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.
The comment that sent Hadley Freeman spiraling into anorexia as a young girl was seemingly benign. A schoolmate who was skinny said she felt envious because she wished she was “normal like you,” an innocuous remark that pitched Freeman into a descent towards self-starvation. As she observes in “Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia,” there’s a difference between trigger and cause: anything could have had a similar effect because she was so vulnerable. For women and girls predisposed to the illness, she writes, “the anorexia was a bomb inside us, just waiting for the right time, the single flame, the trigger.”
A 2011 study at University College London found that when we behold a pleasing work of art, blood rushes to our head in a physiological reflex that’s akin to gazing at a loved one. What explains such an immediate and unconscious seduction? In his new book Affinities: On Art and Fascination, critic and essayist Brian Dillon takes this instinctive rapport as the starting point for a series of elegant and discursive meditations on art’s enchantments.