The Confession

The Confession

John Grisham

I’ll admit, I heart old-school John Grisham.  The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client.  My stack of ten paperbacks stands as ­a (sad and wobbly) monument to my sadly un-ironic love of stories featuring small-town lawyers, poor defendants, bad guys in black hats or black suits, all soaked in bourbon and sweet tea and set out to dry in the sun and dirt of the rural south.  (It also testifies to how much I love used bookstores).

Once his lawyers got richer and started turning into corporate douchebags in fancy cars and private jets, I aggressively lost interest.  The Confession reads like vintage Grisham.  It’s like The Chamber, but from the opposite side of the coin.  I read it straight through in three days, nose-in-book, doing things with one hand and trying not to bump into the walls, the way I read when I was a kid.  It made me want to watch The Client, and Dead Man Walking, and maybe also Thelma and Louise because I just love Susan Sarandon that much.

The plot is so sadly familiar.  A cheerleader disappears and, after a couple of weeks, the police have no idea what happened to her.  They arrest Donte Drumm, an 18-year-old football player.  Legally an adult, he’s interrogated for hours without his parents, without a lawyer, without any recordings of the interrogation.  No physical evidence, no body, an anonymous tip to the cops, a confession full of factual inaccuracies and leading questions.  Any one of those things should add up to reasonable doubt…did I mention that he’s convicted of murder and they can’t prove that anyone’s dead?...but none of those things make a difference.

I was about a third of the way through, on August 18^th (trust me, the date’s significant), and realizing that Donte was going to be killed for something he didn’t do.  It made me feel horrible, because it reminded me of Damien from the West Memphis Three.  I ran the Arizona branch of the support group for years, spent a lot of hours tabling out on Roosevelt on First Fridays, telling anyone who would stand still long enough to listen about three boys in jail because they wore black clothes and listened to heavy metal.  I saw Wil Wheaton at a benefit years ago, and was so busy going ohmygodit’sWesleyCrusher!!! in my head that I was too shy to go up and say hi to him.   I hadn’t checked in with the effort for years, mostly because I was terrified that I’d find out that they’d set a date for execution or worse.   It was also the beginning of a bad time in my life, and a lot of my memories are colored with memories of a bad ex-boyfriend. 

In a weird moment of synergy from the universe, the next day the news broke that they were being released.  It was the happiest I’ve felt in a long time, and it felt wonderful to be so purely happy for someone else.  And it happened without the ex-boyfriend from hell.  It felt like, because I had the end of the experience by myself, he was cleansed from the entire experience.  Like someone took a giant bunch of sage and smudged him the fuck out of my memories.  I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair, except with voodoo incense that you use to chase spirits from your home.  Suddenly, like everything was shiny and new, and a part of my old life was mine again.  

Fault Lines

Fault Lines

Nancy Huston

I used to date this guy.  The fact that he was an absolute and total raging douchenozzle is immaterial to this story, except that I can’t think about him without wanting to punch babies.  But anyway, I used to date this guy.  All the before-the-sex stuff was amazing, but then the actual sex was, well, not long enough and also 4” too short.  The fact that the preshow was so good made the actual event even less of a show. 

This book was kind of like that.

I love love loved the beginning.  It’s a generational story, working backward from California in the mid-2000s to Germany during WWII.  The first section is told by this precocious, slightly terrifying six-year-old named Sol.  He thinks he’s the center of the universe, which is normal for a six-year-old, because his mother tells him he’s the center of the universe, which I understand has become normal for parents.  The book reminded me that kids think magically instead of rationally, not stepping on cracks or believing in crossing your fingers and holding your breath while making a wish, but the book also reminded me that the mid-2000s must have been a scary time to live in a world that operates on magical rules.  Sol wants to grow up to be George Bush (or God), wonders if heaven is like Texas, and sneaks off when his mom is busy to look at porn and pictures of Abu Ghraib. 

After Sol’s section, the book moves backward through his father, grandmother and great-grandmother, all of whom share his self-centrism and perfectionism.  As it moves back in history, the story seems to move more and more inevitably toward the big reveal, which is that his great-grandmother was kidnapped from her family as part of the Lebensborn program in Nazi Germany.  (In part, the program “reassigned” Aryan-looking children from occupied countries to high-ranking SS families). 

Ultimately, while I loved the narrative, the ending had the effect of explaining away the darkness that runs throughout the family.  They’re drawn to violence and obsessive self-control not because we all are, but because someone planted that seed in their family line.  They have an out, which feels like what we’ve all been looking for in the last decade.  I didn’t want Himmler to be the bad guy; I wanted us to admit that the bad guy is in all of us.  It’s a lot to ask from this book, and it wasn’t the point of the book, but I loved the beginning so much that I wanted more from the ending.