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Chain-Gang All-Stars
4/5. A near future dystopian America where the carceral system has an entertainment component under which inmates can “voluntarily” enter a reality show program where they fight to the death for a chance at freedom. This book is about a lot of people in and around that system, but centrally two women stars of it.
This is brilliant and beautiful and deeply humane while being about inhumane things. Some have complained it’s on-the-nose which, like, yes? I’m sorry, did you want subtlety in this critique? What good would that do?
Which leads me to the structure of this book. Tonally, it is a sustained scream, modulating with the kind of pain it is expressing. And then sprinkled throughout are footnotes. Some didactic, some painful, some about our current prison statistics, some about these fictional people. It is a really interesting choice. The author called it an “ethical” one which I am interpreting to mean that he is not interested in giving readers a chance to weasel out of understanding some of what this book is putting down. I think that is also a really smart way of confronting the thing that has wrecked other books like this. The problem is that it’s really hard to tell a story that is critiquing violence and suffering as entertainment without also entertaining your reader with violence and suffering. And the approach taken here is one of the best I’ve ever seen at negotiating that.
Content notes: Oh boy. Violence, murder, torture, mentions of rape and domestic violence, structural and personal racism
4/5. A near future dystopian America where the carceral system has an entertainment component under which inmates can “voluntarily” enter a reality show program where they fight to the death for a chance at freedom. This book is about a lot of people in and around that system, but centrally two women stars of it.
This is brilliant and beautiful and deeply humane while being about inhumane things. Some have complained it’s on-the-nose which, like, yes? I’m sorry, did you want subtlety in this critique? What good would that do?
Which leads me to the structure of this book. Tonally, it is a sustained scream, modulating with the kind of pain it is expressing. And then sprinkled throughout are footnotes. Some didactic, some painful, some about our current prison statistics, some about these fictional people. It is a really interesting choice. The author called it an “ethical” one which I am interpreting to mean that he is not interested in giving readers a chance to weasel out of understanding some of what this book is putting down. I think that is also a really smart way of confronting the thing that has wrecked other books like this. The problem is that it’s really hard to tell a story that is critiquing violence and suffering as entertainment without also entertaining your reader with violence and suffering. And the approach taken here is one of the best I’ve ever seen at negotiating that.
Content notes: Oh boy. Violence, murder, torture, mentions of rape and domestic violence, structural and personal racism