The Prison Book Club (12 page)

Clive soon learned which rules were worth enforcing and which weren't. After three years of battles, he had recently given up on the question of magazines. Magazines were not supposed to leave the library, so that all the inmates could have access to the latest issues. But whether he housed them in binders on a high rack or kept them locked in his storage cupboard, they disappeared, either to be read or, possibly, taped to their bodies under their clothes as body armor. “One guy would distract me and the other guy would grab it,” he said. He finally told the men: “Here they are. Do whatever you want with them, and don't complain to me if I don't have the new issue of
Men's Health
.”

While he operated with a three-book borrowing limit, it was a limit in name only. Nor did he go to the units to hunt down overdue books. Prison librarians could always count on plenty of book returns each time there was a lockdown and cell sweep. Clive had also grown to accept that when books came back from solitary confinement, the covers might have been shredded by men rolling up strips of paper to use as filters for smoking tobacco or other substances.

I was curious about the reading tastes of the inmates in a medium-security prison. According to Clive, the most popular book among the general inmate population at Collins Bay was
The 48 Laws of Power
, the 1998 bestseller by American author Robert Greene, with its tips on how to influence and manipulate people. In fiction, the hottest books were novels by James Patterson, Tom Clancy, Sidney Sheldon and Wilbur Smith. And Jackie Collins.

“Jackie Collins?”

“Yes, surprisingly, some romance. I have a whole shelf of Danielle Steel.” My assumption was that the men were reading along with their wives and girlfriends, or trying to nurture their sensitive side. But according to Clive, one of the inmates told him that it was the sex passages that appealed.

“What I really want to know is whether our Collins Bay Book Club is having a trickle-down effect on other readers in the prison,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. Some of the books that Carol was giving to our book club members to keep each month were eventually finding their way to the library, usually when those inmates were transferred to a new prison. Rather than just gathering dust on the library shelves, the book club books remained in active circulation, according to Clive. “It must be a word-of-mouth thing—somebody they know said it's a good book. And the fact that there's multiple copies of the books.” Indeed, when we walked over to the circulation desk, it had two copies of Dave Eggers's
Zeitoun
, and several copies of Frank McCourt's
Angela's Ashes
, Joseph Boyden's
Three Day Road
and Mark Haddon's
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
, all stacked and waiting for sorting. Except for the book club books, it was rare for the Collins Bay prison library to have more than one copy of any given book.

If the book club was having a trickle-down effect, then which of the recirculated book club books, I wanted to know, were the most requested by other inmates? Clive had no hesitation before answering: “Books by Lawrence Hill or
Dreams from My Father
by Barack Obama. The Obama book was huge and is still read widely.” I suggested he consider setting up a shelf of Collins Bay Book Club recommended books.

It was our second confirmation that month: the book club was stirring something in the men. How far would that go?

He walked me out of the library, pointing out proudly his shelves of foreign-language titles, including Korean, Spanish, Chinese and Russian, and talking about his hopes to reorganize his collection in categories like a bookstore. The library's existing Dewey system for classifying books didn't make much sense in a prison environment, he said. I had to agree.

Finally it was time for my summer reading vacation. My husband and I drove north for a cottage getaway. I took my copy of
A Fine Balance
, thinking of Frank, but I opted instead to start Hemingway's slim volume
A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
, about his writing and drinking life in Paris. I loved Hemingway's description of all the books he had bought from Sylvia Beach at her Shakespeare & Company bookstore and how they changed him— books by Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. Meanwhile my husband read
All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy, which he loved, and when he finished it, I read it too. I decided to put it on the book selection list. The summer heat had eased. As I sat on the dock, a kingfisher scolded at the shore and I thought about how fortunate I was to be sharing books with inmates.

