good guy but he was also fucked in the head. I don’t know the details of exactly why or how he was fucked in the head or if there were any such exact details. Probably he was just born fucked in the head. And I guess I’d been born that way too and it was only a coincidence that I had been to a war and the war probably hadn’t had much to do at all with my being fucked in the head.
We might add that the war sure didn’t help matters, and that his participation in the fighting could be more than a coincidence, that maybe being “fucked in the head” predisposes a certain kind of reckless young person to want to join up during wartime. And to heroin use. And in extreme cases, to bank robbery.
“Because I was born that way” might be the truth, but it won’t be a satisfying one for many readers who have been raised on characters that are supposed to ooze with “agency,” the ability to make a clear bold choice that changes their world. In this novel, Walker suggests we may not have as much of a choice as we think. External forces, substances and genetics shape the lives of these characters as much as choices do. This underlying logic to the novel places it in a tradition of literary naturalism, including work by writers like Zola and Frank Norris, both of whom also tended to chronicle the seamier side of life.
From contemporary book critics, Walker’s voice has drawn comparisons to Hemingway and Salinger, and while his terse prose recalls the former, and his youthful disaffection the latter, to my mind he has more in common with Bukowski or Burroughs. With its themes of meanness, degeneracy, intoxication, and its lacerating black humor, Cherry ranks up there with Junkie or Post Office. Fans of those books will almost certainly appreciate this one, but if readers are looking for a heist novel, they may be disappointed. This is much more a story about drugs and war than about robbing banks; those crimes form the crux of Cherry’s marketing materials, but only a small fraction of its pages. This feels right to me, though. Walker was not an effective thief, taking on average only a few thousand dollars at each of the banks he hit. The way these crimes are described in the novel feels, again, more truthful than we usually get in fiction about such things. His robberies come off as impulsive acts of desperation, little more than smash-and-grab jobs, doomed to fail. He was no master criminal, and his take was far from lucrative, given the risks.
Not lucrative, that is, unless we count Cherry as part of his haul. If he hasn’t already, he will soon make more money from royalties than he ever took from a teller’s drawer. It’s been reported that he has used some of his publishing advance to make restitution to the banks he robbed. I wonder which of his human victims might also want a cut. While lawyers from Knopf have expressed their opinion that the novel does not conflict with laws prohibiting convicts from profiting off depictions of their crimes, that opinion could be challenged in court, perhaps successfully. It might well be challenged if Walker sells enough copies. To paraphrase John Dillinger, people seem to know where the money is.
Despite my initial skepticism and some lingering extra-textual reservations about how and why this book is being sold, I hope it is widely read. I hope its author keeps writing and that he keeps his nose clean when he is released from prison in a couple years. By all rights, his debut should have then become widely known. It’s got all the ingredients for a bestseller: a love story (albeit a twisted one), vivid yet accessible writing, enough suspense to keep you going, and that based-on-a-true-story quality of authenticity that is hard to duplicate. It’s an especially timely read on the opioid epidemic. Those who have had a loved one go down that terrible road may see his or her despair in this book. For those of us who fought in Iraq, you will recognize that place, too. It’s mostly a destroyed place, and we were the ones to destroy it—we finished the job, anyway. Cherry tells us something bitterly important about how, if not why that happened. It reveals, in one man’s process of self-destruction, a nation’s. In this case, I mean ours.
September 25, 2018
These sentences come at you like rapid fire and it took several pages for me to fall into the cadence. This is a story of love, war, drug addiction and crime. A fictionalized account of the author’s life written while in prison, it is deeply depressing although not without flashes of humor. The author’s back-story makes me wonder how he survived to write this novel. Walker took part in over 250 missions as a combat medic and is highly decorated. The publicist has a lot to work with here.
The war scenes are gruesome and the agonizing PTSD inevitable. The unnamed main character is unable to find his footing as a civilian and turns to drugs to ease his anguish. The life of a drug addict is a never ending cycle of scrounging for money, buying drugs, administering drugs… rinse and repeat. Robbing banks became a way of procuring money as well as placing himself in the comforting and familiar situation of heightened risk and insecurity. This novel is fearless. I thank you, Mr. Walker, for writing it and thank you for your service.
The war scenes are gruesome and the agonizing PTSD inevitable. The unnamed main character is unable to find his footing as a civilian and turns to drugs to ease his anguish. The life of a drug addict is a never ending cycle of scrounging for money, buying drugs, administering drugs… rinse and repeat. Robbing banks became a way of procuring money as well as placing himself in the comforting and familiar situation of heightened risk and insecurity. This novel is fearless. I thank you, Mr. Walker, for writing it and thank you for your service.
June 29, 2022
“Somewhere along the way I got into this, and it’s become a habit with me. One thing leads to another, leads to another. Things get better, they get worse. Then one day you’re all the way thrown out, before you ever knew it was that serious. And you might be crazy, and you might have a gun, but even then it’s usually no big deal.”
Cherry follows the life of a young man. Initially enrolled in college and dating a girl named Emily, he loses his direction and flunks out. He chooses another path and enlists in the Army as a medic. He and Emily continue their relationship with a hasty marriage. The horrors of Iraq hit him as well as the trials of keeping things straight with Emily and a return to civilian life and the GI Bill. The money allows him to re enroll in college, but also feeds an opioid and heroin habit.
Things with Emily grow frayed when she also becomes addicted and their daily lives revolve around the next fix. From college student to a PTSD-afflicted veteran who now robs banks to pay for his and his wife's drug addiction.
Semi autobiographical and written by an incarcerated veteran, Cherry is an unaffected and realistic look at life in both military and criminal circles. Some might find the writing a bit unpolished, but it's authentic and a fascinating story.
It’s a piece about addiction, PTSD, and a desperation for purpose. This novel can be described as a train wreck. One that you cannot pry your eyes away from. It’s told in episodic chapters that give you insight into this young man’s descent. The writing is a tad vulgar and graphic, but one can also describe it as raw and penetrating. If this strikes you as the type of book you might be interested in, I would encourage you to take a chance on it. It’s a quick read that will definitely stay with you.
Highly Recommend
Cherry follows the life of a young man. Initially enrolled in college and dating a girl named Emily, he loses his direction and flunks out. He chooses another path and enlists in the Army as a medic. He and Emily continue their relationship with a hasty marriage. The horrors of Iraq hit him as well as the trials of keeping things straight with Emily and a return to civilian life and the GI Bill. The money allows him to re enroll in college, but also feeds an opioid and heroin habit.
Things with Emily grow frayed when she also becomes addicted and their daily lives revolve around the next fix. From college student to a PTSD-afflicted veteran who now robs banks to pay for his and his wife's drug addiction.
Semi autobiographical and written by an incarcerated veteran, Cherry is an unaffected and realistic look at life in both military and criminal circles. Some might find the writing a bit unpolished, but it's authentic and a fascinating story.
It’s a piece about addiction, PTSD, and a desperation for purpose. This novel can be described as a train wreck. One that you cannot pry your eyes away from. It’s told in episodic chapters that give you insight into this young man’s descent. The writing is a tad vulgar and graphic, but one can also describe it as raw and penetrating. If this strikes you as the type of book you might be interested in, I would encourage you to take a chance on it. It’s a quick read that will definitely stay with you.
Highly Recommend
January 8, 2019
Nico Walker is currently serving time in prison for bank robbery; his debut novel Cherry is essentially his fictionalized autobiography, in which the unnamed narrator dispassionately recounts dropping out of college, enlisting in the army, shipping out to Iraq, serving as an army medic, returning home, and developing PTSD as well as an opioid addiction.
