78 Books & arts The EconomistJuly 13th 2019
2 look square; most young performers had
little interest in supplying the kind of
schmaltz it had become known for.
“In a town that got blindsided by the
rock revolution, it was only fitting that Ve-
gas would turn to the original rock ’n’
roller, Elvis Presley, as the agent of its rein-
vention,” writes Richard Zoglin, a longtime
culture correspondent for Time. In “Elvis in
Vegas” he argues that the singer and the
city saved each other, at least for a while.
Las Vegas had always been derided for
its kitsch, but in the late 1950s and early
1960s it was a necessary stop for Hollywood
starlets, Broadway actors and nearly every
nightclub turn in America. The resort be-
gan to lure high-rolling holidaymakers and
the artists who helped empty their wallets
in the 1930s, when Nevada became the first
state to legalise gambling and liberalise di-
vorce laws. Hotels multiplied along the
strip in the 1950s; the advent of non-stop
air travel from Chicago in 1960 helped draw
visitors from across the country.
The mob bosses who ran the town (casi-
nos were handy for laundering money) at-
tracted talent by lavishing huge salaries
and luxurious perks on the stars. For their
part, the entertainers kept people in the ca-
sinos. Judy Garland was paid $55,000 a
week for her heart-on-sleeve perfor-
mances, though she preferred to sing at
2.30am owing to insomnia. Sinatra, a rath-
er touchy and somewhat bigoted codger in
these pages, earned as much as $100,000 a
week for his residency at Caesars Palace.
But by the late 1960s the economics
were changing. Howard Hughes, an eccen-
tric billionaire, bought up Vegas proper-
ties, pushed out the free-spending mob-
sters (a national crackdown on organised
crime helped) and instituted a new era of
bean-counting. Hotels stopped coddling
entertainers, many of whom seemed dat-
ed. Over the same period Elvis’s manager,
Colonel Tom Parker, had steered him to-
wards films, in the mistaken belief that
they offered a surer payday than rock ’n’
roll. Fifty years ago this month, with Vegas
in desperate need of a bankable star, Elvis
arrived with his hat in his hand.
He delivered the goods. Trim, energetic
and still impossibly handsome, he per-
formed like a man hungry for redemption.
His voice was richer and deeper for his 34
years and he prowled the stage like a
panther, kicking up a sweat in his stretchy,
karate-style outfits (Bill Belew, the design-
er of the increasingly ornate costumes,
switched to jumpsuits after Elvis split his
trousers). Backed by a dream-team of musi-
cians, two vocal groups and a 40-piece or-
chestra, Elvis relished the reunion with his
fans, many of them housewives who had
screamed for him as teenagers. He played
twice a night, seven days a week for four
straight weeks and sold out every show.
Rolling Stonehailed him as “supernatural,his own resurrection”.
The King returned to Vegas twice a year
for seven years, always playing to sell-out
crowds. In a city where entertainers had
been loss-leaders, Elvis turned a profit. Ho-
tels learned that the right star could attract
ordinary types from all over, who would
bring their families for a holiday splurge.
He paved the way for the lavish shows of
Celine Dion, Elton John and Lady Gaga.But the demands of these twice-a-night
gigs proved less kind to Elvis. By 1971 he
looked tired and heavy; by 1975 he often
needed a chair on stage. Isolated in his
penthouse suite, hooked on pills and bloat-
ed with bacon, he was “a prisoner of the
town as well as its saviour”. He died at
Graceland in 1977 with 14 drugs in his sys-
tem. But his spirit lives on in Las Vegas and
in the pages of this enjoyable book. 7“E
venindeaththeboysweretrou-
ble.” The first line of Colson White-
head’s new novel introduces both its
fierce vision and the mordant subtlety
with which he ambushes his readers.
Why are the boys dead—and what sort of
trouble can dead boys have caused?
The boys in the “The Nickel Boys”, it
turns out, are blamed and punished for
all sorts of things. Elwood, the protagon-
ist, is a teenage acolyte of Martin Luther
King in the Jim Crow Florida of the early
1960s. Convinced he is “as good as any-
one”, he pores over his “new secondhand
textbooks” and awaits the desegregation
of Tallahassee. After hitching an ill-
starred ride to an extra-curricular class,
he winds up in a reform school. There he
falls in with the worldlier Turner, who
during his short life has “tumbled down
the street like an old newspaper”.
The horrors they experience unspool
as casually as they are inflicted, so that,
like other bystanders, readers might
almost miss them. The black inmates’
food is swiped and hawked around town
(the white boys get to eat theirs); their
labour is sold to local officials. A strap
known as “black beauty” is administered
in a building called the White House—
though some unfortunates are instead
manacled to a tree “out back”, after which
“they put you down as escaped, and that’s
that.” Lovers’ Lane, the venue for sexual
abuse, is a grisly basement. Nobly, naive-
ly or both, Elwood thinks it is his duty to
resist the rackets and cruelties.
The dead become trouble when their
graves are discovered. Survival, though,
is hard. A character makes it to New
York—exactly how is integral to the
plot—where, years later, he remembers
nights on which “the only sounds were
tears and insects”. Yet it is the incidental,
half-told tales that lend this book its
slow-burn power. Jaimie the Mexican,for example, “had an uncle with a quick
hand”; he bounces between the white
and black campuses, too dark for one, too
light for the other. There is a grotesque
boxing match that recalls Ralph Ellison’s
“Invisible Man”. “Pain rolled off him like
rain from a slate roof,” Mr Whitehead
writes of a fabled champ.
In his previous novel, “The Under-
ground Railroad”, which won a Pulitzer
and a National Book Award, the escape
route of the title magically becomes an
actual railway; what begins as an un-
blinking depiction of slavery morphs
into a phantasmagoric allegory of Afri-
can-American history as a whole. “The
Nickel Boys” is a simpler story (albeit
with a late twist), inspired by a real epi-
sode in Marianna, Florida (see picture).
Still, in the dialogue between Elwood and
Turner it frames some perennial argu-
ments over how to respond to injustice.
“You can change the law,” Turner reckons
fatalistically, rejecting his friend’s ide-
alism, “but you can’t change people and
how they treat each other.”
Quietly, meanwhile, Mr Whitehead
insists that this tragic past is far from
dead and buried. “The iron is still there,”
he says of that punishment tree. “Testify-
ing to anyone who cares to listen.”School of scandal
New American fictionThe Nickel Boys. By Colson Whitehead.
Doubleday; 224 pages; $24.95. Fleet; £16.99