Cherry

June 1, 2018
In this unsettling debut, a young man raised in the middle-class comforts of America encounters war, love, and drug addiction.After the narrator awakens on the first page, he is "looking for a shirt with no blood on it" and then for his rigs--the apparatus of heroin addiction--to get him and his partner, Emily, in shape for the day. She has to be at school by 10 a.m. to teach college students remedial writing. The two met at 18 and now they are 25, living in a Cleveland suburb. Walker opens and closes the story in the couples' present at age 25, while the bulk looks back at how the unnamed narrator found Emily and lost her and went off to war in Iraq in 2005. The writing is raw, coarse, and sometimes forced: "Your new friends would eat the eyes out of your head for a spoon." Yet it often has a brute power, tapping the unadorned, pointedly repetitive language of addiction or battle. The IED "took off both Jimenez's legs and severed one of his arms almost completely. But he was still awake and he knew what was happening. He was screaming." So many patrols deal with bombs or breaking into suspect houses: "Just IEDs. Just kicking doors. More IEDs. More doors." Soldiers look for distraction. Two of them make snuff films with mice. Some do drugs because the Army stops checking urine. On his release from the Army, the narrator reconnects with Emily and copes with PTSD. "In these years I didn't sleep and when I slept I dreamt of violence." Heroin takes over, with its own awful monotony. They are "spending over a thousand dollars on dope, every week." She keeps teaching. He robs banks.A bleak tale told bluntly with an abundance of profanity but also of insight into two kinds of living hell.

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June 25, 2018
A man who likens himself to a “stray dog with the mange” descends into addiction in this frustrating debut. Walker’s unnamed narrator begins the novel as “a soft kid” from a stable home, a vegetarian shoe store employee dating a college classmate named Emily who likes Modest Mouse and Edward Albee. But when Emily transfers, he fails out of school and enlists in the Army as a medic, reasoning “I don’t have any other ideas.” He wastes time in Iraq “waiting for the war to happen” and grows further apart from Emily. Upon returning home to Cleveland, the narrator starts “getting into the OxyContin pretty hard.” He traipses through a parade of new women before Emily reenters the picture, having started using drugs herself. “There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin,” the narrator writes. Some readers may find the innumerable descriptions of the Sisyphean life of an addict suitably transgressive. For everyone else, the insistence on Emily’s culpability for the narrator’s degeneration, as well as the depiction of other women as useful only for sex, make the novel feel like it’s willing to describe the catastrophe of its narrator’s life, but not truly examine it.

August 1, 2018

Set in the early 2000s, this work features a nameless narrator telling the story of an intelligent, troubled young man from a middle-class Cleveland suburb who might well resemble the author. It begins as a love story, when he meets Emily, who quickly becomes his high school sweetheart. Directionless and in pain after she splits with him to attend college, he opts to join the army, eventually landing in Iraq as a combat medic. Suffering from PTSD on his return, he again finds Emily, and they take up a tenuous existence together. The PTSD leads to a heavy involvement with drugs, as he moves from Oxycodone to heroin and brings Emily along in his addiction. The constant need for money to support their habits sends him on a downward spiral that culminates in a series of bank robberies. Written by a first-time author currently incarcerated, this is both a sad love story and a raw tale of a young man's downfall owing to war and its aftermath. While the main character is no one's role model, he has enough intelligence and moral sense to seem not totally beyond redemption. VERDICT A raging, agonized scream of a novel and a tremendously powerful debut.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

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Starred review from August 1, 2018
These days, it's not uncommon to find critics deriding that hoary piece of advice given to budding writers to write about what you know. Sometimes, however, that approach still produces a masterpiece, and that's what we have here. Walker, a former U.S. Army medic and Iraq War veteran, became a heroin addict and went to prison for bank robbery. The narrator of his debut novel is also a former U.S. Army medic who becomes a heroin addict before turning to bank robbery to support his habit. The story of that descent, which also involves his wife, a fellow addict, is unsparingly raw and utterly gripping. This is an astonishingly good novel, written by someone who clearly has a gift for storytelling. Walker's characters, even minor players and walk-ons, are beautifully drawn. His dialogue rings achingly true. His story is powerfully told and completely without pretension. The novel, which has already generated considerable buzz, beginning with its remarkable backstory (the author wrote it on a typewriter in prison, eventually attracting the interest of an editor at Knopf), could well become one of the season's smash successes. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)