Cherry is a deeply uncomfortable book to read on just about every level. The war scenes and depictions of drug abuse are graphic, the language is relentlessly profane, the narrator's pervasive misogyny goes unchallenged. This is not a book about redemption or remorse or lessons learned or new beginnings; it's about waste and abuse and mutually destructive relationships and squandered potential. This narrator hits rock bottom so many times that 'rock bottom' loses all meaning, and as he isn't guided by any kind of recognizable moral compass you aren't even sure if you should be rooting for him in the first place. You're just kind of along for this ride that figuratively culminates in a train wreck.
Probably the most noteworthy thing about this book aside from the author's background is its unique narrative voice - Walker blends his disaffected staccato with an urgency that keeps you turning pages, devouring the horror and humor and unexpected moments of tenderness. This is the kind of book that you feel a bit guilty for loving but at the same time you can't deny that there's something special about it.
Cherry is a deeply uncomfortable book to read on just about every level. The war scenes and depictions of drug abuse are graphic, the language is relentlessly profane, the narrator's pervasive misogyny goes unchallenged. This is not a book about redemption or remorse or lessons learned or new beginnings; it's about waste and abuse and mutually destructive relationships and squandered potential. This narrator hits rock bottom so many times that 'rock bottom' loses all meaning, and as he isn't guided by any kind of recognizable moral compass you aren't even sure if you should be rooting for him in the first place. You're just kind of along for this ride that figuratively culminates in a train wreck.
Probably the most noteworthy thing about this book aside from the author's background is its unique narrative voice - Walker blends his disaffected staccato with an urgency that keeps you turning pages, devouring the horror and humor and unexpected moments of tenderness. This is the kind of book that you feel a bit guilty for loving but at the same time you can't deny that there's something special about it.
January 31, 2019
A detailed description of the life of a loser.
December 3, 2020
“Her eyes—green—were bright, merciful, sometimes given to melancholy...I’d listen to her tell me about the abandoned factories and the cemetery where she’d grown up...And her voice took me over. This is how you find the one to break your heart.”
Nico Walker's Cherry is an engaging account of our unnamed narrator's opioid-fueled journey from college dropout to Iraqi War veteran to bank robber. It reminded me of an updated Middle American version of JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Narrators in both are rebelling against the norms while calling out society's rules as essentially phoney. The weakness, for me, is in the unmitigated angst of the narrator. However, the depiction of horrors of the Iraqi War and the opioid crisis is relevant. The language is fast-paced and compelling, and Cherry worked for me.
Nico Walker's Cherry is an engaging account of our unnamed narrator's opioid-fueled journey from college dropout to Iraqi War veteran to bank robber. It reminded me of an updated Middle American version of JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Narrators in both are rebelling against the norms while calling out society's rules as essentially phoney. The weakness, for me, is in the unmitigated angst of the narrator. However, the depiction of horrors of the Iraqi War and the opioid crisis is relevant. The language is fast-paced and compelling, and Cherry worked for me.
August 23, 2018
Not bad. It's written well enough, and the story is compelling, but yeesh, what a groveling, complaining, myopic narrator. Let's call a spade a spade here, this is an autobiography with the names changed. This is Nico Walker's story. And although it is well told, it is a dismal story of decline that is hard to empathize with.
In a way it's existential. Like Meursault from The Stranger, our self-loathing protagonist doesn't really care about anything or anybody but himself, and even then, not so much. Why try? Why be loyal? Why be courageous or caring or considerate? Having not found satisfying answers to these questions, Nico decides to take the path of least resistance to gratification without regard to the wellbeing of any other human.
Overall I liked it. It was like a nonfiction version of Catch-22. We live in an absurd world, and Mr. Walker captures that well, albeit with a pretty bad attitude.
In a way it's existential. Like Meursault from The Stranger, our self-loathing protagonist doesn't really care about anything or anybody but himself, and even then, not so much. Why try? Why be loyal? Why be courageous or caring or considerate? Having not found satisfying answers to these questions, Nico decides to take the path of least resistance to gratification without regard to the wellbeing of any other human.
Overall I liked it. It was like a nonfiction version of Catch-22. We live in an absurd world, and Mr. Walker captures that well, albeit with a pretty bad attitude.
June 25, 2018
Nico Walker isn't your typical novelist. For one, he wrote his debut novel, Cherry, in prison. Not only that, but he remains in prison to this day. In his expletive-ridden, Hunter S. Thompson-esque, Ernest Hemingway-ish, autobiographical novel, he tells us the story of how he got there. In this starkly honest middle American romp, Walker truly impresses with his ability to put words to the images of his memory. The prose is not sophisticated, flowery, or complex—it's better than all that. Reading this book feels like the underbelly of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. All the twisted characters and questionable motives (and justifications) ring true. I knew people like Nico and I still know people like Nico.
Nico hails from Cleveland and gets involved in drugs at a very early age—in other words, a very typical Midwestern young man of the late 90s and early 00s. The novel takes a detour to Iraq, where Walker served as an Army Medic. He continued his drug habit to the best of his ability while overseas and returns home to become a full-blown opiate addict. As his life devolves into a never-ending search for heroin, OxyContin, and virtually anything else he can get his hands on, he has to come up with increasingly risky ways to finance his habit. He also makes friends with increasingly shady people (of which he is among the shadiest), and eventually begins brazenly robbing banks all over the Cleveland area. The novel stops short of his apprehension and eventual conviction because this novel is about the crime, not the punishment.
I can confidently recommend Nico Walker's debut novel. When I set out to read the advanced copy I received from Knopf, I hoped it would deliver, because I very much wanted to support Walker's post-prison life (he has two years to go) by helping him sell a few more copies, because convicted Felons are treated like garbage people in our society (unless you're Martha Stewart). I commend Knopf for taking a chance on this brilliant young writer. He has the life experience and the talent to tell his truth. Many will find fellowship with him.
Nico hails from Cleveland and gets involved in drugs at a very early age—in other words, a very typical Midwestern young man of the late 90s and early 00s. The novel takes a detour to Iraq, where Walker served as an Army Medic. He continued his drug habit to the best of his ability while overseas and returns home to become a full-blown opiate addict. As his life devolves into a never-ending search for heroin, OxyContin, and virtually anything else he can get his hands on, he has to come up with increasingly risky ways to finance his habit. He also makes friends with increasingly shady people (of which he is among the shadiest), and eventually begins brazenly robbing banks all over the Cleveland area. The novel stops short of his apprehension and eventual conviction because this novel is about the crime, not the punishment.
I can confidently recommend Nico Walker's debut novel. When I set out to read the advanced copy I received from Knopf, I hoped it would deliver, because I very much wanted to support Walker's post-prison life (he has two years to go) by helping him sell a few more copies, because convicted Felons are treated like garbage people in our society (unless you're Martha Stewart). I commend Knopf for taking a chance on this brilliant young writer. He has the life experience and the talent to tell his truth. Many will find fellowship with him.
August 26, 2018
DNF 13%
Here's the thing.If you read Catcher in the Rye at the right age you think Holden Caulfield is great, you don't and you think he's unbearable. Ditto here, and the writing wasn't engaging. The blurb promised nonstop excitement--ah, no. I'm bored. I need more than obvious observations and drug use to be entertained. Great cover is not enough.
Life's too short. Outta here.
Bye.
Here's the thing.
Life's too short. Outta here.
Bye.
September 17, 2022
Nco Wakder's WOW. This one incredibly impactful novel/ When I first picked up 'Cherry' I was very curious to find out what title meant. It wasn't until I was a few chapters in that I learned it is a term used for new recruits - straight out of civilian hood. Then I thought: "What a perfect title!"
