I picked up a copy of Rene Denfeld’s debut novel, The Enchanted, just because I liked the look of the cover – it was one of the Harper Perennial Olive editions, with smaller dimensions and some subtle but lovely art on the cover. I’m rarely so suckered in by good artwork on a book, maybe taking one off the shelf but almost never just plain buying the book because of it; I figured at worst it would look nice on the shelves (and it wasn’t expensive, since it was a gently used copy from Changing Hands). And my God, am I glad I did. What a wonderful, ethereal novel, one that pulls hope out of the depths of its setting’s despair.
The narrator of The Enchanted is an unnamed prisoner on death row who cannot speak, and who views the world around him through a magical lens of sorts – not as something unreal, but as a world of possibilities, with hope and promise for other people even though he has no chance of either for himself. He explains the story of one of the other men on death row, known just as York, and the investigator, known just as the Lady, who works for York’s lawyers and tries to find information on his past that might earn him a reprieve from the electric chair. Within these stories, the narrator talks about one or two other denizens of the same ward, the incredibly brutal life in the prison, and, very obliquely, about how he came to be on death row, although he never explains what his initial crime was.
The prose starts out seeming a bit precious, what with the lack of proper names for most people in the book, but it suits Denfeld’s incredible gift for storytelling. The narrator’s view of the world comes through in the faint unreality around everything in the novel, even the graphic violence that appears quite frequently, as is fitting for a prison of this sort, where prisoners are killed and raped – and sometimes guards are as well – while no one on the outside really cares, because one more dead prisoner is one fewer mouth for the taxpayers to feebly feed.
The real narrative greed comes in the Lady’s story – her quest for answers about York, about how he came to become a brutal killer who’d get the death penalty, but also how she came to pursue this job, and what wounds this particular search opens up in her. She has an uneasy bond with the defrocked priest who serves as the chaplain for the death row inmates, if they choose to utilize him, which forms a weirdly sweet undercurrent in a novel of so much sorrow, even though her story turns out to be quite dark. Her efforts for York are complicated by the fact that he wants to die, and has asked his lawyers to stop making efforts to spare his life, so when she learns information that might be enough to get his sentence commuted, she has to decide whether to use it or abide by his wishes.
Denfeld worked as a chief investigator for a public defender’s office, often on death-row cases, and shows incredible empathy for her characters here, recognizing that there is humanity in everyone. Even the people who do the worst things might still have humanity in them. They’ve often have had the worst things done to them. Maybe that cost them their humanity. Denfeld isn’t writing them off. Neither is the Lady. And where it all ends up is quite something – perhaps I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t, not really, and the point Denfeld makes with the final reveal becomes the core message of the entire book. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say it’s a plea for empathy and understanding, and I found it extremely moving.
Next up: Jason Kander’s Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD.