THERE’S A ‘RIOTS’ GOING ON
Merrill House author to discuss satirical prison novel
The literature of incarceration spans the expected emotions: Righteous anger. Poignant hope. Bleak despair. Violence as a pathway to power or survival. And enough wry, chortle-aloud punchlines to explode the headliner tent at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival.
If that last example seems out of place — if your experience with prison writing is limited to “In The Belly of the Beast,” “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” or even “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” — it's time to cheer up! In his first novel, 2019's “Riots I Have Known,” Ryan Chapman, the October writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington Borough, delivered one of the funniest satires in recent years — set entirely during a one-day riot at a penitentiary in Duchess County, New York.
From 5-6 p.m. Saturday, Chapman will read and discuss the book and his new work in an online presentation that can be viewed on the Merrill House YouTube channel. Chapman will be joined in conversation by novelist Joanna Scott.
In “Riots I Have Known,” the unnamed narrator, a Sri Lankan inmate who edits and publishes the prison's literary magazine — The Holding Pen — has barricaded himself inside the institution's computer lab in hopes of completing his final “Letter from the Editor” before falling victim to the horror-show carnage slowly making its way through the prison. But what does the editor wish to convey in his final missive? Well, it's hard to say.
In the fine tradition of literary anti-heroes whose self-importance and inability to, as Joe Biden might say, “Shut up, man!” preclude any possibility of focus and clarity, the editor opines snidely on an incredibly wide variety of topics. As the real-time tension mounts in the blood-slopped walls of the prison, the editor's message is relentlessly hijacked by his own countless mocking observations, biographical flashbacks, and self-aggrandizing endorsements and justifications.
This is all saved from boorish monotony because Chapman is not only incredibly funny, but his sense of tone and pacing make the reader eager to roll along with the detours. The editor, after all, coniders himself blessed with a range of knowledge reminiscent of the Watson computer, a worldview like Schopenhauer if his cellmate was Don Rickles, and a vocabulary that would cause Daniel Webster to abort his dictionary project as too ambitious. Nothing and no one are spared across the realms of politics, society, history, class, and pop culture.
All this is filtered through the prism of incarceration and, oh, yeah, with a bit of resentful focus on Betsy Pankhurst, a femme fatale journalist whose forthcoming book, published by Knopf (no less), is titled “Handcuffed: Sex and Madness with the Widow Killer” and thus provides the best possible clue of why the editor is in prison to begin with.
And Chapman delivers, non-stop. To read “Riots I Have Known” is to undertake an exercise regimen wherein one cackle barely dies off before the next begins. The support characters and their idiosyncrasies and backstories are revealed in delicious tidbits, interwoven with the narrator's circuitous blathering and real-time updates on the progression of the tumult — but it all coalesces and makes a mad, beautiful sort of sense.
Though “Riots I Have Known” is Chapman's first novel, his credits are extensive. A Sri Lankan-American originally from Minnesota, he's lived in New York City and the Czech Republic. He worked in an online editorial capacity for the Penguin Press and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and his short fiction and journalism have appeared online at The New Yorker, McSweeney's, BookForum, BOMB, Guernica, and The Believer. A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and the Millay Colony for the Arts, he and his wife live in Kingston, New York.