Not Everybody’s Protest Novel

In my uncharitable moments, I sometimes believe that writers write voguish political fiction in order to inoculate their work from criticism. When you point out that their novel isn’t very good, they can simply say that to evaluate their work according to small-minded aesthetic standards is to miss the point. They are trying to bring some societal horror to light, and the fiction is merely a vehicle for their important message. After all, who could object to fighting injustice? And it’s true that the length and inherent complexity of the novel can, in the right hands, make it the perfect form for exploring issues that resist easy polemic. So, in theory, it’s possible for someone to write a good novel about mass incarceration. Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is not that novel.

Apparently, I’m nearly alone among critics in thinking so. The novel, which became a New York Times bestseller after its publication in April, has received rapturous praise in the establishment press. Kirkus, in a starred review, called it “acerbic, poignant,” and “alarmingly pertinent.” A rave in The New York Times labeled the book “thrilling” and mused about the ethics of having “this much fun” while reading Adjei-Brenyah’s ultraviolent fight scenes. Not to be outdone, The Washington Post’s Ron Charles likened Chain-Gang All-Stars to 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale as a “dystopian vision so upsetting and illuminating that should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of doing.”

That “dystopian vision” is an alternate-reality, near-future United States in which prisoners, most of them Black, can participate in a nationally televised fight to the death—Chain-Gang All-Stars BattleGrounds—in order to achieve their freedom. It’s a satire of the prison-industrial complex and the NFL—get it? The book focuses mainly on the travails of two female inmate-gladiators who are also lovers, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, as they fight their way to freedom and, with it, celebrity.

The battle royale as a representation of the utterly rigged game of Black advancement is at least as old as the sequence in Invisible Man. In that particular instance, the tragedy and comedy come from the fact that as our hero is punched, mocked, and trampled on, he cannot help but wonder if this spectacle will distract from his eventual speech. However, this is not the type of reference that Adjei-Brenyah is attempting to make. In tone and in quality, this is, as Jenna Bush said on her NBC show, closer to an “adult version of The Hunger Games,” though without the latter series’ passable plotting and characterization. At its best, the book reads like young-adult fiction; more typically, it reads like young-adult fan fiction. At times, it actually rendered me speechless—not because of the violent acts it describes but because of the risible quality of the writing. Take this early scene, describing a small group of activists protesting the blood sport:

When a car had driven by and screamed, “Bitches!” at the crowd, Nile had seen one of the officers chuckle and give the driver a thumbs-up. Still, some bystanders did raise their fists in solidarity. Some clapped as they passed. Some laughed. But most of them acted as if the protestors weren’t there at all. And of course, some weren’t acting. Some truly didn’t think about the fact that men and women were being murdered every day by the same government their children pledged allegiance to at school.

Leave aside the car with the ability to scream “Bitches!” This entire paragraph is remarkably awkward. In lieu of setting a scene, Adjei-Brenyah provides a series of inert observations. We are told there are “bystanders,” and how they behave, but not how many there are. “Most” “acted as if the protestors weren’t there,” and “some” of these “most” “weren’t acting,” meaning … what, exactly? That the protesters weren’t really there? What Adjei-Brenyah seems to mean is that some only pretended to ignore the protest while others actually ignored the protest, leading him to his hilariously unearned, clumsily didactic conclusion. It would be offensive to preachers to call this work preachy, since at least a sermon has fire. This reads more like a hastily scribbled work of activist reportage in sore need of edit.

Yet for all the praise of Adjei-Brenyah’s “searing,” “gripping,” and “raw” prose, this is the governing style of the novel, and it is relentless. The book is supposed to be a graphic metaphor for the evils of private prisons and the callousness of professional football spectators, yet by blending the two issues together, Adjei-Brenyah manages to say little of use about either. Yes, both systems “exploit” Black men. But though mass incarceration has recently become a cause celebre, it is insidious because of the way it hides people away, depriving inmates of their freedom and transforming them into chattel. Like the violence of the abattoir, its noxiousness comes from its concealed cruelty. However, the gladiatorial jousting of American football is plainly visible to anyone who watches it—it’s a part of the game, which is above all else an entertainment product.

A more complex novel might deal with how professional football players are themselves caged in an arena that may eventually destroy them, and, perhaps it might make it clear that for some players, that form of destruction was preferable to other, less remunerative ones. It might also examine the other reasons, aside from structural oppression, why people pursue the fame, glory, money, and camaraderie of professional sports, even at great cost to their long-term physical health. But this is not a complex novel. As didactic as it is dumb, this book heaps judgment on a society that accepts live death-matches of prisoners. Obviously, such a society would be completely depraved—but it’s not the one that we live in. Well-rendered dystopian fiction clears the fog that hides real social dysfunction. The dystopia of Chain-Gang All-Stars is so cartoonish and ridiculous that the reader struggles to recognize in it a version of our own.

Poor prose is the book’s biggest problem, but don’t let the ungainly writing fool you—it’s bad in every other way, too. The characterization is thin. All we know about our two main characters, besides their traumatic histories, is that they are the best fighters of all time and that they are lovers. We are introduced to plenty of other characters in the book, but they are so thinly sketched that their violent deaths come as a relief. A sense of place is entirely absent—the fights could be taking place in Madison Square Garden or on the moon—as is any effort to describe the social texture of the novel’s bizarro-world America. There were many moments when I simply shook my head in disbelief at what I was reading. Take a look at this rare section when a character, Loretta Thurwar, engages in contemplation:

How would she lead in her last few weeks? How would she deal with Gunny Puddles, a rapist/murderer, who’d wanted her dead for the better part of the last two years? How was she going to do that without Sun there to make everything seem easier than it was? And now that she’d learned what she’d learned from the girl in Vroom Vroom, did she care about any of it?

This is the type of narration that one might find in the opening refresher sequence of a cable miniseries. It is a cheap facsimile of human thought that only matters if you care about the plot, which I never did. Somehow, it gets even worse. Later on in the book, Thurwar attempts to put the beliefs of the deceased fighter Sunset Harkless into practice. After witnessing a fight almost break out between Rico Muerte and another member of her team, Thurwar muses about her place in the world:

She and Sunset had meant something like hope for people like him. She resented it, but she also loved it, knowing that her name and life represented an entire avenue of possibility to people like Rico. Her survival made the impossible game seem possible. Of course they were foolish and misguided and would end up dead. But in her weaker moments she enjoyed being a beacon. When she was strong she knew she was a flame to moths.

Thurwar’s inner dialogue seems to consist entirely of exposition, and it resists analysis because its construction is so patently empty of imagination. The surface-level exploration of the inside of this character’s mind gives you no reason to care about them, and it reads like hastily, poorly executed homework, as if Adjei-Brenyah knows that characters are supposed to have thoughts and feel emotions but can’t be bothered to try to render them. In fact, much of the book’s heft comes from literal footnotes, packed with facts about mass incarceration. It’s like he realizes the book can’t hold up as a work of fiction, and so he filled it with information and statistics to provide an unearned gravitas. From the almost uniformly positive reviews, it seems like this tactic worked.