Whitehead Funeral Services

Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Fla. Photo: Michael Spooneybarger/REUTERS By Sam Sacks Sam Sacks The Wall Street Journal Biography @ July 12, 2019 10:56 am ET Not many writers have a backlist that’s as fun to describe as Colson Whitehead’s. An inventory of his novels’ hooks includes a shadowy elevator-inspection agency (“The Intuitionist”), a zombie apocalypse (“Zone One”) and a cross-country subway system built for runaway slaves (“The Underground Railroad”). It’s not that the books don’t address themselves to serious subjects, but the whimsy and weirdness of the gimmicks—or “rhetorical props,” as Mr. Whitehead has called them in interviews—serve a prophylactic purpose, protecting his explorations of race, capitalism or simply the frailties of human nature from sentimentality and cliché. The first thing you notice about Mr. Whitehead’s new novel, “The Nickel Boys” (Doubleday, 213 pages, $24.95), is that it contains no fanciful conceits. It springs instead from a series of articles in the Tampa Bay Times that exposed abuses perpetrated for much of the 20th century at a state-run reform school in the Florida Panhandle. Students were beaten, raped, locked in solitary confinement and, in the case of some black students at the segregated school, murdered and buried in unmarked graves. Mr. Whitehead’s story is fictional in its particulars, but it hews strictly to realism. The author has, for the moment, put away his bag of tricks to stand alone with this grisly chunk of American history. ...