Riots I Have Known

Starred review from March 11, 2019
While fellow inmates at the Westbrook prison in upstate New York are rioting, an erudite unnamed Sri Lankan intellectual attempts to put into words his philosophy, personal history, and, eventually, the events that led up to the riot in Chapman’s funny and excellent debut. The narrator has barricaded himself in the Media Center, trying to finish what could be the final issue of his in-house magazine, The Holding Pen. The narrative gets its most solid comic charge from the ironic disparity between the rough circumstances of prison life and the incongruous need of humans to intellectualize. The narrator reports that just before another inmate was stabbed in the yard, “he said: ‘Time makes fools of us all.’” Later he recounts the tale of inept would-be suicide Fritz, who can’t “master the hangman’s noose, he kept falling to his cell floor in a blooper of self-abnegation.” While the narrator documents his uneasy adjustment to prison life and his complex relationship with a pen pal, he is most concerned with his legacy within the niche world of “post-penal literary magazines.” He confesses early on: “I am the architect of the Caligulan melee enveloping Westbrook’s galleries and flats.” The explanation for this claim is offered in spoonfuls; it’s mostly a MacGuffin for protracted yarn spinning and Chapman’s dazzling virtuosity. Supremely mischievous and sublimely written, this is a stellar work. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

May 1, 2019
A hyperliterate prisoner who is barricaded in his sanctuary while a riot unfolds writes his last words. Well-versed pop-culture writer Chapman (Conversation Sparks, 2015) offers a debut novel that is as eccentric as it comes but also fitfully funny and murderously wry in its humor. Our imprisoned narrator is, as happens in a lot of transgressive comic novels, nameless but for his prison moniker, "MF." There's really no character here--we only learn our nameless narrator is an immigrant from Sri Lanka whose previous gig was working as a doorman in New York City--but he serves as a convenient cipher who allows the author to wax poetic about the role of literature in society and the blunt cruelty of the American prison system while enabling his capricious doppelgänger to pen arch reminiscences of his paramours. These include the now-bitterly despised Betsy Pankhurst, with whom, in a flashback, the narrator has an intimately described conjugal visit, and a fellow prisoner named McNairy, with whom he has what he calls a "meet-cute." It turns out that our narrator is the editor of a popular prison journal aptly dubbed The Holding Pen, and apparently one of his missives has triggered the very riot that now threatens his life. The book is purposefully messy--the prose is breathless, meandering, and riddled with pop-culture references and responses to real-time events on platforms like Instagram and Reddit, which the narrator has access to as editor of the paper--but Chapman demonstrates an arch humor that mimics French existentialism as much as it does traditional American satire. It's even easy to gain an odd affection for our superarrogant narrator despite his supercilious tone and his sentence, which is, as we learn late in the game, for doing something genuinely terrible. This is certainly not a book for casual readers, but those who appreciate a genuinely original stylist and acidly dark humor will find it an odd treat. A frenzied yet wistful monologue from a lover of literature under siege.

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May 1, 2019
The unnamed narrator in debut novelist Chapman's surging satire is monitoring social-media coverage of the riot rapidly escalating inside the prison where he's serving time and serving as editor of the prison's renowned literary journal, The Holding Pen, which brought him notoriety outside, pressure within, and which he blames for igniting the current conflagration. Certain that he will die as soon as rampaging inmates reach the media lab where he's sequestered, Chapman's wily, hilariously garrulous, devilishly explicit chronicler rushes to set the record straight in his strategic apologia. Chapman, a Sri Lankan American who has worked at BOMB magazine, revels in literary parody as his imperiled narrator describes his editorial coups and shares eyebrow-raising tales of his past as a Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, where he was an agile fixer for Hilton Hotels, followed by a stint as a doorman at a prestigious Manhattan apartment building. Then there's his disastrous behind-bars entanglement with an MFA student, Janus-faced Betsy Pankhurst. But will he reveal the crime that earned him nine consecutive life sentences ? Chapman's bravura performance is piquant, rollicking, and richly provoking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)