10 Best "Personal History" Pieces: #6 Danielle Allen's "American Inferno"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Danielle Allen’s searing “American Inferno” (July 24, 2017).

In this extraordinary piece, Allen tells about her fifteen-year-old cousin’s descent into crime, prison, and eventual death, notwithstanding her considerable efforts to save him. It’s a powerful blend of elegy, argument, analysis, and anger. It’s also beautifully crafted. Consider the opening paragraph:

What sets the course of a life? Three years before my beloved cousin’s murder—before the weeping, before the raging, before the heated self-recriminations and icy reckonings—I awoke with the most glorious sense of anticipation I’ve ever felt. It was June 29, 2006, the day that Michael was going to be freed. Outside my vacation condo in Hollywood, I climbed into the old white BMW I’d bought from my mother and headed to my aunt’s small stucco home, in South Central. On the corner, a fortified drug house stood like a sentry, but her pale cottage seemed serene, aglow in the morning sun. Poverty never looks quite as bad in the City of Angels as it does elsewhere.

All the key ingredients of Allen’s approach are here: inquiry, tragedy, feeling, specificity. This passage immediately drew me in. I entered Allen’s world – a starkly contrasting place, divided between her own successful life as dean of humanities at the University of Chicago and that of her cousin, Michael, struggling to start over after spending eleven years in prison for attempted carjacking. Michael, age fifteen, was sentenced to eleven years in adult prison. That is the central, sorry, horrific fact of this piece. How could that be? Allen writes,

The narrative so far is familiar. A kid from a troubled home, trapped in poverty, without a stable world of adults coördinating care for him, starts pilfering, mostly out of an impatience to have things. In Michael’s first fourteen years, his story includes not a single incidence of violence, aside from the usual wrestling matches with siblings. It could have had any number of possible endings. But events unfold along a single track. As we make decisions, and decisions are made for us, we shed the lives that might have been. In Michael’s fifteenth year, his life accelerated, like a cylinder in one of those pneumatic tubes, whisking off your deposit at a drive-through bank. To understand how that acceleration could happen, though, another story is needed.

That story is the sad, rotten history of California’s Three Strikes and You’re Out Law, which took discretion out of the judges’ hands and replaced it with harsh mandatory sentencing. Allen says,

The legislators who voted to try as adults sixteen-year-olds, and then fourteen-year-olds, were not interested in retribution. They had become deterrence theorists. They were designing sentences not for people but for a thing: the aggregate level of crime. They wanted to reduce that level, regardless of what constituted justice for any individual involved. The target of Michael’s sentence was not a bright fifteen-year-old boy with a mild proclivity for theft but the thousands of carjackings that occurred in Los Angeles. Deterrence dehumanizes. It directs at the individual the full hatred that society understandably has for an aggregate phenomenon. But no individual should bear that kind of responsibility.

So fifteen-year-old Michael spent the next eleven years of life in prison, including the notoriously tough Chino. What was that like? Allen tells us:

The years between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six are punctuated by familiar milestones: high school, driver’s license, college, first love, first job, first serious relationship, perhaps marriage, possibly a child. For those who pass adolescence in prison, some of these rites disappear; the ones that occur take on a distorted shape. And extra milestones get added. First long-term separation from family. First racial melee. First time in solitary, formally known as “administrative segregation.” First time sodomized.

When, on June 29, 2006, Michael is released from California Rehabilitation Center-Norco, his family, including Allen, is there to meet him. With their support, his chances of successfully restarting his life seem promising. Allen writes,

Driving back to South Central, my mood was all melody. I imagined Michael felt the same. Little more than a month out and here he was, with a driver’s license, a bank account, a library card, and a job. He was enrolled in college, with a clean, safe, comfortable place to live. This was a starter set for a life, enabling him to defy the pattern of parolees.

But Michael has changed. While in prison he’d fallen in love with another inmate, a relationship that continued, unbeknownst to Allen, after they were released from prison. The relationship was violent. It ended in Michael’s murder. He was just twenty-nine. But for Allen’s potent memoir of him, he likely would’ve disappeared into oblivion like most of the other thousands of black youths incarcerated under Three Strikes who went on to violent death. Allen’s “American Inferno” rescues him from oblivion. It’s a magnificent piece.

Credit: The above illustration is by Mike McQuade.  

Best of 2017: Reporting

Victor J. Blue, “Captain Basam Attallah Shoots at a Cache of ISIS Explosives” (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2017 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Luke Mogelson, “The Avengers of Mosul,” February 6, 2017 (“We accelerated into the lead, hurtling down alleys and whipping around corners. I was impressed that the driver could steer at all. The bulletproof windshield, cracked by past rounds, looked like battered ice, and a large photograph of a recently killed SWAT-team member obstructed much of the view”).

