I can’t imagine what it’s like to write a novel. Sitting in the same chair from morning until night, day in and day out, just to have a red pen come and steal hours of your life like they didn’t happen. And then you’re done, it’s finally ready, and there’s a mass of red pens—a world of red pens—waiting out there. It takes guts to put on display something that’s only ever existed inside your mind. What if they don’t understand your mind? What if they don’t like your mind? What if they don’t pay your mind any mind at all and your book ends up on a Brooklyn stoop?
I can’t speak for Nico Walker, but as I was reading his debut novel, Cherry, it felt like he had never burdened himself with these questions. His prose is so free-flowing and easy, you’d think he dictated it to Alexa while surfing a major swell, instead of writing it behind bars where the Cleveland native is currently serving 11 years for bank robbery. The story, loosely based on the author’s experiences as a war veteran and subsequent heroin addict, is told as if it’s in casual conversation, but the kind you randomly have with a stranger that you don’t forget for the rest of your life. More on that, later.
The voice of his young, unnamed narrator is so realistic that it crosses into that sacred territory of familiarity. I don’t seek predictability when I’m reading, but I seek authenticity, there’s a difference. When the protagonist (can I say that about a guy who implies using Axe body spray?) describes a pregnant waitress at Bennigan’s with a neck tattoo, you’re not expecting her to be there, but it is an authentic reveal.
It was eerie to me how strongly I felt I knew the novel’s main character. For the movie version of Cherry that played in my head, I cast a former classmate from high school that wore a Sublime hoodie almost every day. I had a crush on him for years—still do—not in spite of his bad behavior, but because of it. Recklessness looks a lot like bravery. You’re thinking, that’s fucked up. Well, so is Jackass but we’ve supported Johnny Knoxville for 20 years.
Of course, there are plenty of pages where the author depicts situations that are from the light-hearted buffoonery of Steve-O and his crew, but there’s an undeniable sense of humor present throughout the novel. It’s what separates the bad times from the really really bad times. One second, he’s breaking your heart by describing the aches of addiction and depression, in the next, he’s writing the dialogue of an immature girl in capslock, highlighting her melodrama for your reading pleasure.
That being said, those really really bad times are significant enough to consider this a “heavy” narrative. Though hard to stomach, the emotional and physical gore are necessary to understand the narrator’s pain and motivation for drug use. It was like following that boy from high school home and seeing what his life was like. I want to know what his life was like—what everyone’s life is like. Isn’t that why we read?
I may have not liked what I saw, but I didn’t want to turn away. I didn’t want to leave him. Walker has a way of making you stick out the dark times, making them bearable. He knows how to make his reader connect to an emotion of a moment, and not its action, like when he describes a home he used to live in, but then couldn’t, for presumably bleak reasons. “It was like finding out you’d had some shit on your face the whole time you’d been talking.”
Vices aside, the day-to-day life of military personnel overseas, during war, is equally eye-opening and disruptive to the assumptive mind. The way individuals are organized and grouped with strangers who become their surrogate family; the language and traditions they exercise (a Cherry is a newbie). These are things only a person who’s experienced them can write—the running magic trick of the whole novel. The story is loosely based on Walker’s own life, and it shows in material’s gripping details. The piece operates almost like an exposeé of different worlds: the Army, opioid addiction, middle America.
One of the more interesting reveals is that there’s drug use during the war, too. A lot of it occurs out of sheer boredom, some of it out of sheer exhaustion, all of it arrives by snail mail. It’s not the soldiers’ desire to use that surprised me, but that they’re able to get away with it so easily. This specificity of their day-to-day—gasoline-tasting cigarettes (Miamis) that they buy at “haji shops”, the title of the most-heavily watched porno (“Fuck Van”)—are welcome distractions from the layered horrors of their operations. In these moments, Cherry reminds me of Goodfellas, specifically the coke-fueled itinerary that Henry narrates towards the end, right before the babysitter gets him busted.
I loved this book. I haven’t loved a piece of fiction in a long time, I mostly stick to nonfiction. But maybe that’s because this feels so real. Earlier, I had mentioned Cherry was like a conversation with a stranger. I once met a man in Union Square Park. He was homeless and sitting on a bench, getting soaked in a downpour, so I walked over to offer my umbrella. We ended up talking for a couple hours. He told me a little about how he had lived, what he had experienced, and, without meaning to, what all of it had taught him. It was a conversation that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. He also happened to be a Vietnam Veteran and an admitted alcoholic.
He told me his alcoholism was the reason for the homelessness that his daughter did not know about. We made plans to meet every Wednesday after that, but he never arrived to our appointments. I never saw him again. If I did, I would find a way to get him this book or at least mention it to him. I owe him a life-changing conversation.