The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison by Mikita Brottman
I think I may have hit my saturation point for books about people talking about books, and this is only the third I have read (the others being The Jane Austen Book Club and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress). Yet, I still liked it, which basically meant that there was a lot more to this book than just the novels they were discussing. So if you’re going to write your own book about a book club, make sure there’s something there besides just the literature.
This book is about literature, but it’s also about the men in this maximum security book club. Prison literature is not a subgenre I’ve read widely in, so I liked reading something that broadened the narrow path illuminated by Shawshank Redemption and Orange is the New Black and the book that show was based on. Mikita is drawn to these men, and empathizes with their plight. I didn’t feel as much of a connection. I didn’t feel as if I really got to know enough about these men to overcome the gulf of difference between their lives and backgrounds and values and my own.
Mikita hints that she knows the reason most of them join the book club was out of a combination of a profound sense of boredom and because they happily look at any woman they can. Life in prison, you have to agree, is pretty awful, and any diversion from the soul-deadening monotony must be welcome. But this sympathy didn’t really make me want to like them. To quote Melville in Bartleby the Scrivener, one of the books they cover, “So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not.”
Let me make a confession: I have an intrinsic mistrust of anything described as LITERATURE. All of the great white dead men classics were forced down my throat in high school, and it cultivated a revulsion that has taken decades to dissipate. I read HEART OF DARKNESS at the age of 16 and found it tedious and confusing, and it was heartening to find that the men found problematic as well. Brottman’s enthusiasm and love of the same book I found tortuous felt like going to a really terrible restaurant with a friend and watching them gush about how awesome it is that you’re eating this amazing food with such a cool vibe, and you pick up your greasy fried lump and look around at the threadbare carpet in a beige room full of cranky old people and wonder what they’re seeing that you’re not. I wonder if LITERATURE is like nasty bitter beer that you only like after 20 years of drinking increasingly bitter beer until you start to associate unpleasantness with high-quality. If you have to re-read a book several times to like it, does that mean that it’s better, or just that it’s inaccessible? And why re-read a book you dislike, when there are hundreds of thousands of other books you haven’t even opened? Is she an enlightened aesthete, or just a slightly masochistic pedant who wants to impress people with her taste? This question haunts me. Brottman is like that one person in every club I’ve ever been in who is so much more gung-ho about it than everyone else and kind of intimidates people with her passion (to be fair, once or twice I have been that person.) I love books, but LITERATURE and I have had an uneasy relationship. I wonder sometimes if the surest and most reliable way to take an avid reader and turn them into someone who hates reading is to give them inaccessible books, imply that they are the best the world has to offer, and force them to read them and then discuss them ad nauseum. It works for me. So I was curious how these men would feel about reading these books. Would they hate them too? Turns out, mostly they did.
The prisoners seemed to find HEART OF DARKNESS as inscrutable as I did. With Nabakov, I also sided with the prisoners. Brottman loved Lolita, which I read recently and enjoyed, but Brottman sees it as a love story first and foremost, and is aghast when the men merely see Humbert as a fancy-talking pervert. I sided with them on this, that it’s hard to feel sympathy and pity for a man who is preying upon the very type of girl you yourself desperately want to protect.
The other books I hadn’t read, so I couldn’t really relate to the story at the same level. In general, they felt less sympathy and pity for other people, probably because their own lives were and had been so hard. I liked the stories of the assignments she gave them, like when they had to write letters to the sister of the guy who turned into a cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It seemed as though the men were really getting into the books, and I shared Brottman’s delight. And then I shared her disappointment, as she learns that their love of literature exists only within the confines of the prison. Alas, the story of a woman who gets her heart broken when she tries to make a connection with a man locked up in prison is a well-worn trope, though usually literature isn’t the vehicle.