This is one of those rare novels that touched me immensely - and in many ways. It is about the hardships of fighting a war which doesn't seem much like one anymore - and wondering why you are seeing your new brothers in combat being shredded to pieces almost everyday as you go out on details that have no rhyme or reason. A quote by the author sums it up well - "People kept dying: in ones and twos, no heroes, no battles. Nothing. We were just the help, glorified scarecrows; just there to look busy, up the road and down the road, expensive as fuck, dumber than shit."
When the protagonist finally returns home (by the grace of God in one piece - and with horrible PTSD) he finally reunites with (his one true love) Emily. Unfortunately, they discover they are both hardcore heroin addicts who enable each others addiction. Emily is extremely bright, college educated and has a good position at the local college as a graduate aid who helps students with writing assignments. Meanwhile, her boyfriend (nameless protagonist newly returned from his tour of duty) only works to score them drugs (preferably heroin but coke or opioids will do in a pinch). This is a must - and at all costs. Without a fix, they get violently ill and cannot function. He ends up being surprisingly successful at robbing (multiple) banks. No matter how many thousands of dollars he gets at each, it inevitably ends up being wasted on their addiction in no less than a few weeks.
Most of the story continues in this manner: getting money for drugs, getting high, running out of money, getting sick and then rinse and repeat. Some readers have said it got too redundant reading about the vicious cycle the characters were ceaselessly rotating through day in and day out to feed their addictions.. I respectfully disagree. It is the raw truth and one hundred percent authentic. The constant repetition of what they went through to get drugs - and all the dangerous risks is what it is like to be an addict. You feel purposeless and your life revolves around the redundancy and selfishness of doing the same thing over and over again to feel good for a few hours. A few times they tell each other they want to stop because their lives are a living hell. Emily even goes to detox - while he stays home and gets high the whole time. Upon her return from treatment she's right back at it as well.
Addiction is horrible. Inevitably one of three things happens if an addicted person doesn't hit bottom and seriously pursue recovery: You end up in an insane asylum, prison or dead.
Nico Walker actually wrote this profound eye-opening gem of a novel while in prison himself. He was aided and supported by editors, publishers and multiple other people along the way - but in the end it was his ideas and story which made it a National Bestseller. I am so glad he did not let the editors change some of his grammar (to make it grammatically correct) because he wanted it stay true to how he spoke, thought and wrote. If it had been changed, I do not think it would have had the hard-hitting and reflective impact it had on me.
Thank you, Mr. Walker. This is one novel I will not forget, and I hope this is not the last I will hear (see) from you. Bravo.
This is one of those rare novels that touched me immensely - and in many ways. It is about the hardships of fighting a war which doesn't seem much like one anymore - and wondering why you are seeing your new brothers in combat being shredded to pieces almost everyday as you go out on details that have no rhyme or reason. A quote by the author sums it up well - "People kept dying: in ones and twos, no heroes, no battles. Nothing. We were just the help, glorified scarecrows; just there to look busy, up the road and down the road, expensive as fuck, dumber than shit."
When the protagonist finally returns home (by the grace of God in one piece - and with horrible PTSD) he finally reunites with (his one true love) Emily. Unfortunately, they discover they are both hardcore heroin addicts who enable each others addiction. Emily is extremely bright, college educated and has a good position at the local college as a graduate aid who helps students with writing assignments. Meanwhile, her boyfriend (nameless protagonist newly returned from his tour of duty) only works to score them drugs (preferably heroin but coke or opioids will do in a pinch). This is a must - and at all costs. Without a fix, they get violently ill and cannot function. He ends up being surprisingly successful at robbing (multiple) banks. No matter how many thousands of dollars he gets at each, it inevitably ends up being wasted on their addiction in no less than a few weeks.
Most of the story continues in this manner: getting money for drugs, getting high, running out of money, getting sick and then rinse and repeat. Some readers have said it got too redundant reading about the vicious cycle the characters were ceaselessly rotating through day in and day out to feed their addictions.. I respectfully disagree. It is the raw truth and one hundred percent authentic. The constant repetition of what they went through to get drugs - and all the dangerous risks is what it is like to be an addict. You feel purposeless and your life revolves around the redundancy and selfishness of doing the same thing over and over again to feel good for a few hours. A few times they tell each other they want to stop because their lives are a living hell. Emily even goes to detox - while he stays home and gets high the whole time. Upon her return from treatment she's right back at it as well.
Addiction is horrible. Inevitably one of three things happens if an addicted person doesn't hit bottom and seriously pursue recovery: You end up in an insane asylum, prison or dead.
Nico Walker actually wrote this profound eye-opening gem of a novel while in prison himself. He was aided and supported by editors, publishers and multiple other people along the way - but in the end it was his ideas and story which made it a National Bestseller. I am so glad he did not let the editors change some of his grammar (to make it grammatically correct) because he wanted it stay true to how he spoke, thought and wrote. If it had been changed, I do not think it would have had the hard-hitting and reflective impact it had on me.
Thank you, Mr. Walker. This is one novel I will not forget, and I hope this is not the last I will hear (see) from you. Bravo.
August 17, 2018
We’ve heard these war stories before, in superb fiction and nonfiction by other soldiers. But Nico Walker, 33, brings a raw and casual brutality to the narrative of battle. His rambling collection of chaotic anecdotes involve drugs and porn, acts of cruelty and kindness, unending boredom pierced by spikes of terror. These juxtapositions convey the fundamental disorder of the American mission and its deleterious effect on the young people forced to implement it. His language, relentlessly profane but never angry, simmers at the level of morose disappointment, something like Holden Caulfield Goes to War: “I’m glad I missed the battle because it was probably bullshit and the Army just murdered your dog anyway.”
But Walker also channels an even older novelist who saw the carnage of war. His prose echoes Ernest Hemingway’s cadences to powerful effect like. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
But Walker also channels an even older novelist who saw the carnage of war. His prose echoes Ernest Hemingway’s cadences to powerful effect like. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
October 11, 2019
* 3.5 *
An incredibly tough read and also near impossible for me to write a review of; because it feels akin to reviewing someones life. This is auto-fiction and as such I am fighting my nature to want to untangle the fact from the fiction, but that way lies madness.
If there is one reason to pick up this novel then, it is for the sections set in Iraq. Walker gives a very believable, no frills account of the life of a lower ranking officer in Iraq circa 2005. The picture he paints is ugly but entirely believable and it chimes with some of the recollections in Phil Klays' short story collection Redeployment .
The part of this novel that is a tougher sell is the spiral into heroin addiction and bank robbery. The character, which you assume is essentially the author in his twenties, is troubled before the army gets hold of him, but a tour in Iraq certainly does him no favours. I am not sure I had much appetite for the nihilistic decent into a life of chasing drugs, complete with some questionable relationships with women. There are moments when the narrator is endearing but that is frequently negated by some morally questionable decisions. I would not label this misogynist but I could see how you could view it that way. It is troubling, but then it is also quite honest and raw ( or does a good job of seeming so ) and I always like to hear about experiences so far removed from my own. Really, who am I to judge this at all, this is someones life, and it feels brave to expose it so completely.
So not entirely "enjoyable" .... but interesting.
An incredibly tough read and also near impossible for me to write a review of; because it feels akin to reviewing someones life. This is auto-fiction and as such I am fighting my nature to want to untangle the fact from the fiction, but that way lies madness.
If there is one reason to pick up this novel then, it is for the sections set in Iraq. Walker gives a very believable, no frills account of the life of a lower ranking officer in Iraq circa 2005. The picture he paints is ugly but entirely believable and it chimes with some of the recollections in Phil Klays' short story collection Redeployment .