2. Gary Shteyngart, “Time Out,” March 20, 2017 (“If you want a watch that looks like a Russian oligarch just curled up around your wrist and died, you might be interested in the latest model of Rolex’s Sky-Dweller”).

3. Ian Frazier, “Drive Time,” August 28, 2017 (“For me, the dreamy part of metro-area driving happens when the traffic is light and every highway on my phone’s congestion map glows green”).

4. Ian Frazier, “High-Rise Greens,” January 9, 2017 (“Throughout the mini-farm, PVC pipes and wires run here and there, connecting to clamps and switches. The pumps hum, the water gurgles, and the whole thing makes the sound of a courtyard fountain”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Clear Passage,” November 13, 2017 (“On an afternoon in early spring, I talked to two painters from Ahern Contractors, in Woodside, New York, who told me that they were painting the bridge pewter-cup gray. It’s a nice shade, and everything that day—bridge, water, clouds, birds, sky—seemed to be a version of it”).

6. Ben Taub, “We Have No Choice,” April 10, 2017 (“The rescue vessel eased alongside the dinghy, and we shuttled migrants back to the Dignity I in groups of around fifteen. As the rescue boat bobbed next to the larger ship, Nicholas Papachrysostomou, an M.S.F. field coördinator, helped Blessing stand up. She was nauseated and weak. Her feet were pruning; they had been soaking for hours in a puddle at the bottom of the dinghy. Two crew members hoisted her aboard by her shoulders. She stood on the deck with her arms crossed—sobbing, shivering, heaving, praising God”).

7. Danielle Allen, “American Inferno,” July 24, 2017 (“Why did he love her? He loved her because she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He loved her because, of all the men in prison, she had chosen him—and that was a gift of surpassing value. But it was also a gift that came to blind him. When he was finally released from prison, I failed to grasp that he was not yet free”).

8. Evan Osnos, “On the Brink,” September 18, 2017 (“The mentions of war and weaponry were everywhere: on television, on billboards, in the talk of well-rehearsed schoolchildren”).

9. Burkhard Bilger, “Feathered Glory,” September 25, 2017 (“Almost every outfit bore a striking embellishment: a coat of arms, an embroidered badge, a feathered breastplate, tufted sleeves. If you looked closely, you could see patterns in the designs: a heraldic eagle, a pair of rising phoenixes. These were refined, modern designs, yet they had a rude vitality—as if they might peel from the cloth at any moment and take flight”).

10. Nick Paumgarten, “Singer of Secrets,” August 28, 2017 (“Later, when she’d started calling me Uncle Nick or Nicky boy, I’d find myself wondering if this skin-suit episode hadn’t been an elaborate setup, a provocation or even a trap laid by someone known to be in command of her presentation in the world. Or maybe it was just show biz, the same old meat market now refracted through self-aware layers of intention and irony”).

Fact v. Post-Fact

Photo by Victor J. Blue

Stephen Marche, in his “David Shields’s Reality Hunger in the Age of Trump; or, How to Write Now” (Los Angeles Review of Books, August 5, 2017), claims, “Nobody believes that journalists are communicating reality.” What? Nobody believes Luke Mogelson, in his extraordinary “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), is communicating the reality of war against ISIS? Nobody believes Ben Taub, in his brilliant “We Have No Choice” (The New Yorker, April 10, 2017), is communicating the reality of the African refugee crisis? Nobody believes Danielle Allen, in her searing “American Inferno” (The New Yorker, July 24, 2017), is communicating the reality of her fifteen-year-old cousin’s descent into crime, prison, and eventual death? What are these pieces – imitations of reality? No, they’re the thing itself – life as it actually is. Marche is right to complain about writers’ “willingness to blur fact and fiction.” He calls it “profoundly willfully stupid.” But he fails to allow for the abundance of great factual reporting still being written today. His rant against “post-fact” writing is too sweeping. 

Credit: The above photo by Victor J. Blue is from Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017).       

July 24, 2017 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Danielle Allen’s riveting “personal history” piece, “American Inferno,” an account of her fifteen-year-old cousin’s descent into crime, prison, and eventual death, notwithstanding Allen’s considerable efforts to save him. It’s a powerful blend of elegy, argument, analysis, and anger. It’s also beautifully crafted. Consider the opening paragraph:

What sets the course of a life? Three years before my beloved cousin’s murder—before the weeping, before the raging, before the heated self-recriminations and icy reckonings—I awoke with the most glorious sense of anticipation I’ve ever felt. It was June 29, 2006, the day that Michael was going to be freed. Outside my vacation condo in Hollywood, I climbed into the old white BMW I’d bought from my mother and headed to my aunt’s small stucco home, in South Central. On the corner, a fortified drug house stood like a sentry, but her pale cottage seemed serene, aglow in the morning sun. Poverty never looks quite as bad in the City of Angels as it does elsewhere.

