<em>Chain-Gang All-Stars</em> Is <em>Gladiator</em> Meets the American Prison System
Look for the videos, and you’ll find them everywhere: a stranger getting pummeled in public, the victim of a bloody brawl having a seizure on the ground while people snicker, someone in psychological distress lashing out while the person filming chuckles. In a world where the ability to capture such images and videos via smartphone technology is commonplace, it’s become disturbingly easy for that violence to stop registering with viewers as violence, per se. Instead, these clips are at best just more content in an endless stream and at worst, mere entertainment, with their creators standing to profit if they get enough views. In this way, violence becomes quotidian and commodified. It’s the banality of evil for a new era, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt—who famously coined the phrase after observing just how unexpectedly “normal” the Nazi Adolf Eichmann appeared at trial—might have observed.
This idea is at the core of , a new novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. In a dystopian America, prisoners—into multimedia entertainment for the masses. It is a testament to Adjei-Brenyah’s idiosyncratic talents as a satirist that this premise, which initially seems outlandish, feels disquietingly plausible by the novel’s end.