The part of this novel that is a tougher sell is the spiral into heroin addiction and bank robbery. The character, which you assume is essentially the author in his twenties, is troubled before the army gets hold of him, but a tour in Iraq certainly does him no favours. I am not sure I had much appetite for the nihilistic decent into a life of chasing drugs, complete with some questionable relationships with women. There are moments when the narrator is endearing but that is frequently negated by some morally questionable decisions. I would not label this misogynist but I could see how you could view it that way. It is troubling, but then it is also quite honest and raw ( or does a good job of seeming so ) and I always like to hear about experiences so far removed from my own. Really, who am I to judge this at all, this is someones life, and it feels brave to expose it so completely.
So not entirely "enjoyable" .... but interesting.
August 16, 2019
This debut novel is advertised as a work of fiction, but it is clearly at least partly autobiographical - it's pretty hard to find out how big the overlap between the unnamed narrator and the author is though, as Nico Walker is still in jail, serving an eleven-year-sentence for bank robbery. That's also where he wrote this novel about a guy who dropped out of college, joined the army, served as a medic in Iraq, consequently suffered from severe PTSD, self-medicated with heroin, and, short of money and with an expensive addiction to support, became a bank robber - all of this happened to Nico Walker himself. The fact that the protagonist is also the narrator gives it an even more memoir-ish feel.
Long before Walker wrote the book, some media outlets reported on the author's life story, and it's very interesting to read especially Scott Johnson's article from 2013, because readers of "Cherry" will recognize parts of the book in it, as well as some people who are mentioned, and even some of the instances and environments documented in the various photos (https://www.buzzfeed.com/scottbuzz/pa...).
Walker's book combines different themes, but all of them are closely connected to a spiritually numbing sense of futility and alienation: Teenage angst, what soldiers experienced in Iraq and what this did (and still does) to them, the failure to help people with mental problems, and the raging opioid epidemic, in which people try to escape only to get trapped in the most rigid and dehumanizing system of self-harm: Addiction. Another important aspect of the book is the narrator's relationship to women: While I wouldn't say that he is misogynistic, it is striking that his girlfriend/wife, who plays a major role in the book, does not quite come together as a character and mostly works as a reflection of himself (which makes sense in the context of the depiction of the main character). Which brings us to the narrator's personality.
His unreliability is part of why this book is so interesting: During the different stages of his life, it feels like we are in his head then, meaning he reflects his limited and tainted cognitive experiences while dropping out of college, being in Iraq, being on heroin and robbing banks - plus there's the question how honest he is to us as his readers. Everything feels slightly off, which is understandable, because we meet the narrator in extreme situations that would mess with anyone's mind. This does not necessarily mean that the narrator is a nice dude, but it's easy to empathize with him nonetheless. At the same time, Walker finds a distinctive voice, with short, sharp sentences, colloquial language, and more humor than you might expect in such a story. While this isn't "Trainspotting", there's a parallel when it comes to finding a recognizable voice talking about tragedy in an often nonchalant way.
I was drawn into this story due to its distinct and somewhat hypnotic language, and I was amazed how Walker combines emotional urgency and alienation - but maybe those two are intertwined, because the sadness that comes with alienation is rooted in the longing for connection and a purpose, a feeling that haunts the narrator from very early on. I'd love to see this book in the brackets of the "Tournament of Books 2019", for which it is currently longlisted.
Long before Walker wrote the book, some media outlets reported on the author's life story, and it's very interesting to read especially Scott Johnson's article from 2013, because readers of "Cherry" will recognize parts of the book in it, as well as some people who are mentioned, and even some of the instances and environments documented in the various photos (https://www.buzzfeed.com/scottbuzz/pa...).
Walker's book combines different themes, but all of them are closely connected to a spiritually numbing sense of futility and alienation: Teenage angst, what soldiers experienced in Iraq and what this did (and still does) to them, the failure to help people with mental problems, and the raging opioid epidemic, in which people try to escape only to get trapped in the most rigid and dehumanizing system of self-harm: Addiction. Another important aspect of the book is the narrator's relationship to women: While I wouldn't say that he is misogynistic, it is striking that his girlfriend/wife, who plays a major role in the book, does not quite come together as a character and mostly works as a reflection of himself (which makes sense in the context of the depiction of the main character). Which brings us to the narrator's personality.
His unreliability is part of why this book is so interesting: During the different stages of his life, it feels like we are in his head then, meaning he reflects his limited and tainted cognitive experiences while dropping out of college, being in Iraq, being on heroin and robbing banks - plus there's the question how honest he is to us as his readers. Everything feels slightly off, which is understandable, because we meet the narrator in extreme situations that would mess with anyone's mind. This does not necessarily mean that the narrator is a nice dude, but it's easy to empathize with him nonetheless. At the same time, Walker finds a distinctive voice, with short, sharp sentences, colloquial language, and more humor than you might expect in such a story. While this isn't "Trainspotting", there's a parallel when it comes to finding a recognizable voice talking about tragedy in an often nonchalant way.
I was drawn into this story due to its distinct and somewhat hypnotic language, and I was amazed how Walker combines emotional urgency and alienation - but maybe those two are intertwined, because the sadness that comes with alienation is rooted in the longing for connection and a purpose, a feeling that haunts the narrator from very early on. I'd love to see this book in the brackets of the "Tournament of Books 2019", for which it is currently longlisted.
September 18, 2018
Library Overdrive Audiobook...narrated by
Jeremy Bobb
....F#cK...
....Crack smoke...
....Puke smelled like big BigMac sauce.
....”Gary was a real mother sh*t f#cker... but I already knew that”....
....Brillo Pads & Heroine
.... shooting up at the old abandoned house....
....Emily was totally f#cked: True Love
.... Romance: “ We’ll buy some pills, then shoot them up”
.....”Don’t you understand that we are completely f#cked?”
.... Yes, life was good when you’re young and on heroin... slowly killing yourself....
.....until it wasn’t!!!!
The question was....was Nico and Emily going to - not only get clean- but survive together as a married couple?
Oh wait.... they did sorta survive their separation when Nico was in Iraq -
Not sure either one survived individually during that time....
As if things were not bad enough.....
Nico turned to robbing banks ....
....oops...” Open the fu#king door you b#tch”.
“F#ck, f#ck, f#ck”.....
I wonder how many times Nico’s favorite word- ‘f#cked’ was written in “Cherry”.
In all seriousness....
the voice narrator - Jeremy Bobb was Soooooooo GOOD, you would think this was ‘his’ true story...
rather than Nico Walker’s semi auto biography/fiction novel.
This is an incredibly tragic dark story… a world I’ve never experienced and am thankful that neither of my daughters have....
There is so much profanity that it might make some readers too uncomfortable....
at the same time there was so much heart and honesty - with not an ounce of victimization...blame...or justification.
Fear... hope ... fear.... hope: it’s amazing how those two words become entangled.....which we experience for this war veteran as we follow his story about how PTSD drove him to opioid addiction.
Once again I must say - the voice narrator- Jeremy Bobb was OUTSTANDING!!!
Jeremy Bobb
....F#cK...
....Crack smoke...
....Puke smelled like big BigMac sauce.
....”Gary was a real mother sh*t f#cker... but I already knew that”....
....Brillo Pads & Heroine
.... shooting up at the old abandoned house....
....Emily was totally f#cked: True Love
.... Romance: “ We’ll buy some pills, then shoot them up”
.....”Don’t you understand that we are completely f#cked?”
.... Yes, life was good when you’re young and on heroin... slowly killing yourself....
.....until it wasn’t!!!!
The question was....was Nico and Emily going to - not only get clean- but survive together as a married couple?