7

THE BOOK CLUB ALIBI

T
HE SOUND OF BIRDS woke Ben one late-summer morning in his cell, he noted in one of his first journal entries for me. But it was the prospect of calling his “common-law” that got him out of bed that day. The scrawl in blue pen read: “Knowing that someone is actually there waiting to hear from me. I love her deeply.” He wrote about how empowering it was to have Carol and me also caring about his direction in life. These musings gave way to more anxious thoughts, as the prison went into lockdown following some guards' sighting of metal pieces being smuggled in to make weapons. “You do see a lot of homemade weapons—shanks—that could kill or do real damage to a person. There's been a lot of tensions on this block lately. I avoid it at all costs. You could end up doing life if you react to everything.”

I was grateful that Ben could escape in his reading to the gentle and humorous novel up for discussion that month:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. I had recommended it chiefly because it was set during the World War II German occupation of Guernsey—a relatively obscure episode in the war when the English Channel island became a virtual prison. Although the residents managed to evacuate some four thousand of their children before the Germans invaded, food and other resources were in short supply for the islanders who remained. But I also wanted the men to read the novel because it dealt with how a book club helped the characters survive the occupation.

In the story, when a German patrol apprehends a group of island residents out past curfew, the islanders invent an alibi. They explain that they were simply attending a meeting of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. In order to give credibility to their alibi, the individuals start reading, even though some of them are farmers and fishermen who have rarely picked up a book in their lives. For anyone who has found community through talking about literature, the situation is instantly recognizable.The book topped the
New York Times
bestseller list at one point and, when I last looked, had one of the highest Goodreads average ratings at 4.1.That beat the Goodreads rating for
One Hundred Years of Solitude
,
The Catcher in the Rye
, Jane Austen's
Emma
, and
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
.

Carol was a little worried about my book choice, given that literary female readers were considered its primary audience. An epistolary novel that opens in 1946, the story revolves around Juliet, a thirty-two-year-old London-based newspaper columnist who receives a letter from a stranger named Dawsey, writing from Guernsey soon after the war has ended. Dawsey explains that he found her name inside a book by Charles Lamb called
Selected Essays of Elia
, and he asks for the name of a London bookstore where he could find more books by the same author. He also mentions the island's book society. Juliet's curiosity is piqued and she begins a correspondence with Dawsey and other islanders to find out more about the book club. In no time, she is caught up in the lives of the residents and travels there, ostensibly to include Guernsey's book society in an article that she is writing for
The Times
on the philosophical value of reading. As she tells Dawsey in a letter, all she'd come up with so far was the idea that books helped prevent people from going crazy.

It was perfect for the men, I assured Carol. After all, reading was keeping them from going crazy.

Gaston arrived early for the meeting and walked purposefully toward Carol and me. I couldn't help thinking that the way he shaved the sides of his head for a “high and tight” brush cut made him look more like a cop than an inmate. “I have an interesting proposition,” he said to us. “I'm coming up on exactly one year to my statutory release. I'm thinking what could I do to challenge myself for one full year that would form as a habit to make me a better person when I get out.”

Carol and I looked at each other. “Do you want to read the classics?” she asked him. What was she thinking? I wondered. Wasn't he already tackling a significant amount of reading?

“There we go,” he said, then hesitated, the two vertical creases deepening between his sandy eyebrows. “But I want something that will be beneficial, not a waste of time.” He explained that he'd already done some college courses on business and counselling and that he expected to return to landscaping when he got out.

“It's not a trade enhancement, Gaston,” I said gently. “It's a life enhancement. And if you could commit to writing a journal about your reading every day for me, it would reinforce the habit.”

“What would you do, Carol?” he asked.

“I would read the ‘great books' and I'd get Dennis Duffy, a former English professor of Ann's and mine to draw up your reading list.” And that was that. Carol was a firm believer in the value of reading.

Gaston then introduced a new member he'd recruited, Peter, a slight man in his mid-thirties, who seemed to be conscious of not horning in on Gaston's camaraderie with Carol and me. The other members began streaming in, and it was time to start. Carol gave them all leather bookmarks that she'd purchased on her summer vacation in Tuscany. Ben chose one that had gold decorations and a fringe.

