Dallas Morning News
Saturday, November 9, 2002

Book ‘Em
Two Texas authors receiving praise for novels with crime at the core

By Jerome Weeks

Two fiction debuts have come out from writers with Texas connections—one born in Dallas, the other living in Austin. And although different, both novels are hard—bitten takes on timely subjects—the one on identity fraud, the other on violent prison life. And both novels have gotten positive national attention. Cool Hand Luke, Dead Man Walking, Caged Heat, The Last Castle, HBO’s OZ and dozens of others—films and TV love to tell us about doing hard time. In comparison, serious American novels are surprisingly quiet about prison, except for the occasional genre thriller from Stephen King (The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption). Which is one of the things that makes Austin writer Alexander Parsons’ Leaving Disneyland (Thomas Dunne, $23.95) a rarity, a serious novel about both prison and parole. Try to remember the last fiction you’ve read in which someone toils at a fast-food joint and phones his parole officer every night. Yet that’s life in America for thousands. The Department of Justice says there are more than 750,000 people currently on parole, more than 3 million on probation. Told from the viewpoint of an aging, black drug dealer named Doc Kane, Disneyland follows Doc in prison as he tries to keep out of trouble. He’s been inside for 16 years for killing his daughter’s abusive husband, and he’s only days away from parole. It’s no surprise, Mr. Parsons says over lunch in South Austin, that more novelists haven’t tackled prisons. “It’s a tough topic,” he says. “Ultimately, there’s no happy side.” Doc, for instance, is getting on in years. He’s 55 years old—not the usual young thug. But that is one unintended result, Mr. Parsons notes, of our current policies of mandatory sentencing, no parole, and longer jail time: aging, ailing inmates. And their medical bills are ballooning: The first prison heart transplant was performed this years. In short, imprisonment is a huge, messy issue that more writers need to address, he argues. That’s not just because of our record-breaking boom in both prison building and incarceration—or because of the dismantling of rehab programs in favor of for-profit prison corporations. It’s because prison gets a writer down to basics, Mr. Parsons says. “Prison questions human nature. It asks, what are we conditioned by? And what makes us human? Take away everything from someone—family, job, home—put him in this rigid, confined environment, and what’s left of him?” In Doc’s case, despite his history of violence, he considers himself a man of honor. But the prison authorities give him a new cellmate: the young killer of one of Doc’s old gang. And Doc’s gang demands revenge—even at the cost of the aging con’s imminent parole.

The son of a professional photographer, Mr. Parsons grew up in New Mexico. You can see the lights of New Mexico State Penitentiary, he says, from his parents’ home. That penitentiary was the site of one of the most horrendous prison riots in history, a 1980 siege that left 33 inmates dead. But seeing those distant lights is as close as the 33-year-old author has actually got to serving time. He laughingly calls his life “dull and uneventful. I’m a superhonky.” A literature student at Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he’s worked at Random House in New York. Having received his master’s at New Mexico State, he currently teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. He had long been interested in prisons, he says, but it was while he was bored as a magazine editor in 1994 in Washington, D.C., that he met an ex-con, a former Leavenworth inmate he calls Ronnie (Mr. Parsons declined to reveal his name—the man was a convicted murderer and heroin addict). He interviewed Ronnie at length, but then the ex-con vanished. Back into prison, Parsons later learned. “I was fascinated by a criminal who held himself as a man of principle,” Mr. Parsons recalls. “His principles may have not been mind, but he obviously was not the stereotypical inmate. … He made me wonder, would I have fared any better in prison?” Mr. Parsons augmented his interviews with research in such books at Pete Early’s landmark work, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison. His novel won the AWP/Thomas Dunne Books Award. Still, Mr. Parsons knows the doubts linger: Why would readers want to read about prison life, especially black prison life—from a guy like him? Indeed, when Americans have to read up on prisons, we’ve turned to journalism and memoirs, to direct experience, from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Even the few novels that have popped up, like Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard, have been written by ex-cons. But such a view of “authenticity” denies any role to a writer’s imagination, Mr. Parsons contends. It limits a novel to autobiography. This is fiction, he says, and it must have the freedom to invent. After all, Leaving Disneyland has a ghosts—no one seems to object to that. “When I read, I like works that take me to other worlds,” he says—as in his just-completed New Mexico novel set in World War II. In short, Mr. Parsons wrote about prison for the same reason that we read about it—to head into the unknown from our armchair. As he says, “I want to read about things I haven’t experienced.”