Oh wait.... they did sorta survive their separation when Nico was in Iraq -
Not sure either one survived individually during that time....
As if things were not bad enough.....
Nico turned to robbing banks ....
....oops...” Open the fu#king door you b#tch”.
“F#ck, f#ck, f#ck”.....
I wonder how many times Nico’s favorite word- ‘f#cked’ was written in “Cherry”.
In all seriousness....
the voice narrator - Jeremy Bobb was Soooooooo GOOD, you would think this was ‘his’ true story...
rather than Nico Walker’s semi auto biography/fiction novel.
This is an incredibly tragic dark story… a world I’ve never experienced and am thankful that neither of my daughters have....
There is so much profanity that it might make some readers too uncomfortable....
at the same time there was so much heart and honesty - with not an ounce of victimization...blame...or justification.
Fear... hope ... fear.... hope: it’s amazing how those two words become entangled.....which we experience for this war veteran as we follow his story about how PTSD drove him to opioid addiction.
Once again I must say - the voice narrator- Jeremy Bobb was OUTSTANDING!!!
March 11, 2019
On a Highway to Hell
Red-hot, Raw and Howling tour de force of Demoralization and Descent into the early 21st century Abaddon and Beelzebul of many young American men: war and opioids (the most powerful of which is heroin).
Reminiscent of a roughcut Denis Johnson' Jesus' Son and of a shorter, a little less bitter Céline's Journey to the End of Night.
Will flesh out this review to give this outstanding debut novel its due.
Red-hot, Raw and Howling tour de force of Demoralization and Descent into the early 21st century Abaddon and Beelzebul of many young American men: war and opioids (the most powerful of which is heroin).
Reminiscent of a roughcut Denis Johnson' Jesus' Son and of a shorter, a little less bitter Céline's Journey to the End of Night.
Will flesh out this review to give this outstanding debut novel its due.
October 21, 2018
Y’all serious with this?
September 11, 2018
I thought I would love this book. And at the beginning I did... there are some laugh out loud funny and creatively profane bits here and there. The voice is compelling and there are even some moments of brilliance in the writing. But as it went along this novel started to feel like a hustle... it was frequently small-minded and mean-spirited. With every female character introduced in the book, the author's misogynistic attitudes become more apparent. After a certain point I just wanted it to be over. Very disappointing.
March 21, 2021
This novel is about the life of an unnamed narrator. A narrator who is a junkie or dope fiend. A narrator who throughout the whole book makes it almost impossible for the reader to like him.
After returning from the Iraq War, he uses drugs to self-medicate his PTSD. The only thing that worries him is where his next “hit” is coming from.
If you are averse to graphic violence and profanity, then do not even open the cover of this book. There are no moral platitudes, the end of the tunnel has no light, and the word “hope” takes on a different meaning with this novel. However, it is one of the strengths of the novel. The protagonist does not have any type of filter. He does not care if what he says or what he does is morally correct. He cheats, he steals, all in the pursuit of money to pay for more drugs. He loves two things in life, drugs and his wife Emily. In that order. In fact, I am still trying to work out if he loves his wife. His treatment of women throughout the novel is deplorable. But he does not try to hide his actions or thoughts, he is what he is.
I don’t know if it is because of this guilelessness and sincerity, but I found myself hoping that he would somehow sort out the catastrophe of his life. When he refuses to kill somebody for money, I saw a glimmer, ever so slight, of hope. Remember this is a man who has been to war, witnessed death and violence. So, for him to draw the line here shows promise, a flicker of movement from the moral compass needle.
The novel gives the reader a view of the life of a junkie. The continuous, vicious circularity of their lives. Get money any way you can, score drugs, get high, run out of drugs, get sick, return to square one. As the desire for the drugs and the physical dependency becomes stronger, the user becomes weaker and sicker, losing their job, leading to crime, prison and death. It is a life of incredible highs and unbearable lows. A life that is unsustainable.
As the narrator inevitably runs out of money, he turns to robbing banks to fuel his addiction.
There is a similarity between his life in Iraq and his life now back home. A mind-numbing monotony. In Iraq, the endless patrols searching for insurgents. Back home the endless search for drugs.
The author of this book is in jail now and you cannot help but think how much of this actually happened? He does write at the end of the novel,
“This book is a work of fiction. These things didn’t ever happen. These people didn’t ever exist.”
However, he is in jail for bank robbery, served in the army as a medic, struggled with drug addiction. I think that it is obvious that the author is the protagonist. And I believe this enhances the readability of the novel, strengthening its authenticity and realism.
The two themes that the reader cannot help taking away from this novel are the drug crisis and the scourge of PTSD. Both these problems still very much exist today, and answers are scarce.
It makes you think if there is an answer to PTSD short of not sending soldiers to war. How can we expect to send these men and women, who have individuality drummed out of them, are desensitized to violence, trained to kill, to come back and just slot back into society without mental problems? To turn off all that training, and what they have seen and experienced like a switch.
Again, this will not be a book for everybody, but I found it to be, it almost feels wrong to say, an enjoyable read. For such a dark novel there are surprisingly many instances of humor, especially regarding the army. 4 Stars.
This novel has now been turned into a film on Apple TV starring Tom Holland. It is interesting in how the protagonist is portrayed, in my opinion, very differently from the novel.
After returning from the Iraq War, he uses drugs to self-medicate his PTSD. The only thing that worries him is where his next “hit” is coming from.
If you are averse to graphic violence and profanity, then do not even open the cover of this book. There are no moral platitudes, the end of the tunnel has no light, and the word “hope” takes on a different meaning with this novel. However, it is one of the strengths of the novel. The protagonist does not have any type of filter. He does not care if what he says or what he does is morally correct. He cheats, he steals, all in the pursuit of money to pay for more drugs. He loves two things in life, drugs and his wife Emily. In that order. In fact, I am still trying to work out if he loves his wife. His treatment of women throughout the novel is deplorable. But he does not try to hide his actions or thoughts, he is what he is.
I don’t know if it is because of this guilelessness and sincerity, but I found myself hoping that he would somehow sort out the catastrophe of his life. When he refuses to kill somebody for money, I saw a glimmer, ever so slight, of hope. Remember this is a man who has been to war, witnessed death and violence. So, for him to draw the line here shows promise, a flicker of movement from the moral compass needle.
The novel gives the reader a view of the life of a junkie. The continuous, vicious circularity of their lives. Get money any way you can, score drugs, get high, run out of drugs, get sick, return to square one. As the desire for the drugs and the physical dependency becomes stronger, the user becomes weaker and sicker, losing their job, leading to crime, prison and death. It is a life of incredible highs and unbearable lows. A life that is unsustainable.
As the narrator inevitably runs out of money, he turns to robbing banks to fuel his addiction.
There is a similarity between his life in Iraq and his life now back home. A mind-numbing monotony. In Iraq, the endless patrols searching for insurgents. Back home the endless search for drugs.
The author of this book is in jail now and you cannot help but think how much of this actually happened? He does write at the end of the novel,
“This book is a work of fiction. These things didn’t ever happen. These people didn’t ever exist.”
However, he is in jail for bank robbery, served in the army as a medic, struggled with drug addiction. I think that it is obvious that the author is the protagonist. And I believe this enhances the readability of the novel, strengthening its authenticity and realism.
The two themes that the reader cannot help taking away from this novel are the drug crisis and the scourge of PTSD. Both these problems still very much exist today, and answers are scarce.
It makes you think if there is an answer to PTSD short of not sending soldiers to war. How can we expect to send these men and women, who have individuality drummed out of them, are desensitized to violence, trained to kill, to come back and just slot back into society without mental problems? To turn off all that training, and what they have seen and experienced like a switch.
