Brilliant Writing From Prison

Nico Walker is a once-decorated war hero turned junkie bank robber who wrote “Cherry” from his jail cell. It’s different. 

It was hard to put down for all the wrong reasons. I told myself that this was research. I was reading about the reality of war today. Discovering the circumstantial nuances that create today’s opioid addict. But the binge reading went down for more base reasons. A less noble part of me just devoured this book like insight-riddled candy.

Walker has crafted the perfect slow motion train wreck. You can’t look away. The narrator is an anti-hero with a heart. “Cherry” is an anti-love, anti-war, anti-drug and anti-true crime story. An absolute must read. It woke my dormant desire to gape at misfortune right in the first paragraph.

“Emily’s gone to take a shower. The room’s half dark and I’m getting dressed, looking for a shirt with no blood on it- not having any luck.”

Like smelling salts, the words forced my voyeur aspects out of bed. Sleeping giant arise! Three sentences in, I switched to coffee at hand, glasses on, and dig-in mode.

Did you catch the captivating cadence of that quote above? That tempo is kept up through the full 319 pages. Walker brings to mind the short, clipped, just-the-facts narrative style of Holden Caufield,* and the results kept me glued to the book.

The similarities go past the cadence. Our protagonist in “Cherry” is his own person, well, as much as a true blue junkie can be, and his story is unique to today, but he articulates an intelligent dissatisfaction which rings so much like the prose of “Catcher in the Rye” it feels like a distant sequel.

Reading “Cherry” was like encountering a friend unseen for decades, but out of context, like in traffic court or on a trampoline. 

Walker shows the main character in high school, amid smart philosophical angst. We come to love our man’s earnest hopelessness as he offers all the unbridled optimism of a Bukowski character. 

He says that there are so many women in the world “...and they all start out the way they do, with all the brightness and their own invisible worlds and secret languages and what else they have,” but he cannot bear to think of all the ways that men ruin everything.

He leaves you no choice but to love him.

The story’s arc takes our hero to Iraq, and we get a long walk along the “war is hell” path. (It’s not fun. I was reading some to my girlfriend and actually put it down because, well, war.) But the rapid-fire writing keeps us in for the full journey, and it is soon apparent how very real is PTSD. War trauma paves the way to opiate addiction, bank robbery, and straight into the jail cell where the book was written. 

The book matters for its successful and bold narrative style. It matters because it delivers heart on a most unusual (and vulgar) platter. And it matters because we need to see into the workings of the mind of the addict, and open our minds to the possibilities inherent in such an understanding.

I’m not saying the empathy this book imparts makes a great case for prevention, decriminalizing, harm-reduction approaches and needs-based crime assessments, but, oh wait, I am saying that. “Cherry” is all that and a bag of almost clean needles. Pick up a copy.

*In what we can only assume is a tip of the hat, the story trots out a serviceable old bit from “Seymour, an Introduction,” one of J.D. Salinger’s lesser known works, and gives him full credit.