BINGO: “N,” how silly of me to forget.
hot take maybe a slight round up, but I really did find it unputdownable towards the end
This is one of those flip forward flip backwards books that walks you through (in second person, always a gutsy choice) the present day, when Ansel is scheduled to be executed, and the past, where you see through the lens of three different women “how he became who he became.”
The conceit is to strip the importance of the serial killer to the serial killer plot, and recenter the lives of the people around them–and if we apply the most commonly found gender markers, it means to decenter the male killer and give import to his female victims (and not just those he would have actually murdered). I don’t know how successful this book is in that sense, because it’s hard to change the narrative when, in fact, we only see the other women in relation to Ansel.
But if you set that aside–aka, ignore the author’s note–you end up with an interesting unreliable narrator story and a good test of one’s own moral standing re: the death penalty. Ansel, of course, is pathologically untrustworthy, even as he paints himself (and successfully convinces others) that he is a cold-blooded genius sociopath. Like all stereotypical serial killers he has a manuscript (don’t call it a manifesto) (or do, it might annoy him) that purports to explain the nature of good and evil, conveniently in a way that exonerates him. But one of the funniest bits is when the lead detective (also, coincidentally, a fellow foster sibling in one his many postings) goes to Ansel’s university to ask a professor there about his educational credentials. The professor is immediately dismissive, calling the entire work vague and derivative.
Methinks Ansel hearing that would have been a more humane way to kill him.
But jokes aside, the book is also a good way to interrogate one’s own feelings on the death penalty. I am against the death penalty, a position largely driven by the realities of the practice in the US (i.e., barbaric, racially motivated, frequently wrong, incredibly expensive, etc etc). But then you realize while reading this that those sorts of motivations falter when faced with incontrovertible proof that this man definitely committed these crimes. I felt a bit shaky in my convictions while reading this, but with some time am newly committed on more holistic, less procedural grounds.