Again, this will not be a book for everybody, but I found it to be, it almost feels wrong to say, an enjoyable read. For such a dark novel there are surprisingly many instances of humor, especially regarding the army. 4 Stars.
This novel has now been turned into a film on Apple TV starring Tom Holland. It is interesting in how the protagonist is portrayed, in my opinion, very differently from the novel.
November 10, 2018
Not quite sure what to say about this book, because not quite sure what to think about it.
This book was written after a Buzzfeed article detailing Nico Walker's life (soldier in Iraq, has PTSD, comes home gets hooked on heroin, starts robbing banks to fuel heroin habit, goes to jail) piqued the interest of a book editor, who began pursuing him to write a book. So this is basically a fictionalized version of Walker's own story. Which is one of the problems I have with it. Where is the line between fiction and non-fiction? What is real and what is made up? And does it matter?
Those can be interesting questions to consider, but I found the whole thing very frustrating, precisely because the narrator of this book was supremely unlikeable, basically a narcissistic, nihilistic black hole of a person. And how much of that is real? How much was a deliberate character choice on Walker's part, to prove his literary point? Is anything made up at all? Because it changes my opinion completely, if all of this was deliberate: the emptiness of his character, the lack of anything resembling reflection, the misogyny (quite honestly the misanthropy). The way the book is written, the narrator comes off as a guy who believes nothing has any meaning at all, and people are not really people to him. He's this way before he goes to war. He says he loves his girlfriend, that he's in love with her and never loved anything more, but the reasons he goes on to list for why he loves her are that she swears a lot, and that she really lets him fuck her, and she fucks him right back.
Those are not character traits, that is not personality, those are not reasons to love something. It makes me question whether the narrator is even capable of love at all.
He joins the army for no reason at all, and witnesses horrific things, that also seem to prove his point that nothing has any meaning. One second he'll be saying something witty and insightful, the next he's saying nothing at all. If all of it was deliberate, it's well done. But if it's not, and there's no reflection going on here, I have a very different view on that.
But ultimately what it comes down to is this isn't my kind of book. I did not like reading it, although talking about it with my book club was interesting. Lots of things to break down: war, the opioid crisis, disaffection, white male privilege, addiction, psychology.
I'd say if literary fiction, satire, and black comedy are your thing, you may like this book a lot better than I did. (And that's if all of the above was deliberate. If it wasn't, this is just a very sad view into something that actually happened.) And it's really not about robbing banks at all. If anything this is a book about the Iraq war, and about addiction.
This book was written after a Buzzfeed article detailing Nico Walker's life (soldier in Iraq, has PTSD, comes home gets hooked on heroin, starts robbing banks to fuel heroin habit, goes to jail) piqued the interest of a book editor, who began pursuing him to write a book. So this is basically a fictionalized version of Walker's own story. Which is one of the problems I have with it. Where is the line between fiction and non-fiction? What is real and what is made up? And does it matter?
Those can be interesting questions to consider, but I found the whole thing very frustrating, precisely because the narrator of this book was supremely unlikeable, basically a narcissistic, nihilistic black hole of a person. And how much of that is real? How much was a deliberate character choice on Walker's part, to prove his literary point? Is anything made up at all? Because it changes my opinion completely, if all of this was deliberate: the emptiness of his character, the lack of anything resembling reflection, the misogyny (quite honestly the misanthropy). The way the book is written, the narrator comes off as a guy who believes nothing has any meaning at all, and people are not really people to him. He's this way before he goes to war. He says he loves his girlfriend, that he's in love with her and never loved anything more, but the reasons he goes on to list for why he loves her are that she swears a lot, and that she really lets him fuck her, and she fucks him right back.
Those are not character traits, that is not personality, those are not reasons to love something. It makes me question whether the narrator is even capable of love at all.
He joins the army for no reason at all, and witnesses horrific things, that also seem to prove his point that nothing has any meaning. One second he'll be saying something witty and insightful, the next he's saying nothing at all. If all of it was deliberate, it's well done. But if it's not, and there's no reflection going on here, I have a very different view on that.
But ultimately what it comes down to is this isn't my kind of book. I did not like reading it, although talking about it with my book club was interesting. Lots of things to break down: war, the opioid crisis, disaffection, white male privilege, addiction, psychology.
I'd say if literary fiction, satire, and black comedy are your thing, you may like this book a lot better than I did. (And that's if all of the above was deliberate. If it wasn't, this is just a very sad view into something that actually happened.) And it's really not about robbing banks at all. If anything this is a book about the Iraq war, and about addiction.
August 18, 2018
Many thanks to Knopf for providing my free copy of CHERRY by Nico Walker - all opinions are my own.
This is an intense, bleak, insightful, and poignant debut novel about war, crime, love, and addiction. The language is explicit and unsettling. This story is fictionalized but is based on the author’s real life and was written on a typewriter during his time in prison. He is a decorated war veteran who served as a line medic in Iraq, he’s a heroin addict, a bank robber, and an incredibly talented writer.
We follow an unnamed narrator, who is a young war veteran who suffers from PTSD and is struggling in civilian life. He turns to opiates and heroin to escape the anguish. And by the time he is home, he is a hardcore addict and will do anything for money to feed his addiction including robbing banks.
The writing style reminded me a bit like gonzo journalism in the likes of Hunter S. Thompson. The sentences are blunt and raw, not lyrical or poetic, but they pack a fiery punch. I was gripped right from the prologue all the way through the acknowledgements. Not only is the novel emotive and utterly fascinating but Walker’s backstory is so intriguing, that it makes this a significantly profound book. I am absolutely floored by CHERRY and extremely impressed by the circumstances in which it was written. There are an abundance of expletives but I appreciate the author not sugar-coating the hellish experiences endured. Our unnamed narrator may be contemptible, but he is also likable with a memorable story. If your interest has not already piqued, I don’t know what else to write but read. this. book.
This is an intense, bleak, insightful, and poignant debut novel about war, crime, love, and addiction. The language is explicit and unsettling. This story is fictionalized but is based on the author’s real life and was written on a typewriter during his time in prison. He is a decorated war veteran who served as a line medic in Iraq, he’s a heroin addict, a bank robber, and an incredibly talented writer.
We follow an unnamed narrator, who is a young war veteran who suffers from PTSD and is struggling in civilian life. He turns to opiates and heroin to escape the anguish. And by the time he is home, he is a hardcore addict and will do anything for money to feed his addiction including robbing banks.
The writing style reminded me a bit like gonzo journalism in the likes of Hunter S. Thompson. The sentences are blunt and raw, not lyrical or poetic, but they pack a fiery punch. I was gripped right from the prologue all the way through the acknowledgements. Not only is the novel emotive and utterly fascinating but Walker’s backstory is so intriguing, that it makes this a significantly profound book. I am absolutely floored by CHERRY and extremely impressed by the circumstances in which it was written. There are an abundance of expletives but I appreciate the author not sugar-coating the hellish experiences endured. Our unnamed narrator may be contemptible, but he is also likable with a memorable story. If your interest has not already piqued, I don’t know what else to write but read. this. book.
September 4, 2018
Read my reviews at http://jenchaosreviews.com
By Nico Walker
Knopf, August 14, 2018
336 Pages, Hardcover Edition
RATING: 2 STARS
In 2003, a college freshman in Cleveland, Ohio, the narrator is lost and lonely until he meets the dazzling Emily. When he almost loses her to a new school in Elba, New York, he joins the army.
