Chain-Gang All-Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Pantheon, 2023

Everywhere you look, high and low, there are rave reviews of Adjei-Brenyah’s novel Chain-Gang All-Stars. This is only half a review because I think it’s all the book deserves. I was disgusted with it and with the ravers. While seeming to satirize the guilty-pleasure methods of mass media entertainments, the author uses those very methods to make his novel a mass media entertainment—about killers with superhero powers.

In a dystopian American future of pervasive private prisons and sophisticated shocking devices, prisoners with long sentences, often for murder, can choose to participate in “chain-gang” teams that pit individuals against prisoners in competing teams. Survive enough of these death matches in packed stadiums and prisoners can gain their freedom. The matches, as well as the “private” lives of the combatants, are televised to great ratings.

Repeat survivors become celebrities and through sponsorships earn better food and weapons, which help them achieve superhero status and capture even more audience identification and affection. The novel has two such heroines, Black women called Staxxx and Thurwar who are in the same chain and in love. Both were imprisoned for murder, but we don’t learn much about their acts or lives before they became skilled killers and sensitive lovers. Will their love fail? To all the violence, Adjei-Brenyah adds a sop of soap opera.

Characters get or take catchy names like pro wrestlers. The characters spend some of their time in inhospitable nature like participants in Survivor. They have different weapons like, I guess, gladiators. When gangs compete as teams, the action, broadcasters, and fans’ response are supposed to remind us of professional football. Mini-drones constantly record characters’ intimate moments, including deaths, presumably to remind us of our cell-phone and CCTV surveillance state.

Not far into the novel, Adjei-Brenyah has a chapter in which a husband explains to his wife why she should be as fascinated as he is with the chain-gang telecasts. Her faint resistance was the seed, somewhat belated I confess, of my disgust with the author’s attempt to elicit readers’ complicity in his farrago of victimization. “The GameMasters,” he says, “who sewed together story lines through matches and choreographed serendipity, they loved the obvious.” So does Adjei-Brenyah. He wants readers to be as uncritically immersed in and compelled by his novel as television viewers are by the murderers and their killings—and he uses the same addictive methods, alternating details of violent action with close-ups of his heroines, building suspense toward the one-on-one fight that always ends crappy movies. The author wants readers to be prisoners of Chain-Gang All-Stars, of his manipulation and exploitation from which, like the owners of prisons and the purveyors of televised entertainment, he can profit.

Every few pages, Adjei-Brenyah provides footnotes, some invented, some factual about American prisons: the preponderance of Blacks and other people of color; the torture of long-term isolation; the psychic costs of hopelessness. He also includes a few chapters about a small courageous group protesting the existence of prisons. What he ignores by focusing on former and present murderers is that high rates of Black incarceration are primarily a result of low-level offences, mostly drug related. To have effect, a dystopia must bear some resemblance to the “topia.” The chain-gangs are empty invention. The stories in Adjei-Brenyah first book, Friday Black, are rather juvenile in their fantasies and inventions. In Chain-Gang All-Stars, he pushes up to sophomoric horror.

If Adjei-Brenyah had really wanted to address incarceration and long sentences, instead of writing high drama for low-end television, the information in the footnotes and the protesters’ speeches could have been bases of a realistic—and outraged-- prison novel such as Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room. But it was not a best-seller. Chain-Gang All-Stars may not be either, but not for lack of trying, for racing to the bottom. With this first novel Adjei-Brenyah has enthusiastically joined the Industrial Entertainment Complex.

Tom LeClair is the author of the “Passing” sequence, five novels about the basketball playmaker Michael Keever.