Nico WalkerResenhas

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.

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.

Worth your time, even if just to get a feel for how the other side lives. Nico Walker's Cherry is dark, hopeless, fast, and human. It doesn't matter how much of it is autobiographical and how much is fictional, but I nonetheless wondered as I wandered through the entire fever-dream of a tale. That the Acknowledgments are written in the selfsame style as the story extends the immersion for three whole pages – a brilliant touch.½

Heavy, maybe too close to the truth, unsettling, way too realistic

I have really mixed feelings about this book, not the least of which includes the fact that the author of this book is (currently) still in jail for bank robberies akin to those in this novel. One side of me completely supports his right to tell this (thinly fictionalized) story of war, drugs, addiction, and crime, and one side of me wonders -- why fictionalize? Wouldn't it be more meaningful and powerful to say it like it is -- this is what I did and what happened because of it?

Also, good lord we need mental healthcare for veterans.

And if this author wasn't a white man, would we be reading his story now?

2.5 trending up. I'm on the fence with this one. Not sure where I heard about it since it is way out of my usual realm (I blame the BibliOracle - John Warner, Chicago Trib). If I didn't listen to it, I don't think I'd have liked it at all, but the narrator's voice and total 'whatever' attitude kind of hooked me. It's like Holden Caulfield with a potty mouth and a drug addiction. Otherwise there is not much that is redeeming here. The narrator (unnamed) is a listless, unmotivated young adult from Shaker Heights, OH who drops out of college and enlists in the army when his girlfriend Emily transfers schools. He has so little forethought and such lack of direction that it was rather fascinating to be carried along. The army trains him to be a "medic warrior" and he serves time in Iraq in the second version of that war, mostly stoned and not entirely devoted to his mission. He misses Emily desperately but their connection is so tenuous it does more harm than good. When he is discharged, he turns to bank robbing to support his and Emily's drug habit. Every other word is a epithet, women are debased (except Emily who retains some angelic status in his eyes), and there is graphic description of drug use. And yet there is something about the narrator that is a little bit endearing - maybe his ability to see thru BS and accept it. This felt like a satire, but I wasn't sure what was being mocked - millennials? the military? drug culture? If it weren't for the jaunty tone, this would be a dire story.

Cherry is a novel based on the Nico Walker's life of war and addiction. The book opens on the unnamed main character robbing a bank then backtracks to the story of what happened in his life to put him in that position. He goes to war and is, as a result, left broken and angry. He turns to drug to heal his pain and sooth his anger, until his addiction becomes its own monster that needs taming.
Nico Walker does a superb job of bringing the reader into the mind of a damaged and flawed addict. It helped me to better understand addiction and an addicts single-mindedness pursuit of their next high. The intelligence used to get the drugs is quick shoved aside when it comes to his own self preservation. While hard to read at times, I believe it is a worthwhile read.

Throughout this gritty, raw, and powerful novel there were some purely stunning lines. Many of them would stop me dead in my tracks, as they described our war in the Middle East (Iraq) and on the streets of the Midwest of our own country. Bullets and drugs, with abuse everywhere.
The graphic and unrelenting section on the war was intense and much too long for me. The gore, the burnt bodies, the violence, the slaughter, and the stupidity and fog of war was heavily clouded by the widespread addiction to heroin and an abundance of many other drugs.
There’s a crazy energy to the writing, it’s never far from a hyper drug-addled mind. Returning from the crazed war landscape, our young medic returns to the opioid crisis causing chaos across the land. His massive drug-taking continues straight into his civilian life. His relationships with women are progressively stranger and stranger.
I took some comfort from the short author’s note in the book.

“This book is a work of fiction.
These things didn’t happen.
These people didn’t ever exist.”

Yet I found myself wondering what exactly were the events that launched Nico Walker into this story. What was the raw material that this novel was formed from?
I got to the end of the book, and saw how many impressive lines I’d marked with Post-its, it very much resembled an intimidating porcupine. At another time, this book might blow my socks off, but it was simply too intense for my state of mind. Maybe I’ve become another pandemic-addled wimp.
It’s interesting to be so impressed by an author’s writing, but find his book lacking. But be sure, depending on the storyline, I’ll be looking seriously at Nico Walker’s next book.½

So this book is not my regular type of book that I read. And for that I did like it. But there was so much I didn't particularly care for. Honestly, I think the most interesting thing for me is that it is sort of autobiographical. There is some insights I got out of it and there are a few times I was amused, but overall, it's not for me.

This is a book about addiction. It's also a book about war. It's gruesome, graphic, and raw, and I was reading, I thought, "Why do I want to read about these awful people?" I nearly abandoned the book, but I kept reading, and days later I'm still thinking about the book and its characters.

The unnamed narrator parties heavily with drugs and alcohol in college, where he meets Emily who is in and out of his life over the ensuing years. He drops out of college and enlists in the army (a few years post-9/11). He marries Emily before heading for Iraq.