All the key ingredients of Allen’s approach are here: inquiry, tragedy, feeling, specificity. This passage immediately drew me in. I entered Allen’s world – a starkly contrasting place, divided between her own successful life as dean of humanities at the University of Chicago and that of her cousin, Michael, struggling to start over after spending eleven years in prison for attempted carjacking. Michael, age fifteen, was sentenced to eleven years in adult prison. That is the central, sorry, horrific fact of this piece. How could that be? Allen writes,

The narrative so far is familiar. A kid from a troubled home, trapped in poverty, without a stable world of adults coördinating care for him, starts pilfering, mostly out of an impatience to have things. In Michael’s first fourteen years, his story includes not a single incidence of violence, aside from the usual wrestling matches with siblings. It could have had any number of possible endings. But events unfold along a single track. As we make decisions, and decisions are made for us, we shed the lives that might have been. In Michael’s fifteenth year, his life accelerated, like a cylinder in one of those pneumatic tubes, whisking off your deposit at a drive-through bank. To understand how that acceleration could happen, though, another story is needed.

That story is the sad, rotten history of California’s Three Strikes and You’re Out Law, which took discretion out of the judges’ hands and replaced it with harsh mandatory sentencing. Allen says,

The legislators who voted to try as adults sixteen-year-olds, and then fourteen-year-olds, were not interested in retribution. They had become deterrence theorists. They were designing sentences not for people but for a thing: the aggregate level of crime. They wanted to reduce that level, regardless of what constituted justice for any individual involved. The target of Michael’s sentence was not a bright fifteen-year-old boy with a mild proclivity for theft but the thousands of carjackings that occurred in Los Angeles. Deterrence dehumanizes. It directs at the individual the full hatred that society understandably has for an aggregate phenomenon. But no individual should bear that kind of responsibility.

So fifteen-year-old Michael spent the next eleven years of life in prison, including the notoriously tough Chino. What was that like? Allen tells us:

The years between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six are punctuated by familiar milestones: high school, driver’s license, college, first love, first job, first serious relationship, perhaps marriage, possibly a child. For those who pass adolescence in prison, some of these rites disappear; the ones that occur take on a distorted shape. And extra milestones get added. First long-term separation from family. First racial melee. First time in solitary, formally known as “administrative segregation.” First time sodomized.

When, on June 29, 2006, Michael is released from California Rehabilitation Center-Norco, his family, including Allen, is there to meet him. With their support, his chances of successfully restarting his life seem promising. Allen writes,

Driving back to South Central, my mood was all melody. I imagined Michael felt the same. Little more than a month out and here he was, with a driver’s license, a bank account, a library card, and a job. He was enrolled in college, with a clean, safe, comfortable place to live. This was a starter set for a life, enabling him to defy the pattern of parolees.

But Michael has changed. While in prison he’d fallen in love with another inmate, a relationship that continued, unbeknownst to Allen, after they were released from prison. The relationship was violent. It ended in Michael’s murder. He was just twenty-nine. But for Allen’s potent memoir of him, he likely would’ve disappeared into oblivion like most of the other thousands of black youths incarcerated under Three Strikes who went on to violent death. Allen’s “American Inferno” preserves his memory. It’s a magnificent piece.

Postscript: This week’s issue brims with great writing. In addition to Danielle Allen’s extraordinary “American Inferno,” there’s Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: Past Customs” (“buzzy synths swell into prominence like a takeoff, asymmetrical percussion mimics the metallic dance of landing gear unfolding, and talk-box samples evoke the chorus of voices, automated and analog, that echo through terminal halls”), Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: Highlands” (“The Catholic Guilt left a taste of anise on the tongue”), Richard Brody’s capsule review of Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (“he sets the characters into mad motion, alone and together—jogging, dancing, fighting, strolling, embracing—and even the static set pieces, in bars and at dinner tables, have the sculptural authority of frozen ballets”), James Wood’s “Handle With Care,” a review of Joshua Cohen’s new novel Moving Kings (“Style is a patent priority: his fiction displays the stretch marks of its originality”), and Alex Ross’s “Tank Music” (“A moment later, the storm broke. Gusts buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a hundred snare drums. The voices bobbed on the welter of noise, sometimes disappearing into it and sometimes riding above”) – all superb!