Posted on March 10th, 2022

It would be easy to skim the back cover of “This Life,” the vital, inventive new novel by Quntos (pronounced “QUAN-tuss”) KunQuest, glean the fact that the author has, for the past twenty-five years, been incarcerated at Angola prison, in Louisiana, for a carjacking committed when he was nineteen, and presume that the book belongs to the genre of prison literature predominantly concerned with exposing to the world outside the horrors of the one within. There is a significant nonfiction tradition of these books. Piri Thomas’s “Down These Mean Streets” and “Seven Long Times” dealt with how incarceration effaces the humanity of its subjects. Sanyika Shakur’s “Monster,” which recounted his years as a Los Angeles Crip and his multiple stints in prison, graphically described routine violence and sexual assaults in the system. And Piper Kerman’s memoir, “Orange Is the New Black,” illustrated the material and moral costs of the war on drugs.

That Angola—a facility that began as a slave plantation—was the setting for another recent book, Albert Woodfox’s “Solitary,” a sprawling memoir of the decades Woodfox spent in solitary confinement, is even more ballast for suspicions about what “This Life” has in store. But part of what makes the book memorable is the fact that KunQuest—perhaps because he’s working in a fictional mode—is concerned with a wholly different and more subtle set of questions. “Once you’ve been in the fire for so long . . . you get used to the heat,” he told me recently, when we spoke by phone. “Once you get used to the heat, you start living, man.”

“This Life” is the story of an intergenerational set of men, all of whom are serving time in the same prison. Violence is a possibility, but no more so than wonder, friendship, hope, and, significantly, creativity. The latter forms the basis of the book, as freestyle rap battles between its primary characters serve as a kind of narrative device, which unites the plot’s disparate strands. There is conflict—mainly between Lil Chris, a new arrival, and Rise, who’s been inside for years—and that conflict drives crucial decisions. But there are also the mundane facts of daily life, the seemingly disposable moments that reveal much more about the characters than the dramatic interludes do.

Original article: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-man-rewriting-prison-from-inside