The first pages of Danya Kukafka’s unsettling novel, Notes on an Execution, set the stage for a very uncomfortable read. Not only does Kukafka put us into a death row cell along with one of the primary narrators of the novel, she also writes these chapters in the second person. Having “You” tell their own story forces us into the experience of a very bad person, waiting to receive the ultimate penalty. The other narrators—the detective who hunts down You and the evidence to put You away, the sister of one of You’s victims, You’s mother—are a step removed by having their chapters written in the third person. Kukafka flips the perspective on us, a choice that raises a lot of questions about justice, guilt, and retribution. This book is an incredible feat of writing.
You is Ansel Packer, and all of his chapters count down the hours of his last day on earth. We readers will have little doubt that Ansel is an evil person. We know what he did. We even see how he plans to manipulate the people around him to try and make a break from death row. The mystery in Notes on an Execution is how Ansel came to be caught in the first place. We learn those details through the perspectives of Saffy Singh, a detective; Hazel, the sister of one of Ansel’s victims; and Lavender, the woman who gave birth to Ansel and his brother before fleeing her abusive husband.
Each of the female narrators in Notes on an Execution is a complicated person. None of them follow a predictable path. Their chapters just add more dimension to their characters. Lavender, for example, is a mother who abandons her young family because she can’t think of any way to make them all safe except to run away and leave her boys to the foster system. Hazel, whose sister is Ansel’s final victim, is no saint who speaks for her sister. Instead, she has a jealous relationship with her twin. Saffy Singh might be the closest to an archetype from the lot. She obsessively tries to solve the murders of three women who she knows Ansel killed when he was still a teenager. We’ve seen obsessive detectives before, except that Saffy’s goals are a lot harder to satisfy than just seeing a bad person locked away. And, unlike other righteous law enforcement officers, Saffy harbors a dark desire for her own punishment.
The plot evolves as each of the four characters spills their guts on the pages of Notes on an Execution. Small clues become definitive evidence of Ansel’s guilt, strong enough to make sure that he will never hurt anyone ever again. This book is one of the deftest explorations of crime and the death penalty that I’ve ever read. It never gets preachy and its complications preclude any kind of easy answer. I seek out these kinds of books because, the other I get, the more unsure I am about how criminal justice works in the United States. I’ve seen how much of court proceedings are simple theatre, and how the make-up of a jury can skew verdicts and sentences. And when it comes to sentences, the more I think that there are no good answers. Nothing will ever make up for the losses caused by the guilty; victims will never come back to us. Locking people up or, in some cases, subjecting some criminals to the death penalty doesn’t satisfy those of us outside. How do these sentences force criminals to make amends or “pay” for their deeds? Or is prison, like critics say, just a form of throwing people away? As for the death penalty, the efforts of the Innocence Project should terrify all of us because of how many people they find who are in fact innocent. Even if the person with the death sentence is guilty, punishing a murderer with death strongly reminds me of Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye justice.
Books like Notes on an Execution bring all these questions into the spotlight, leaving us to meditate on the emotional morass of dissatisfaction, grief, anger, and more that’s left in the wake of brutal crimes and the ineffectual sentences meted out by judges and juries. I strongly recommend Notes on an Execution to book groups and readers who like to wrestle with impossible dilemmas.