Not a bad book, not what I expected. I picked this up after seeing a preview for the movie and I can already see how many liberties they took with making the movie. The short chapters and writing style made for a quick read that didn’t loose my attention. It just felt like one of those books that don’t really have a clear cut point. In the authors’ acknowledgements at the end of the book he explains that the main character was changed to be an asshole that you kind of liked...he succeeded lol ( )

Good. Drug use became a bit boring. ( )

You’ll either appreciate the writing as raw or loathe it as amateurish, but Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical debut is undeniably different than most books from any major publisher. ( )

Cherry is sort of Jarhead meets Trainspotting by way of Joe Swanberg. Our nameless narrator is aimless and restless. As Walker admits in the acknowledgments his narrator is an asshole, but you kind of end up liking him by the end. After dropping out of college, the narrator joins the army because, well, it's not like he had anything better to do. In Iraq, he sees death and chaos. He huffs computer duster with his squad mates and watches porn. He gets high on care packages of pot brownies. He comes home and quickly finds himself crippled by PTSD and addicted to heroin and oxycontin. He'd probably be okay if he wasn't dating a fellow addict, Emily. He starts robbing banks to finance their drug habit. This is all in the jacket copy, and if it sounds like a tough hang that's because it is. However, Walker's style is so rapid and matter-of-fact that you don't ever have time to process the darkness of what you've just read until you've set the book down. Events and chapters flow together one after the other. Conflicts and actions in one vignette rarely have resolutions or consequences in another. It makes for a read that's as bleak as it is addicting. ( )

Descending into Druggie Hell

To give you idea of what you will encounter in Nico Walker’s blistering ride down into the bowels of drug induced Hell, let’s talk about dogs. Well, just one dog, Livinia, the dog the nameless narrator and his wife, Emily, get. If you have a dog, then you know dogs sleep a lot, sleep for hours. When they wake, they have a furnace of energy in them. They release it by running around like possessed creatures. After, they curl up and sleep some more, until they need to burn off energy again. In a way, Livinia serves as a neat little metaphor for Nico Walker’s storyteller and the whole arch of the novel: nodding doped up, scrounging for dope, nodding again. Repeat endlessly. This would be mighty dull, if Walker wasn’t as talented as he is, writing with a sort of deadpan run-on style. It serves to emphasize the ambling trajectory of the our narrator that reduces him to a young man robbing for money as he pukes his life up into a little pail. (True, he carries a pail around with him when he’s sick for dope, which is frequently.) If ever a writer wrote a novel to turn prospective drug addicts away from the life, this is it.

Walker traces the life of the nameless narrator from desultory youth, to Army medic in Iraq, to full blown heroin addict and bank robber. Yes, you’ll read about a sad, pathetic life, but you’ll find yourself from time to time shaking with laughter. Because the nameless narrator is kind of likable, really a nice guy in a tough situation. He knows how absurd his life is; he sees the humor in the ridiculousness of it. That’s because beneath the surface crud, he constantly muses introspectively, struggles with his emotions about right and wrong, and especially about his relationship with his girlfriend, then wife, Emily, who keeps him on edge, questioning her fidelity while in Iraq, living through her outbursts when with her, always needing her, maybe as much as he needs heroin.

This is a semi-autobiographical novel. The nameless narrator is real but, as Walker has related, the other characters are archetypes. The grit of the novel, however, is real. Walker was a desultory youth. He did sort of fall into the army. He did serve a year in Iraq as a medic (these passages are tragically authentic and totally disturbing). Heroin did own him so completely that he did become a serial bank robber, just like his character. And right now, instead of going on a book tour, he’s serving an eleven-year sentence in a federal prison for robbing banks. Of course, when he gets out, he’ll not only be clean but he’ll have a good career ahead of him, should he want it.

For those interested in the drug crisis plaguing America, it might be instructive to read Cherry alongside Beth Macy’s Dopesick. While Macy lays out the origins and dimensions of the crisis and includes cases of youths and adults hooked on opioids and heroin, Walker gives you a taste of just how harrowing life in drug hell is. ( )