The men's enthusiasm for the book spilled over in the early minutes of the book discussion when Carol and I asked them to talk about how they felt about the main characters. Every member had plot and character details at his fingertips and they all laughed in recognition at one another's recollections of high points in the novel. Ben thought Juliet was gutsy. He liked the fact that she decamped from her bombed-out apartment in London to travel to Guernsey on the basis of a few letters from Dawsey and other islanders. Gaston, the bank robber, liked that she turned down a rich American suitor. “He said I'll give you everything, riches and all, and she still said no,” Gaston recalled.

But Dread singled out another character for the men to consider: Elizabeth, the woman whose quick-wittedness saved the group of islanders out past curfew. When German soldiers trained their guns on them, it was Elizabeth who coolly concocted the literary society alibi to conceal the truth that they'd just finished dining on a roast pig, a rare smuggled treat at a time when food supplies were low.

A new member with a name tag that read JAVIER agreed with Dread. He spoke in a voice that was even deeper and richer than Derek's, and was handsome, with a small pirate earring gleaming against his jawline. Javier found Elizabeth outspoken and brave to stare down the barrel of the gun and invent a story. But Peter wasn't so sure. He had noticed that the soldier holding the pistol was also grinning suggestively at her. Peter's suspicion was that the soldiers were aware of her covert affair with a kindly German soldier among their ranks. “It just seemed kind of lenient,” said Peter. I flipped to the page. The novelists hadn't insinuated that the German's reaction was anything more than a delighted smile, certainly not leering. But it was interesting that Peter read the situation that way.

“The whole climax was built up around Elizabeth, hoping that she would still be alive,” Dread went on. “And when she died, it was so devastating.”

As the character discussions moved on to Juliet's various suitors, it was clear that the men were comfortable with discussing love interests. First, they assessed Juliet's London-based book editor, Sidney. “Sidney had a crush on Juliet,” volunteered Javier.

Someone in the corner disagreed: “Sidney's a homo.”

“Are you saying he's a gay man?” asked Carol, gently trying to steer the group away from homophobic slurs.

“But it doesn't actually say that,” said Gaston. “It's after that you find out that's his preference.”

“Right,” said Carol. “Did you imagine Juliet as beautiful and charming?”

“Yeah, I imagined that,” said Javier.

“And she ended up with … ,” said Carol.

“Dawsey!” everyone said simultaneously, keen to fill in the blank.

Dawsey is a character of few words in the novel and, as Gaston said, was “never going to put it together” to reach out to Juliet, but his kindness was magnetic to her.

Now that I knew that Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel were popular in men's prisons, it was less surprising to find that the men appreciated romance in literature. I sensed that it was a reassuring reminder of the world that waited for them outside prison, when they could fully resume lives with their partners.

We asked the men how they felt about reading a novel that unfolds as a series of letters between Juliet, the island inhabitants and others. I expressed how some of the early letters between Juliet, Sidney and Juliet's friend Sophie seemed a bit precious and self-conscious to me. But Peter said it was “like being an invited eavesdropper. It made me feel like I was part of it. You get to be trusted with information people are willing to share only with people that are close.” And Javier said that he'd enjoyed another epistolary novel about an inmate who wrote letters home that tracked his transition and his moods. I recalled that one of the earliest epistolary novels in the English language was written by an inmate in Fleet Prison in the 1640s, James Howell.

The chaplain, who had also read that month's book, said to the group that reading a book told through letters was like opening the mail. He was talking about that moment of anticipation before you open the seal of a personal letter. I realized that letters, after all, were a lifeline for people in prison. Under the rules at Collins Bay, however, by the time an inmate receives a letter, the seal is already broken. All letters in and out of federal prisons are opened and their contents inspected. If a security issue is suspected, the authorities also have the right to read the letters.