Welcome to ‘What Are You Reading?’ a whole column dedicated to dispelling the notion that skaters are dumb high school dropouts who don’t read. Each month, we ask one skater to tell us what’s waiting for them on the nightstand. Or getting jumbled around with bruised bananas and random chunks of wax in their backpack, as it may be. While this column might have been born out of the chip on our collective shoulders about how society sees us, the real goal is to get free book recommendations from all the smartest people in skating. To wit, our inaugural interviewee is none other than Willy Staley, possessor of the most inscrutable sense of humor on Twitter and story editor for the New York Times Magazine. He recently published a profile of Tyshawn Jones for that magazine that was both a very good profile of a very interesting athlete and, more importantly, one that was readable for actual skaters with zero cringe. Congrats dude, and thanks for kicking this off! – SKATEISM
What are you reading right now, or what was the last book you read?
I just finished reading Cherry by Nico Walker.
What’s it about?
Cherry is about a young shitkicker of a kid living in the suburbs of Cleveland who enlists in the Army in the middle of the war in Iraq. He goes off to serve as a medic, but sees a lot of combat: he’s party to the killing of an unarmed Iraqi man and what might have been his mother; he has to scoop his comrades’ scorched remains out of an IED-wrecked Humvee. He returns home, deeply traumatized, to Ohio and starts abusing various prescription medications until they dry up and he moves on to heroin. He and his girlfriend become codependent junkies as he slips further into the Cleveland criminal underworld (such as it is), eventually becoming a bank robber to fund their habit.
Do you like it? Why or why not?
I loved reading this book, but I’m struggling to say whether I liked it; whether it was good for me to read. It’s like reading a novel written by a Denis Johnson character. It’s told wholly in the narrator’s voice, which is terse and folksy — and occasionally very, very funny. (“The only way not to graduate basic [training] was to try and kill yourself. One kid tried hanging himself from the drop ceiling in the latrine. It didn’t work. He brought the ceiling down. So he didn’t die. But he didn’t graduate either.”) But part of me felt — as I was reading it, and quite enjoying just about every minute of it — that there was something unseemly happening here. That Walker was raising the beaded curtain to the other section of the video store and inviting me to sneak a peak.
But perhaps that has as much to do with his authorial voice as with the content of the book, which, it warrants mentioning, is autobiographical. Walker wrote it from prison, as he explains in the acknowledgements, with the help of some editors who approached him after reading a profile of him in BuzzFeed. A friend warned me not to read the BuzzFeed profile before finishing the book. Why? It reveals what Walker’s novel does not: Walker is not quite the shitkicker that narrates the novel. (His first effort at going cold turkey was on a family vacation to Italy.) And yet it also reveals that Walker did, in fact, have to scoop what used to be his friends out of a smoldering Humvee; that he did risk his own life to try to save an unarmed Iraqi man his comrades had just shot; he really robbed banks all over Cleveland and he really got caught. His PTSD, as described in the profile, is quite worse than it is depicted in the book.
These elisions briefly frustrated me, until I looked at the cover (which is tight, by the way) and reminded myself it is, as advertised, a novel. (I’ve only just realized, sitting down to write this, that the narrator has no name.) What Walker chose to include is troubling. There’s a nihilism to his depiction of war that supersedes any nihilistic depiction of war I’ve ever read; he seems to hold his fellow troops in contempt, and yet this generates no sympathy for the enemy, or the people he is ostensibly there to protect. (The slur “haji” is used gratuitously.) What happens to someone when there’s nothing left to believe in? What about a whole country of people? Well, we’ve seen it happen.
Eventually, the narrator doesn’t have to believe in anything at all. His horizon shrinks to just keeping himself from getting dopesick, and these daily humiliations and hustles drive the plot forward, horrifically. Sure, it might not have all happened just like the book says it does, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a true story. Shit, now I sound like the guy. I guess I liked this book.
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Featured image via Amazon.
