The Prisoner and the Chaplain
By Michelle Berry
Buckrider Books, 280 pages, $20
A chaplain stays with a convicted murderer in the prisoner's last 12 hours before execution. Of course, both men have names – Larry and Jim – but each man is reduced to his role in this drama: "No one on Death Row is allowed a name." Where either man slips out of role, a chorus of Correctional Officers puts him back in place. For Larry, the COs perform an odd dance of caring (but not too much) for a person who in a few hours they will legally kill. With Jim, it's a matter of being insufficiently righteous. But Jim knows how close he came to being in Larry's position. The Prisoner and the Chaplain offers resolution not in the way the plot unfolds but in the truth discovered: not in what happens but the insight into what happened. Because this is a novel, we as readers get to be psychologically promiscuous: We know Larry's truth to a degree we cruelly cannot know another person in real life. This is what haunts both men: the mystery of other people, and the ways we remain mysterious even to ourselves.