In This Satire, Televised Blood Baths Offer Prisoners a Path to Freedom

The New York Times, April 28, 2023: In This Satire, Televised Blood Baths Offer Prisoners a Path to Freedom

“Should I be having this much fun? This is one queasy testament to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s talent: You cannot applaud his debut novel, ‘Chain-Gang All-Stars,’ without getting blood on your hands. To enjoy the action is to share in the guilt of the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside at the live-broadcast death matches between prison inmates. Adjei-Brenyah is so good at writing fight scenes that our moral disgust never definitively stamps out the primitive thrill of reading them.

“This is also why his book works. It is an act of protest, but it does not straightforwardly preach. Instead, it lures you in, as if to demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick. Even readers who acknowledge the brazen evil of the dystopian premise — these televised duels offer prisoners a path to freedom — might find themselves titillated by its depiction, which functions as both satire and straight-up sportswriting. The lulls between bouts give readers a beat to think about all the ways they’ve been conditioned to enjoy such a story, by any number of America’s perversions: its narcotic televised pastimes, its singular talent for mass incarceration, its steady innovation in violence technology, its racial caste system, its eternal appetite for retribution. But it’s fun, I promise.

“And yet, as much as this book made me laugh at these parts of the world I recognized as being mocked, it also made me wish I recognized less of it. The United States of ‘Chain-Gang All-Stars’ is like ours, if sharpened to absurd points and flung a few decades into the future. Its most famous athlete is Loretta Thurwar, our protagonist, beloved for bashing her peers to death with a large hammer. In her anonymous prior life, she was convicted of killing a lover. After opting into the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) program, Thurwar left the confines of a private prison and entered a more glamorous kind of captivity. These prisoners, known as Links, belong to teams called Chains, which trudge all day long in Marches all over the country. Periodically they arrive at arenas to fight Links from rival Chains to the death. These battles are presented for the world as pay-per-view sports. The rest of their daily lives, full of internal politics and wanton bloodshed, are packaged as episodic reality television.”

Additional reading:

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on bookshop.org

NPR, April 29, 2023: Author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on his new novel 'Chain-Gang All-Stars'

Vulture, April 25, 2023: Now That He Has Your Attention … Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s dystopic first book was a surprise hit. He’s using his second to ask harder questions.