Iraq is like Vietnam, but with sand instead of jungle, haji instead of gooks. There's boredom and drugs, war crimes and atrocities. The narrator survives Iraq, but succumbs to PTSD and heroin on his return stateside. He and Emily divorce for a while, get back together, now both hooked on heroin, and their lives become a daily quest in search of a fix--to get the necessary drugs that make them "well"; when they don't have the drugs they are "sick." At first their student loan money keeps them supplied, but soon that is not enough. He takes to robbing banks to obtain the cash to pay for their habit. The book ends abruptly, but you know there can be only one of two fates for our narrator--death by overdose or jail as a convicted bank robber. Then you think back to the prologue, in which the narrator has just robbed a bank and is hurrying to his getaway car, dreaming of his fix, but hearing police sirens heading his way.

This book felt so real to me, about characters I have never known in real life, but who are so desperate and true. The author's note at the beginning of the book said: "This book is a work of fiction.
"These things didn't ever happen.
"These people didn't ever exist."

And then you turn the last page of the novel and in the acknowledgements you immediately read that the author wrote the book while in jail serving 11 years for a bank robbery conviction. He will be released in November 2020.

Recommended if you can stomach things like this.
4 stars

When books review themselves: "I had a theory. My theory was that I was a piece of shit and deserved it when bad things happened to me."

The unnamed narrator is a feckless waste of space, drifting through life in a meandering fashion that ever so slowly becomes a spiral around around a drain. Way too slowly.

Over half of the book recounts the narrator's experience as an Army medic, from basic training to a tour of duty in Iraq. It's a pretty standard the-military-sucks series of anecdotes about tedium, IEDs, war crimes, and death, sprinkled liberally with the H-slur for Muslims. Not a good look for the Army or soldiers.

Return to civilian life just brings another series of pretty standard anecdotes about scoring drugs and getting high. (You could just watch Drugstore Cowboy instead.) The narrator is also involved with various women, mostly the on-again-off-again Emily, with whom he has pretty toxic relationships, but they never become more than props in the story.

This book initially came on my radar because I heard it was supposed to be a modern day take on bank robberies, but that element is a tiny fraction near the end of the book that never really amounts to anything.

In an afterword, the author basically confesses he is a bad writer and several editors had to work several years to help him make this readable. When he had doubts about one guy's pass on the material, he got this feedback: "When I read your version I thought the main character was an asshole, and when I read Tim's version I thought the main character was an asshole but I kind of liked him." Well, I found nothing likable about him in this published version, and I certainly don't want to dwell on how much worse it could have been.

I'll grant that the book has an authentic voice, but it is not one I care to listen to for so long.

This is a war book, a drug book, a bank robbery book, a book about struggle. The young protagonist takes to drugs early on. Girlfriend problems exacerbate his need. He drops out of college, joins the army, and goes to Iraq as a medic. And it’s bad. After he gets out and attempts college again it’s more girl problems and on to pills and heroin. Then bank robbery to get the money for pills and heroin.

He tries for normality and domesticity. Apartment, girlfriend, a dog. “We had said, we’ll get a dog and we won’t be dope fiends anymore. So we got the dog. But we stayed dope fiends. And now we’re dope fiends with a dog.”

That’s the kind of sad beauty that Nico Walker puts into his words. With the heroin, it’s up and down, mostly down. “And it hit me and I was right as rain. If you know, then you know what I mean. If you don’t, then don’t ever find out.”
And “There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin.”

On bank robbery: “I had a gun. It wasn’t my gun. I forget who had given it to me. Funny thing about guns. If you’re known to rob things people will give you guns. It’s kind of like sponsoring missionaries.”

Written in prison, this book is alive and sharp. It shines a harsh light on the effects of war, and on addiction.½

Really good, though with heavy shades of *Catcher In The Rye*. If that kind of disreputable narrator character isn't to your liking, you'll hate this. Walker's narrator is untrustworthy, an unreliable narrator who slips over some details and lingers long on others. You can tell that you're only getting pieces of the story as it progresses, but that's just fine. The writing is very pretty, though it seems to really just be Walker's natural style, not something developed. That's too bad, because I'm afraid that a follow-up might lose the punch. The story is fine, but it's the style that I've come for.

A roman à clef about addiction, PTSD, war, and its aftermath, Cherry is a brutal, raw read whose saving grace is probably its honesty. Nico Walker isn't interested in sugar-coating the novel's unnamed protagonist (a thinly-veiled version of Walker himself) or his penchant for awful, selfish choices in anyway. This is an unflinching look at what it is to be an opioid addict in middle America right now.

That honesty, however, isn't paired with any really new insights. We get a photo-realistic portrait of a very familiar face: the middle-class, clean-cut suburban white boy who gets into drugs and petty robbery as a teenager and faces no consequences; who goes to college on his parents' dime and who, despite being more than smart enough to learn something if he gave a shit, fails out and faces no consequences; who enlists and goes to Iraq and spends his time getting high and inflicting the consequences of his actions on the local population. I know this face. I'm tired of it.

There are some good lines in Cherry ("Funny thing about guns. If you're known to rob things people will just give you guns. It's kind of like sponsoring missionaries"), but they were nowhere near enough to win me over. And even if there had been a lot more of them, there's still the fact of the book's unrelenting, continual, visceral misogyny. Not a single female character here felt like an actual person—and none of the male characters treated them as such, either. I finished the book wishing I could go bathe in bleach, which is just never a place you want to be in life.

Great story. I enjoyed the characters!

New book by Nico Walker recommended by the bookstore in Hollywood about the young guy in working class Cleveland whose life doesn’t come together. He joins the army , lives his girlfriend and gets into opioids.
Seems a little obvious to me, but apparently critics liked .

I had mixed feelings about this book.

I did not like the excessive use of offensive language or maybe just the offensive character.

Perhaps this is because I listened as an audiobook. The obscene language (including sexist, racist, and homophobic remarks, in addition to run-of-the-mill swear words) assaulting my ears was almost enough to make me turn it off. Had I been reading the book, that would not have been an issue. (That said, the vocal performance was excellent. Really conveyed the sense of depression, hopelessness, and general lack of drive.)

But it really was more than the language. I had a hard time relating to the character. What a jerk. The way he talked to women, the way he talked to so-called friends, ... He was really unpleasant much of the time.

I did like the realism.

While the vocabulary was not very extensive, nor the descriptions providing the full depth possible with the English language, I believed I was listening to a former Army medic turned drug fiend. The short sentences and pacing of story-telling felt like someone who lived through a tour in Iraq, watched people maimed and injured for no understandable reason.

I did not like that the story really went nowhere.

As in real life, this book follows a person through some experiences. But they didn't seem to go anywhere or lead to anything. One could read this book and think that PTSD and war made the protagonist into a drug fiend and back robber. But I listened and I heard someone who didn't have anything happening in his life, wasn't sure what to do, and the Army and Iraq were just things that he stumbled into for lack of anything else. And drug abuse was already part of his life before the military. He didn't grow or change. He continued to be a disengaged, unmotivated, person without any goals or direction. And then it just ends with robbing banks and doing drugs. Not really an ending just a pause while I wonder if this is going to end in early death, jail, or rehab.

I liked that is really is an exploration of the author.

If I am going to read (or listen to) a book, I want it to say something. Teach me something I don't know. Show me people I might never meet. Develop characters and resolve issues. Take me on a journey. This book had an interesting character who seemed to be treading water.

I would have rated it lower, until I read the other reviews and followed the link to the Buzzfeed article. When I think of this as a fictionalized version of a memoir, I have a lot more compassion for the story. Real life doesn't always have a nice arc and end somewhere nice and tidy. Further knowing that the author was a medic in Iraq, was a drug addict, was a bank robber, that provides a different lens. If I think of this as a person sharing his own story with his own voice (no matter how much I dislike it) then I have learned something. And I appreciate the courage it took to write it - even in this fictionalized form - because I now think that the author is speaking his own truth his own way.

Such a sad first person narrative. Left me feeling so depressed about our youth, our military, and this awful opioid crisis.

This book isnt interesting because it's a story of a military veteran turned bank robber, but how this person marketed his story first through a Buzzfeed video (https://www.buzzfeed.com/scottbuzz/passing-the-note-is-the-bang-how-a-war-hero-became-a-serial?utm_term=.evg425brY4#.jyQJLZNdwJ) into a book deal. I didn't find his addiction and sex stories all that interesting, I was more interested in the time he spent at Ft Hood and Ft Sam Houston as I grew up in military family in Central Texas. As far as the book goes, its mediocre writing and certainly doesn't deserve as much attention as it has received.

OK, this is not the book for me. Maybe it was the wrong time, maybe I just couldn't get into it, but it was relentlessly bleak, sweary and full of desperately unappealing characters. The thing with a book like this is that everyone comes to it with the narrative framework already in place; we know it's written by someone who experienced all these things, is currently in prison, and suffered PTSD as a result of his time with the army in Iraq. So where do we draw the line between autobiography and autobiographical fiction? In this case, I don't know.

There were occasional glimpses of good writing, some nice punchy sentences, and the parts of the book set in Iraq did feel genuine and were decently done. But no, I just didn't need this. I appreciate that many others who have reviewed the book have got much more out of it than I have, and I would never want to put people off from making their own minds up, but I just have to put this one down to experience and move on.

A gritty tale of a dumb kid who does moves through his drug- addicted life.