EnterDopesickandCherry, devastating calls to action that affirm the galvanizing power of pointed, human storytelling.
Journalist Beth Macy (Factory Man) wroteDopesickafter witnessing deadly drugs spreading around her Roanoke, Virginia, hometown.
Her book marks a definitive attempt at confronting the epidemic, from its source to its current scale.
Credit: Knopf; Little, Brown and Company
Macy is a terrific reporter, scrupulous in detailing the significance of her findings.
For those coming intoDopesickalready aware of the basics, then, it can read a little too familiar.
The answers Macy arrives at are bleak, fatalistic, and enraging.
The unnamed narrator ofCherry, Nico Walkers coarsely poetic debut, feels like another case study of Macys.
Hes shipped to Iraq thereafter.
The book is gritty, profane, and raw.
It opens on a flash-forward of sorts, with the protagonist and Emily shooting up heroin.
He winds up on the floor, unconscious, with his pants undone and his balls cold.
Walkers first-person prose reads remarkably at times uncomfortably authentic, lyrically clunky.
We were pretending to be soldiers, he says.
The Army was pretending to be the Army.
He encounters needles and drugs in his role as a medic, which shapes his future addiction.
Walker traces his journey with impressive clarity, without it seeming calculated.
Cherryhas a unique backstory.
Walker wrote the novel while in prison; hes serving an 11-year sentence for bank robbery.
Indeed the writing here is conspicuously uneven.
Walkers expression still shines through.
One major reason:Cherrydoesnt ask for pity.
Cherry: B+Dopesick: B+
