SO FAR GONE
Paul Cody
Many writers have attempted to plumb the criminal mind, but few have given us as penetrating and compassionate a portrait of both the mind and soul of a murderer as Cody does here. Guilty of the grisly triple murder of his parents and grandmother, Jack Connor spends his last days on death row. There, at the suggestion of a priest, he writes down his dreamlike memories of abuse. These passages are interspersed with testimonies from a series of narrators who try to understand the crime and the man who committed it. With calm, lucid prose that renders events harrowing but never sensationalistic, Cody sketches Jack’s dazed, self-loathing existence, a life divided between involuntary stays on a mental ward and despairing years spent in the family house, where he lives on a diet of alcohol, true-crime books and prescription drugs. As Jack’s misery builds, the narrative gather momentum, speeding the Connors and Jack to their respective dooms. Cody (Eyes Like Mine, 1996) maps the emotional geography of the family with as much confidence as he delineates their depressed, Boston-Irish suburb. Although the witnesses whose testimonies we hear tend to be types (sentimental fireman, self-important undertaker, peppy but conflicted journalist, racist prison guard), they function well as a chorus that evokes the effects of violence on a community. The moral discomfort of the journalist—who seizes on the Connor murders in order to make her own career—elegantly complicates our own interest in Jack’s crime. Collectively, the voices of these people comprise a taxonomy with which Cody delineates some of the imperfect ways we try to make sense of the senseless. The cumulative effect of the juxtaposition between these outside voices and the voice of Jack, imprisoned within his tortured self, is stunning.
Publishers Weekly
March 9, 1998