Louisiana: Louisiana State Prison Angola

Jason Berry's

Author Berry has chronicled New Orleans culture for years and found the story behind Poppas back in the 1980s while reporting on environmental issues as the state suffered under the heavy hand of toxic-waste-loving Governor Edwin Edwards. Over the years he worked on other projects, but as he wrote in the book’s introduction, “Those policies rewarded certain of his cronies and kin while sending poisonous chemicals into the communities of innocent people. Many political sins are forgivable; I have trouble with that one.” Berry’s anger has served him well, as the resulting book is both funny and sad, charming and decadent. It is all about the sins of politicians and greed of the highest and lowest scale.

And although he does not appear, the book cannot deny the retribution brought forth on Edwards, now in federal prison and learning crime does not pay, even when you are elected to four terms in the governor’s mansion .

In the beginning,

Most importantly, though, there is a trio of unforgettable personalities: the First Lady, who holds it all together when it matters most, Henry Hubbell, an assistant attorney general who was leaving it all behind until Rex’s death really fucked up his life, and the Reverend Christian Fraux, a mortician who knew Hubbell’s father and Rex and is about to become critically important to the First Lady. In fact, in a story that spirals in a dozen different directions and moves back and forth between angry wives and a mobster in the State Penitentiary at Angola, Fraux is the magnet for every plot development; he is the heart and the soul of what Rex needed to accomplish and Louisiana needs to happen.

Reverend Fraux is, dare I say it, a good man. But remember this is a novel about southern politics, so don’t expect him to be a fool or a sap or the sort who trusts in God alone. He might be good, but he isn’t stupid, and that critical difference is just one of the reasons why this whole book works so well. Consider that it is only Christian Fraux who contemplates what the dead governor knows:

Fraux wondered if the newly deceased infiltrate our minds, like spies, before we lay them in the earth. People behave in cemeteries because they feel the spirits, those who have gone before, watching, assessing us. It is not God so much as the beloved dead who engender our decorum. The dead know things. What would Rex be thinking?

He almost lost me when the fingers showed up in someone’s kitchen, swear to God. Because this is Berry’s first novel after a steady string of nonfiction publications, I just wasn’t sure if he could do it. You will laugh because so much of this is crazy, but you will also recognize, sadly, how much of it is true. And in the end, when all is revealed, you will wonder who really was bad and good here; even the dead man who should be the greatest victim of all does not entirely seem that way, not really. And the fact that you thoroughly enjoyed reading

Finally, I would be sadly remiss in reviewing

by Jason Berry
Chin Music Press 2006
ISBN 0974199524
302 pages