Becoming a combat medic, he goes to Iraq only to partake in huffing computer duster, abusing painkillers, and watching porn to pass the time. Many of his friends die. Furthermore, when he comes home, his PTSD is profound, and he continues the cycle of abusing drugs. As the opioid crisis sweeps the midwest, the narrator and Emily get swept in it and find no way out. As their addictions worsen, their money dwindles, and debts rise, he stumbles into the only solution to their problems-robbing banks.
REVIEW:
I am shocked by this book. Honestly, I read the summary of this book and eagerly anticipated its release in August. I was disappointed with the book in its entirety. The majority of the middle of the book was so dull I had to put it down and read something else. The second half was nothing but debauchery. The book was about heroin addiction and bank robberies. The heroin addiction and bank robberies were done to death. I couldn't see any end in sight to this storyline. Each chapter was an unending cycle of drug abuse, sex, and criminal activity, and became more of a confession of sorts and less of a novel. The book started with a blurb stating this was a work of fiction. Given the history of the author, I often wonder if this is a memoir of his own life rather than a novel. Names were changed to protect the people involved, but the story may have been of his own life. However, I have no idea.
WRITING:
The writing was not good. It was jerky and unimpressive. It jumped around and made no sense. I could tell that the author had not written anything before and I was not happy with it at all.
PLOT:
Since this was a work of fiction, based on what he claimed, I expected some sort of tie up at the end. There was nothing to indicate such. It ended very abruptly and with no resolve. The middle of the book was boring and could have been edited for content. The rest of the book was very descript and explicit. I may not be the audience he was aiming to please. However, I don't know anyone who would like this book but other drug addicts. There was no real plot at all. It read like a messy memoir.
WHAT I LIKED.
I liked the honesty. Believe it or not, I liked something about this book, hence the two stars. Most people don't reveal the intimate natures of their demons. He spelled it out in the 336 pages of the book. Whether or not it was fiction, it was honest and forthcoming. Though it was explicit and often shocking, it was sincere and revealing of a life we usually never see.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
Most of all, I did not like the writing style. It made it very hard to read and confused me. Had it been written better, I would have liked it more. I do like shocking material, but not if it's written by a novice.
OVERALL IMPRESSION:
Cherry is a book about a man who is addicted to heroin with his girlfriend Emily whom he loved desperately. He robbed banks to fund this habit because he didn't have any other way to do so and was a poorly represented and poorly written book by a man who is spending 11 years in prison for just such a crime. I am not sure if this really is a work of fiction or an actual memoir, so I am honestly confused. I do not recommend this book to anyone who is sensitive to shocking books about sex, drug abuse, and criminal activity.
By Nico Walker
Knopf, August 14, 2018
336 Pages, Hardcover Edition
RATING: 2 STARS
In 2003, a college freshman in Cleveland, Ohio, the narrator is lost and lonely until he meets the dazzling Emily. When he almost loses her to a new school in Elba, New York, he joins the army.
Becoming a combat medic, he goes to Iraq only to partake in huffing computer duster, abusing painkillers, and watching porn to pass the time. Many of his friends die. Furthermore, when he comes home, his PTSD is profound, and he continues the cycle of abusing drugs. As the opioid crisis sweeps the midwest, the narrator and Emily get swept in it and find no way out. As their addictions worsen, their money dwindles, and debts rise, he stumbles into the only solution to their problems-robbing banks.
REVIEW:
I am shocked by this book. Honestly, I read the summary of this book and eagerly anticipated its release in August. I was disappointed with the book in its entirety. The majority of the middle of the book was so dull I had to put it down and read something else. The second half was nothing but debauchery. The book was about heroin addiction and bank robberies. The heroin addiction and bank robberies were done to death. I couldn't see any end in sight to this storyline. Each chapter was an unending cycle of drug abuse, sex, and criminal activity, and became more of a confession of sorts and less of a novel. The book started with a blurb stating this was a work of fiction. Given the history of the author, I often wonder if this is a memoir of his own life rather than a novel. Names were changed to protect the people involved, but the story may have been of his own life. However, I have no idea.
WRITING:
The writing was not good. It was jerky and unimpressive. It jumped around and made no sense. I could tell that the author had not written anything before and I was not happy with it at all.
PLOT:
Since this was a work of fiction, based on what he claimed, I expected some sort of tie up at the end. There was nothing to indicate such. It ended very abruptly and with no resolve. The middle of the book was boring and could have been edited for content. The rest of the book was very descript and explicit. I may not be the audience he was aiming to please. However, I don't know anyone who would like this book but other drug addicts. There was no real plot at all. It read like a messy memoir.
WHAT I LIKED.
I liked the honesty. Believe it or not, I liked something about this book, hence the two stars. Most people don't reveal the intimate natures of their demons. He spelled it out in the 336 pages of the book. Whether or not it was fiction, it was honest and forthcoming. Though it was explicit and often shocking, it was sincere and revealing of a life we usually never see.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
Most of all, I did not like the writing style. It made it very hard to read and confused me. Had it been written better, I would have liked it more. I do like shocking material, but not if it's written by a novice.
OVERALL IMPRESSION:
Cherry is a book about a man who is addicted to heroin with his girlfriend Emily whom he loved desperately. He robbed banks to fund this habit because he didn't have any other way to do so and was a poorly represented and poorly written book by a man who is spending 11 years in prison for just such a crime. I am not sure if this really is a work of fiction or an actual memoir, so I am honestly confused. I do not recommend this book to anyone who is sensitive to shocking books about sex, drug abuse, and criminal activity.
September 8, 2018
As previously stated in updates, to this reader, Nico Walker's Cherry reads as if Charles Bukowski wrote a memoir about a tour in Iraq while in the army and his return to the US while becoming a full-fledged dope fiend.
The novel describes the narrator's journey from that of growing up in a privileged life while bouncing around trying to find his place in the world and how he and his girlfriend eventually become "dope fiends."
The writing is gritty, biting, humorous and told in a "matter of fact" way that is not taken as a glamorization of becoming a dope fiend or that of a full onset apology for one becoming what one is.
The entirety of the novel contains observations and witticisms that one knows are true due to them being unapologetically honest. The scab is present and not only does Walker tear it off, he continues to rub the sore. In other words, while some of these passages may seem naked and raw in their description, or possibly even quite offensive to some, the reader can tell for Walker to describe them as he does, either he witnessed them or knew of someone that did.
Walker's writing is also done in such a way that the graphic nature of his writing does not seem to have been done in a gratuitous manner for the purpose of shocking and stunning the reader unnecessarily so.
So, why the four stars instead of five? Well, to this reader, while the ending was understood, the ending felt incomplete and anti-climatic. Still, this novel is highly recommended and has been one of the best novels read this year.
The novel describes the narrator's journey from that of growing up in a privileged life while bouncing around trying to find his place in the world and how he and his girlfriend eventually become "dope fiends."
The writing is gritty, biting, humorous and told in a "matter of fact" way that is not taken as a glamorization of becoming a dope fiend or that of a full onset apology for one becoming what one is.
The entirety of the novel contains observations and witticisms that one knows are true due to them being unapologetically honest. The scab is present and not only does Walker tear it off, he continues to rub the sore. In other words, while some of these passages may seem naked and raw in their description, or possibly even quite offensive to some, the reader can tell for Walker to describe them as he does, either he witnessed them or knew of someone that did.
Walker's writing is also done in such a way that the graphic nature of his writing does not seem to have been done in a gratuitous manner for the purpose of shocking and stunning the reader unnecessarily so.
So, why the four stars instead of five? Well, to this reader, while the ending was understood, the ending felt incomplete and anti-climatic. Still, this novel is highly recommended and has been one of the best novels read this year.
July 30, 2019
But that’s a good way to go to heaven.
Cherry follows an addict with a gun chasing his fix.
