Even without Nico Walker's unusual biography, his debut novel, Cherry, would be impressive. But the fact that it was produced by an Iraq War combat veteran and drug addict while serving time for bank robbery in federal prison unquestionably adds to its power. Walker is a talented writer whose depiction of how it feels for a soldier to return from a war his country would like to forget, only to join a growing army of addicts in a crisis that country can't solve, is as timely as it is terrifying.
There's nothing heroic or noble about the unnamed narrator's military service in Iraq in 2005-2006. A medic, he's sent on endless patrols that mostly involve kicking down doors on the chance he'll find bad actors behind them, all the while hoping to avoid random, instantaneous death at the hands of an improvised explosive device.
But as much as Cherry is a story about war and its consequences, it's also a love story, if a sadly perverted one. The narrator and his wife (and ex-wife), Emily, can't live together or apart. The scenes of their mutual self-destruction and the desperate search for money to buy more drugs (that eventually leads to bank robbery in order to avoid the agony of withdrawal) are nightmarish. To the obvious question why anyone would want to live this way, Walker helps us understand that, for these two characters, there's no choice.
Laced with dark, ironic humor, Cherry remains a bleak and uncompromising book. Considering its subject matter, any other stance would represent a failure of imagination, if not artistic dishonesty. When Nico Walker leaves prison, he'll face a world changed in countless ways from the one he left. The fact that it hasn't in others is part of the tragedy of this deeply disquieting novel. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer