[ book tip by Robert Adlam ] I once worked in a Maximum Security prison. My office was right next to the place where they used to hang the people who’d been condemned to death. 

The man who brought me my coffee in the morning had a beard and smoked a pipe. Good manners meant that one never asked an inmate why he was ‘inside’. Later though, a colleague of mine checked the files: it turned out the prisoner had murdered his girlfriend and then dismembered her body. Maximum Security prisons play host to the darkest stories.

When I picked up Granta 54 – the edition on ‘the best young American novelists’ – I was expecting a shot of dirty, pretty realism. And I got it, from, say, Jonathen Franzen’s story featuring the lawyer for whom lying became second nature. Then I saw Robert O’Connor’s story ‘Maximum Security’. Zap! This was a piece of thanatos fiction. In a quick blade of text I was back inside the nick. Now, though, it was American style: pumped up; extreme – all in heightened colours, as it were.

O’Connor tells it really well. There’s no spare flesh. We get the drift: the threat, the fear, the crude wretched liaisons, the deals made, the twitchy guards, the ethos of violence; we get life stripped down to the minimum. 

O’Connor was teaching a creative writing course to some of the prisoners. That’s how he managed to get so close to them. In just a few short pages, he gives us their style, their foibles, their charm. He gives us two murders and a great insight about hope. He gives us some vivid truths: one unfolds when we meet Hector. Hector was feeling down. Marisa, his common-law wife, had visited him. Marisa told Hector that she had been raped by a drug-dealer. The drug-dealer was now in the same prison as Hector. Marisa begged Hector to avenge her:

'"I told her I would not," said Hector. 
"You chose the right thing," said O’Connor.
"You don’t understand, O’Connor," Hector said. "This means I am alone now. There’s nobody for me."' 

Yep: O’Connor nails a great piece of docu-writing. The other authors in Granta 54 ain’t bad either.  

[ Favourite quote ] '... we had worked on the poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow'. One of the men confessed that he did not know what a wheelbarrow was. The others had jeered at him. "How the fuck do I know wheelbarrows?" he shouted, rising from his seat. "I grew up in the goddamn City. Where the fuck did you grow up?"

[ book info ] Jack, Ian : Granta 54 - Best of young American novelists. (Book language: English) Rea S Hederman, London, 1996 (1996). ISBN: 0-90-314101-9.