I like when fiction is mobilized in service of an argument. all novels have a perspective, and to a certain extent that can be interpreted as advocating for a position, but works like The Enchanted actively use the medium of literary fiction to make a stand. the reason I appreciate this is because stories can be used very effectively when the language on a subject is underdeveloped or non-existent. Lolita is a good example. the arguments that Nabokov is making about love and America’s effect on the psyche are difficult to put in plain language because we’re socially ill-equipped to receive them, but structured in fiction form they can be engaged with more readily. I think fairy tales work similarly, though there it is less about social rejection of certain explicit ideas and more about the difficulty of engaging with the unconscious directly.

The Enchanted makes the case for a reinterpretation of the criminalization of the most frightening violent offenders. this should be of interest to anyone who is interested in prison abolition. as Denfeld suggests, it is necessary to understand how men (and I do mean men) who commit violent sexual acts against women and children are a product of their environments, but that isn’t a solution to how to treat them. our social philosophy towards violence in the U.S. is extremely crude, and it has resulted in our stunted and exploitative approach to incarceration. I think that Denfeld is suggesting that, for certain people who commit violent acts compulsively, there will always be some form of imprisonment. but right now we are unable to conceive of imprisonment as anything other than a punishment, and of the imprisoned as anything other than monsters. it is possible (at least for some people) to recognize the humanity of people who do horrible things, and in order to move past prisons we need to allow for empathy in containment. or, alternately, we should allow the family members of victims the chance to kill the person who assaulted or killed their loved one. I think both of these options are more ethically correct than our current mode of imprisonment, which is the horror of our times that will be looked back on with revulsion and disappointment by future generations.

Denfeld often writes as graphically as possible about terrible things, which I think is her way of purging herself of the stuff she’s dealt with on the job. I also think that the shitty priest character gets way too much sympathy (i.e., any). some of the writing was clumsy, and the intentional repetition at points was distracting. still, I think we need more straightforward discussions like this about what we call insanity, violence, sociopathy, and all related topics. right now, we’re just too stupid and evil to do anything but throw people in holes.