Tag Archives: Trauma

When You Google It, Just Remember – It’s Penal, Not Penile

Published in 2023, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All Stars is influenced by some of America’s sports/entertainment behemoths, including the National Football League, Reality Television, and the World Wrestling Foundation. If you think of capitalism as a game, throw that one in, too. Each has a “bloodsport” element to it, so it’s understandable that Adjei-Brenyah draws from them, because Chain-Gang All-Stars is the “crown jewel in the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program.” It allows felons “under their own will and power . . . to forgo a state-administered execution or a sentence totaling at least twenty-five year’s imprisonment” to participate in a spectacle where they can travel the country, get some fresh air, and perhaps become a hero. Oh, yeah, every couple of weeks or so, they’ll have to fight each other to the death in sold-out arenas and on pay-per-view television. But if they survive three years in the program, they may be granted clemency or a full pardon. Yippee! Where do I sign?

What’s that, dear reader? Yes, you’re correct. This has been done before. Several times, in fact. There’s the movie, The Longest Yard, and the re-make of that movie, also called The Longest Yard. And the movie, Running Man, and the other movie, Escape From New York, and the Hunger Games franchise. So it’s not really a fresh idea.

Except, here, everything in the penile, dammit, penal system is privately owned, and the competitors have corporate sponsors. Oh, yeah, that’s been done before, too.

How about this? Adjei-Brenyah wants you to take his premise as seriously as he does. And he’s not afraid to preach. The system is evil, evil, evil. He’s going to smack you in the face with the horror of it all, because he’s concerned you won’t figure it out on your own. These prisoners are humans, who’ve had traumatic upbringings. In case that’s inconceivable to you, he has characters say things like “These marks (tattoos showing the number of kills they have) don’t mean we aren’t people. These chains don’t mean we have to do it like they want.” He has footnotes! They cite statistics!! Some are relevant!!!

All of this is to impress upon the reader that America’s penal system is dehumanizing and evil. And the reader is like no shit, I already knew it was awful and in desperate need of reform. The fact that you’ve come up with a bloodier version of a more-than-twice-told tale doesn’t shed more light on the subject.

The outlandish premise would have been perfect for a satire, and that seems to be what Adjei-Brenyah initially intended. But about halfway through, he abandons that approach and turns to evangelism. The story is violent, bloody, and angry. Those are its strengths. There’s just one weakness. All that preaching and self-seriousness gets to be a bore.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Lessons In A Life Adrift

Ian McEwan’s Lessons opens with a piano teacher groping her student. She is 25 years old, and the boy is 11. Her cold fingers pinch the inside of his upper thigh and travel up his shorts to his underwear. As is typical, the victim blames himself. He’s newly arrived at his English boarding school and misses his mother tremendously. He’s textbook, and Miriam begins grooming him.

Roland is 14 when the Cuban Missile Crisis happens. Fear and loneliness compel him to ride a bike to Miriam’s house in the nearby village. She doesn’t seem surprised when he shows up unannounced. Roland is escorted upstairs to her bedroom, and Miriam tells him what she expects. As if he is a child. Because he is. After they have sex, he is even more under her control. “She had always frightened him. He had not forgotten how cruel she could be. Now it was more complicated, it was worse and he had made it worse.”

Over the next two years, Miriam manipulates Roland. She is always the teacher, and he is always the pupil. His schoolwork suffers. He loses touch with friends. The night before his sixteenth birthday Miriam tells Roland they will be traveling to Scotland in the morning to get married. This scares him more than the Cuban Missile Crisis did. When he flees, Miriam yells “You’ll spend the rest of your life looking for what you’ve had here.”

She’s not wrong. The trauma from this relationship has “rewired his brain.” He drops out of school. He floats from one job to another, from one relationship to another. Finally, in his thirties, he meets Alyssa. They get married and have a son, but the marriage falls apart.

Alyssa dreams of being her generation’s greatest writer, but she’s sinking. Being a wife and mother is suffocating. She can’t be the writer she wants to be so she leaves. Years later, she writes novels and they’re brilliant. Roland wonders how he could have been married to a genius and not realized it. Is Miriam to blame? Is he still a victim?

Roland’s life story (from the 1950s to 2020) is deftly told. McEwan is a deeply humane writer, and he creates fascinating characters with complex motivations. The women are far more interesting than the men, but this shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows Shakespeare or women.

McEwan is generous and empathetic with all his characters – even Miriam. That is a testament to his genuine skill as a writer. But there’s a problem. Roland does eventually (late in middle age) confront Miriam. This is a pivotal moment, and its resolution is humane only if Miriam hasn’t abused other children. And we have no reason for believing this is the case. What if she is a serial pedophile? The fact that no one thinks to ask this, especially after all the scandals uncovered during the 1980s and later, is a glaring problem in an otherwise masterfully told story.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor