The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

by Sid Holt

  To give you a better sense of this, my new cellmate here in the SHU snuck over to Dallas from Mexico when he was fifteen, became the leader of a gang, did a year in state prison for shooting another drug dealer with a shotgun, sometimes consulted a local television psychic called Indio Apache for intel by which to better plot his criminal strategy, and worships Santa Muerte, the skeletal narco-deity beloved throughout the Mexican underworld. He has three kids, is currently serving a fifteen-year sentence for conspiring to distribute methamphetamines, is listed on his indictment as having seven different aliases, and is, he tells me, “almost twenty years old.” In the federal system, this qualifies him as a moderately interesting person. And, yes, here in Texas dealing meth is fifteen times more serious than shooting someone with a shotgun.

  Panchito Villa, as I’ll call him, is actually a very good cellmate. For one thing, he gives me the bread from our food trays, which is a big deal here in the SHU where one can’t get commissary, and particularly at this prison, where the rations have been inexplicably reduced over the last two years. Apparently his old boxing coach weaned him off bread products during training and the lesson stuck. Also he drew some very impressive decorations on our cell wall, including a life-size depiction of what would appear to be Princess Zelda wearing a handkerchief over her lower face gangster-style and sporting the tag “Vata Loca” tattooed above her eyes.

  One morning, the two of us discussed the possibility that, this being Wednesday, which is hamburger day, our lunch might perhaps include potato wedges—a relatively beloved dish that the prison manages to provide once or twice a month—instead of the potato chips that it pawns off on us more often than not. Panchito knelt before the photograph of a robed skeleton that serves as a makeshift shrine to Santa Muerte and prayed to her on our behalf, asking that she intercede in this matter. An hour later, we received our hamburgers accompanied by potato wedges, and afterwards Panchito led me in a Spanish prayer of thanksgiving to our benefactress. The sad thing is that, given the alternative explanation is that the prison administration decided to feed us a sufficient lunch in accordance with the national standards, and given how rarely this actually ends up happening on any given day under the reign of our jerk-off warden, Rodney Chandler, and also taking into account what I’ve already documented in prior columns regarding this prison’s ongoing failure to meet a whole range of such standards on everything from hygiene to due process, there’s a better than even chance that it really was Santa Muerte who got us the fucking potato wedges.

  On a day when we happened to receive cornbread with our dinner, Panchito handed it over to me as usual.

  “Are you sure you don’t want this?” I asked. “I think cornbread isn’t as bad for you.”

  “I don’t want to risk it,” replied the shotgun-wielding child soldier who makes pacts with demons for potato wedges.

  • • •

  Shortly after arrival I received my incident report in which the “reporting officer” relates, with some apparent effort: “ON JUNE 17 2015 AT APPROXIMATE 8:35 PM DURING A RANDOM BREATHALYZER TEST I DECIDED TO SEARCH INMATES BROWN 45057-177 LOCKER AND FOUND A COFFEE MUG FULL OF PRISON MADE INTHOXICANT. OPERATION LT WAS INFORMED AND INMATE BROWN #45047-177 WAS ESCORTED BY THE COMPOUNP OFFICER TO THE SHU.” How it was that the benighted man-child should have been taken by a sudden fancy to search, er, “INMATES BROWN #45047-177 LOCKER” in the midst of a “RANDOM BREATHALYZER TEST” that I passed is left to the imagination. Luckily I received a gratuitous confirmation that this account was nonsense a few days later, when a Special Investigations Service officer by the name of McClinton came by the hole to give me yet another drug test and to brag about how they knew the hooch was in my locker due to the informants they have watching me. That just leaves the mystery of how the reporting officer managed to render “compound” as “compounp.” And if anyone out there is having trouble deciding on a name for their ska band, you could do worse than “PRISON MADE INTHOXICANT.”

  There’ve also been some exciting new developments in my ongoing quest to get the BOP to explain why its D.C. liaison, Terrance Moore, switched off my ability to e-mail the public an hour after I used it to contact a journalist about wrongdoing by bureau employees. Recall that the Administrative Remedy coordinator, a fellow named McKinney, fraudulently back-dated receipt of my original complaint about this to indicate that he received it on June 4, when in fact his office received it on April 30. Then, he failed to reply within the allotted twenty days of his make-believe date of receipt (and likewise missed his other self-declared deadline of June 29 for my second complaint regarding his failure to follow procedure on my first complaint, by golly!). According to the BOP’s own guidelines, I’m permitted to take this failure to respond as a refusal of my claim, thereby finally allowing me to file a BP-10 form, which goes to the regional office. But—hark!—on June 30, McKinney belatedly filed for extensions on the illicit deadlines that he’d already missed, giving himself twenty more days to respond to both complaints. And then he missed his fake deadlines, too.

  Meanwhile, the prison has failed to inform me immediately and in writing of the various media interview requests I’ve been receiving, as policy requires it to; actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter has even sent his latest application via certified mail, to no effect. It also turns out that I’m on the BOP’s Central Inmate Monitoring system, billed in a BOP program statement as being used for prisoners who “present special needs for management,” which is one way of putting it. Naturally, they’ve failed to “ensure that the affected inmate is notified in writing as promptly as possible of the classification and the basis for it,” as is also required by policy. On a totally unrelated subject, I was sentenced recently to another thirty days in the hole beyond the month I’d already done, plus ninety days of phone, commissary, visiting and e-mail restriction, which will certainly teach me to break BOP rules without first getting a job with the BOP.

  Luckily I’ve gotten lots of nifty books in the mail from supporters, including The Muqaddimah, the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun’s treatise on world history. Early on, Khaldun presents us with an example of an old story he deems unreliable: “Sea monsters prevented Alexander from building Alexandria. He took a wooden container in which a glass box was inserted, and dived in it to the bottom of the sea. Then he drew pictures of the devilish monsters he saw. He then had metal effigies of these animals made and set them opposite the place where building was going on. When the monsters came out and saw the effigies, they fled.” Ibn Killjoy goes out of his way to discredit this charming tale: “Now, rulers would not take such a risk. Any ruler who would attempt such a thing would work his own undoing and provoke the outbreak of revolt against himself, and be replaced by the people with someone else…. Furthermore, the jinn are not known to have specific forms and effigies. They are able to take on various forms.” Whatever, asshole.

  Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels

  As I not only live in a federal prison but am also currently being held once again in a twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown punishment cell due to my incorrigible behavior, I haven’t been in a position to directly follow what I gather has been a very edifying net-driven controversy over Jonathan Franzen and his latest work, which really feels like another punishment in and of itself. Thankfully, though, I’ve received a couple of representative clippings in the mail, along with a copy of the book in question, Purity, which I’ve been asked to review.

  Two things bear noting in the interest of full disclosure. First, this book revolves in part around the amoral antics of a character based rather closely on Julian Assange, while separately including references to Assange himself, most of them critical. I happen to have been an early and rabid partisan of Assange, and the two of us sometimes say nice things about each other in the press. Meanwhile, the criminal charges on which I’ve been imprisoned center on my fairly peripheral involvement in a 2011 raid by certain anarchist hackers of my acquaintance on the State Department
–linked corporate espionage firm Stratfor, the stolen e-mails from which were provided to WikiLeaks. Second, and more to the point, I despise contemporary fiction almost as much as Jonathan Franzen despises women. In my view, the novel peaked with Dostoyevsky, and although I do admire, for instance, Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, and Burgess’s Earthly Powers, you’ll note that the most recent of these was published almost thirty years ago. Now, I don’t doubt that some worthwhile works of “serious” fiction are still being put out now and again, but I wouldn’t know how to go about finding them, as many of our nation’s respectable outlets have apparently resorted to just hiring crazy people off the street to do their book reviews.

  I have here, for instance, a copy of Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin’s recent review of Purity. This is just as well, as I needed a refresher on my Franzen lore, and Ulin opens with that very thing before promptly descending into some sort of fugue state. Naturally I was aware of the existence of The Corrections, which, Ulin reminds us, was “his masterful 2001 portrait of a Midwestern family,” but I seem to have entirely missed the more recent Freedom, “a moving meditation on marriage and friendship.” Nor was I aware that the author himself had reached the dual status of “both avatar and scapegoat.” As Ulin explains, “By now, Franzen is often regarded less as writer than as cultural signifier, emblem of white male hegemony. That this has little if anything to do with the substance of his novels is (perhaps) the point and the tragedy; when it comes to Franzen, the writing is where we go last.”

  “Tragedy” may be a bit melodramatic in this instance (although it is indeed distressing to learn that the venerable old White Male Hegemony is now being fronted by Jonathan Franzen; we seem to have taken something of a plunge since Winston Churchill). After all, Ulin himself here admits that “that depth, that texture,” which is said to mark the characterization in The Corrections, “can be elusive in Purity, which is a more plotted novel, sometimes to its detriment.” And plotting, he concedes, “has never been the author’s strong suit.” Perhaps there’s a good reason why the writing is where we go last? But no—Ulin still maintains that our timely reading of this poorly plotted novel filled with low-resolution automatons is our only chance of averting tragedy because the writing itself is just that good. As proof, he actually cites the following snippet of monologue as delivered by a character named Tom:

  “Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married,” he tells us in the book’s one extended first-person sequence. “Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is your capacity to be hurt by her.”

  That’s fierce writing, and it does what fiction is supposed to, forcing us to peel back the surfaces, to see how love can turn to desolation, how we are betrayed by what we believe. It is the most human of dilemmas, with which we must all come to terms.

  Setting aside this sprinkling of third-tier lit-crit commonplaces that I blush even to reproduce, it’s unclear to me exactly what “fierce” is supposed to mean in this context, although I can tell that the term is here being misapplied since it appears to be intended as a compliment. And though the passage itself isn’t especially awful, it’s alarming to be tasked with reading a 500-page tome in which that sort of overwrought prose is supposed to make up for bad plotting and notso-hotso characterization. It’s also quite telling that Ulin manages to get his favorite passage wrong; the end of the selection actually reads, “her capacity to be hurt by you,” not “your capacity to be hurt by her,” and directly follows a key plot point that makes the distinction quite clear. But then, as the fellow said himself, the writing is where we go last. Shed we a tear for Franzen? Nay—shed we a tear for us all!

  • • •

  When I finally did get around to going to the writing last, I was relieved to find that Purity isn’t a terrible book or even a very bad one. There is some clever use of language once in a while, yet Franzen resists the temptation to dip into the self-conscious attempts at “literary” phrasing that mark so much of his competition (our friend Ulin mentions that Franzen penned a 1996 Harper’s essay on the state of fiction, inevitably titled “Perchance to Dream”; one might be better served in reading a piece The Atlantic ran a few years later, “A Reader’s Manifesto,” in which someone named B. R. Myers points out that a great portion of modern prose styling is conceptually fraudulent garbage). Characters will sometimes think clever thoughts or even say them out loud, but not so often that this becomes unseemly. Now and again we are even presented with snippets of real insight. One can see how Franzen could have written a much better book fifteen years ago.

  But one can also see how that book might have been a fluke. In Purity, marriages fail one after another in excruciating fifty-page flashbacks. No one is particularly likable or even unlikable, though a few do manage to be insufferable. Toward the end we’re treated to one great character, the cynical plutocrat dad of one of the dastardly feminists, but then he disappears from view and promptly dies. The megalomaniacal information activist is admirably complex, but as a megalomaniacal information activist myself, I found him unconvincing. The one murder that serves to kick off the plot is perpetuated against an otherwise minor off-screen character rather than one of the several main characters whom the reader might have much preferred to see murdered. Franzen is also rather hard on the ladies, whereas everyone would have been better served had he instead been harder on himself and maybe put out a better book.

  It’s worth reiterating, though, that this sort of subject matter is not my cup of tea to begin with, and I certainly don’t want anyone to refrain from reading a novel that might interest them simply because I said mean things about it. If you’re up for a “moving meditation on marriage and friendship,” then you should probably read Freedom over and over again until your eyes bleed. If divorce and infidelity and guilt and trial separation is your thing, then you’d better get your ass over to the nearest book store and pick up a copy of Purity. You need not worry about what I think. But if you’re curious anyway, what I think is that I hate you.

  • • •

  Just kidding. Ah, but there is indeed a major plot element interwoven into Purity that should be of interest to someone like me—that of Franzen’s ersatz Assange, Andreas Wolf, and his leak-driven Sunshine Project. Let me put it this way. I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.

  There are big ideas here, but none worth having, much less writing down. One big idea seems to be that Julian Assange has blood on his hands. Not even the Pentagon makes this charge anymore, but it’s nonetheless raised almost in passing in an Oakland anarchist squat, of all places, by a transient Occupy activist, of all people, who proclaims: “But Wiki was dirty—people died because of Wiki,” an assertion that goes unchallenged. To be sure, this is a bit character talking, rather than one of a handful of main characters whom we can be certain are speaking for Franzen when they start denouncing the Internet or women, but again, it sounds about as natural coming from a slum-dwelling anarcho-what-have-you as a declaration to the effect that the Multinational Imperialist State of Amerikkka must be brought to its knees by a reenergized Situationist International movement would sound coming from Mike Rogers. This, then, is the author speaking.

  Not content to present discredited five-year-old anti-Assange Department of Defense talking points as if they were accepted facts even among Assange’s own ideological constituents, Franzen has, again, also created this Andreas Wolf figure, unmistakably modeled on Assange—he’s even escaped to a friendly South Ame
rican country, as the real Assange is trying to do, and like Assange, he’s in the habit of deploying a rather striking female emissary on secret missions around the world. And naturally, Franzen has made Wolf a near-sociopathic fraud, murderer, and cover-up artist who also has weird sexual hang-ups (although it’s worth noting that most everyone in Purity has weird sexual hang-ups; one young lady can only achieve climax during a full moon, but then you know how feminists are). What’s particularly interesting is the sort of cluttered presence of both the model of the real figure and the real figure himself, whereas generally a writer will content himself with one of the two. Do the inhabitants of this fictional world ever get suspicious, I wonder, concluding as they must that one of the two global celebrity leakers is clearly an unfair literary depiction of the other? Do they also notice that all of their mothers are psychotic and that their marriages tend to slowly collapse in the course of long, grueling flashbacks, and do they conclude that they’re living in a Jonathan Franzen novel? This raises all manner of ethical questions that I will leave to others.

  Rather than any measured objections to online activism as currently practiced or the social-networking culture, we’re treated instead to a moving meditation on how the Internet is a totalitarian system comparable to East Germany under the Stasi or the Soviets under Stalin. The gurus of the information-technology field—the “New Regime,” as Franzen calls them—are very much the natural heirs to the politburo. Oh, there are a few differences here and there, of course: “But Stalin himself hadn’t needed to take so many risks, because terror worked better. Although to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to worship risk-taking—a relative term in my case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist’s money, or worse of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged—the most successful of them had instead followed Stalin’s example.”