After his parents’ departure to make a better living in California, Elwood is left to grow up in the Florida of the 1960s in the segregated black neighbourhood of Frenchtown, Tallahassee. He is kept on the straight and narrow by his stern but loving grandmother. A bright, thoughtful boy, he is fatefully influenced by a record of Martin Luther King’s speeches, which he plays obsessively.  His potential is spotted by a teacher, who eases his path to a technical college, the route to a better life.

Through an unlucky chain of events, he is obliged to hitch a ride to his first day at college, and just happens to be picked up by the driver of a stolen car.  With a prejudiced court, the penalty is disproportionate This leads to his incarceration in the grim institution of the Nickel Academy, based  on a  former real reform school, Dozier School in Florida, which operated for more than a century.  It was exposed recently as the scene of much appalling violence against pupils, including unrecorded deaths and burials. Not only this, but the inequity between the treatment of the  black and white students, and the cynical exploitation on the part of local people, including influential members of the local “clan”, Ku Klux implied, in siphoning off food and equipment intended for the boys, added to the injustice which Colson Whitehead clearly felt impelled to make more widely known.

Thinking I had read enough fiction about boys being abused at school for one lifetime, I avoided reading this at first. However, having walked out of the highly praised film version of it, because I could not engage with the technique being used, I decide to read the book in order to grasp exactly what it was about. This would be an unbearably bleak read were it not for the vivid descriptions of a society which kept flagrant inequality alive with a casual, unthinking acceptance, and the author’s flashes of dry, ironic humour, against the odds.  The novel resembles his debut novel, “The Underground Railway” in tending to digress into the lives of various minor characters, but is different in the authentic ring of its sense of place, rather than any hint of magic realism.

He also lightens the plot by shifting forward in time for much of the final Part 3, to show us the life of an adult Elwood who has survived the Nickel Academy to make a living, but we see the permanent scars in apparent difficulties in sustaining emotional relationships, and no evidence that he has managed to fulfil his intellectual promise.  Sometimes, the narrative drive seems to lose momentum, but the plot comes into sharp focus with a dramatic and unexpected twist at the end.

I was interested to read Colston Whitehead’s description of the two central characters as the  “two different parts of my personality”, with Elwood Curtis being “the optimistic or hopeful part of me that believes we can make the world a better place if we keep working at it”, and his friend Jack Turner, “the cynical side that says no—this country is founded on genocide murder, and slavery and it will always be that way.”

“The Nickel Boys” is a book that all young white people would benefit from reading, to gain an understanding of the wrongs suffered by black Americans over time. Whitehead is a talented writer who merits being one of the few to win the Pullitzer Prize twice.