Opioid addiction touched by the Iraq War.
Not the best writing but worth the read for the point of view.
Cherry follows an addict with a gun chasing his fix.
Opioid addiction touched by the Iraq War.
Not the best writing but worth the read for the point of view.
September 1, 2018
Listened to it on audio and it flowed into my ears and landed on my brain like fucking melted butter. It's tightly written, and perfectly narrated - Autobiographical fiction at its tautest.
November 5, 2018
If you like reading about men who hate women then this is the book for you.
January 21, 2019
If you’ve thought to yourself “I wish Trainspotting were set in Ohio with double the testosterone and half the wit,” you might find this book something other than tedious. Not for me.
April 12, 2022
What in the Holden Caulfield did I just read?????
I picked up Cherry after seeing the extremely stylized and eye-catching trailer for the Apple + film starring Spiderman and brought to life by the gentlemen who also introduced me to some of my best fictional friends via Community and Arrested Development . . .
The movie looked intriguing, but at some point I have to put my foot down when it comes to all of these subscription streaming services, so Apple got the ixnay and I went to the library.
And yeah, I’m clearly not the target demographic for this. The writing was simply turrrrrrrible and talk about a slog when it came to story (or lack thereof). I’m being super generous in giving this 2 Stars, but the part in Iraq had promise and called to mind movies of the past like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket. The rest could line the cat box. Jesus' Son meets Reservoir Dogs? In Nico Walker's dreams maybe.
I picked up Cherry after seeing the extremely stylized and eye-catching trailer for the Apple + film starring Spiderman and brought to life by the gentlemen who also introduced me to some of my best fictional friends via Community and Arrested Development . . .
The movie looked intriguing, but at some point I have to put my foot down when it comes to all of these subscription streaming services, so Apple got the ixnay and I went to the library.
And yeah, I’m clearly not the target demographic for this. The writing was simply turrrrrrrible and talk about a slog when it came to story (or lack thereof). I’m being super generous in giving this 2 Stars, but the part in Iraq had promise and called to mind movies of the past like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket. The rest could line the cat box. Jesus' Son meets Reservoir Dogs? In Nico Walker's dreams maybe.
November 20, 2018
Nico Walker's Cherry is a book whose gestation is more interesting than the book itself. Imagine Trainspotting without a sense of humor. Or a boring Requiem for a Dream. I didn't hate the book (2 stars, yo), and it certainly has a blunt, fist-to-the-gut appeal. But it's also sort of the literary equivalent of a model train set, where the first couple loops around the track are kinda cool – the train goes through a tunnel! the buildings light up! look at all the little people! – but that's all it does and soon you've seen it all before.
I can't decide if that's actually Walker's modus operandi. His unnamed main character – like the author himself – serves in Iraq, comes home, gets hooked on drugs, and starts robbing banks. I could buy the argument that the stultifying, soul-deadening passages set during wartime are written for that express purpose. We quickly become inured to the scenes of violence and depravity in much the same way I imagine soldiers have to steel their souls against the things they witness in battle. Similarly, when the main character returns to the States and embarks on a cyclical routine of scoring drugs, shooting up, finding money, scoring drugs, shooting up, finding money, it's hard to believe Walker isn't making a point about how pointless it all is.
There's a certain nihilistic appeal to that, I guess, but narratively speaking it doesn't amount to much in the way of momentum. And that wouldn't have to be a problem, either, if Walker wrote in a style that rewarded the reader's time. Instead, it's all cod-philosophical declarative statements like this:
Yeah, it's clever, and in small doses – or even in large doses where something actually happens – I'd be fully on board. But it's all a road to nowhere, peopled with unlikable characters. And then Walker gives us an unforgivably ambiguous non-ending that just reinforces how foolish we all were to take the ride in the first place.
I can't decide if that's actually Walker's modus operandi. His unnamed main character – like the author himself – serves in Iraq, comes home, gets hooked on drugs, and starts robbing banks. I could buy the argument that the stultifying, soul-deadening passages set during wartime are written for that express purpose. We quickly become inured to the scenes of violence and depravity in much the same way I imagine soldiers have to steel their souls against the things they witness in battle. Similarly, when the main character returns to the States and embarks on a cyclical routine of scoring drugs, shooting up, finding money, scoring drugs, shooting up, finding money, it's hard to believe Walker isn't making a point about how pointless it all is.
There's a certain nihilistic appeal to that, I guess, but narratively speaking it doesn't amount to much in the way of momentum. And that wouldn't have to be a problem, either, if Walker wrote in a style that rewarded the reader's time. Instead, it's all cod-philosophical declarative statements like this:
“I sold drugs but it wasn’t like I was bad or anything. I wasn’t bothering anybody; I didn’t even eat meat. I had a job at the shoe store. Another mistake I made. No interest whatsoever in shoes. I was marked for failure.”
Yeah, it's clever, and in small doses – or even in large doses where something actually happens – I'd be fully on board. But it's all a road to nowhere, peopled with unlikable characters. And then Walker gives us an unforgivably ambiguous non-ending that just reinforces how foolish we all were to take the ride in the first place.
January 30, 2019
Author Nico Walker grew up the son of affluent parents in Ohio, spent 11 months in Iraq pulling in more than 200 missions as a woefully under-qualified Army medic and returned to develop a heroin addiction which led to a string of 11 bank robberies in a 4 month span, stealing about $40K to feed the habit before inevitably being caught. He's currently spending 11 years at the Federal Correctional institution in Ashland Kentucky where he wrote Cherry. And despite the author's note proceeding the work - "This book is a work of fiction. These things didn't ever happen. These people didn't ever exist." - the story is pretty much that.
But damn what a read. I think critic Ron Charles put it best when he calls Cherry a morose Holden Caulfield goes to war. Walker is matter of fact, adopting a simple street argot but not in a boastful way, trying to show off his cred. The story is not a metaphor, Walker's not angling for your sympathies, he's not looking to redeem himself in your eyes. There's nary a whiff of an MFA program, juggling intent. He's a walking shrug emoji noting the blunt, blood-used and crooked needles in the cupboard, the quiet joke of robbing a bank, the whole make-believe mess of the war. I really enjoyed the read and really settled into Walker's distinct voice - and maybe I'm just taken in by the lived experience on display here, the story that fuels the story adding to the weight of the thing. In contrast to the novel, Walker's Acknowledgements are an effusive read, crediting the people around him for any semblance of talent on display here which just adds to the allure.
The book has sold in several languages already and Walker's using the money to pay back some of the banks he's robbed. They're already working on a movie deal but it's currently held up because he's used up all his phone time in prison. At a meta level it's just such a beautifully crafted package.
But damn what a read. I think critic Ron Charles put it best when he calls Cherry a morose Holden Caulfield goes to war. Walker is matter of fact, adopting a simple street argot but not in a boastful way, trying to show off his cred. The story is not a metaphor, Walker's not angling for your sympathies, he's not looking to redeem himself in your eyes. There's nary a whiff of an MFA program, juggling intent. He's a walking shrug emoji noting the blunt, blood-used and crooked needles in the cupboard, the quiet joke of robbing a bank, the whole make-believe mess of the war. I really enjoyed the read and really settled into Walker's distinct voice - and maybe I'm just taken in by the lived experience on display here, the story that fuels the story adding to the weight of the thing. In contrast to the novel, Walker's Acknowledgements are an effusive read, crediting the people around him for any semblance of talent on display here which just adds to the allure.
The book has sold in several languages already and Walker's using the money to pay back some of the banks he's robbed. They're already working on a movie deal but it's currently held up because he's used up all his phone time in prison. At a meta level it's just such a beautifully crafted package.
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