Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment by David Guest (review)

56Rocky Mountain Review written from the Hotel Somerset in Chicago in 1922, she speculates on going to school since she "know[s] what I have yet to know" (416); given her track record of employment, this yearning seems yet another momentary distraction. The marriage to Ira apparently supplanted the companionship and security found in correspondence. Rosen suggests that Maimie and Ira may have lit out for the territory, heading to California to try out the movie business. So, while the ancillary materials could be more helpful, Maimie's story itselfis inherently interesting. Readers mustjudge for themselves how reliable the narrator is. JOYCE KINKEAD Utah State University DAVH) GUEST. Sentenced to Death: TheAmerican Novel and Capital Punishment. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997. 179p. rveading Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment at a time when all kinds of people are self-righteously talking about the justice ofthe inevitable "frying" ofTimothy McVeigh in matter-of-fact voices should have been an interesting experience. I wanted it to be interesting and enlightening; I worked hard to make sure I understood the arguments correctly. I looked forward to author David Guest showing me how the "execution novel and the literary artist both participate in and mirror a discourse that facilitates the exercise of power [of the prodigious U.S. criminal justice system]" (xix) and the connection between "popular images of crime and public policy" (xv). Killing killers is a hot topic these days; how, when, and whether to kill "mad dog murderers" seems to be the current U.S. debate. We certainly see it reflected in recent movies such as Dead Man Walking, just as we see the "reality" of the unrepentant, impossible-to-rehabilitate criminal in Primal Fear, Natural Born Killers, and Reservoir Dogs, and the "nobility" and "rightness" of taking the law into your own hands in Slingblade, True Romance, and A Time To Kill. Unfortunately, although David Guest does some interesting things in Sentenced to Death, he never convinces me that the killers he discusses are really victims of an unfair system who are participating in a form of resistance, nor does he show how the novels "participate in the creation of myths that play a powerful but generally unacknowledged role in the correctional system and especially in sentencing capital offenders" (169). One thing Guest does do is provide some new and interesting ways to consider several novels. He discusses the construction of the psychopath in the public imagination, and he does a wonderful job ofdetailing the true life murders on which most of the books are based. He also discusses some of the cultural conditions which seemingly influenced the killers, although the absence ofany mention offeminist issues is unsettling. In all ofthe murders he discusses, women are victims, which clearly should at least be noted in his discussion of cultural factors. 57 Unfortunately, the positive aspects of the book are outweighed by the negative. Guest leaves me wanting him to develop and prove what I consider to be his most important suppositions. For example, in his discussion of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, he writes that, "Under the system that Capote describes, hospitals and prisons are conflated, as are psychiatrists and prison guards, and murders come in a variety of recognizable types" (111). An interesting lead, but he fails to develop the idea, and never gives me another way to think of murderers; he leaves me unconvinced that murders don't come in a variety of recognizable types, such as the serial killer and the sex-motivated killer. In addition, he writes that despite the fact that Capote claims to be friends with the murderers, he portrays them as "murderous time bombs," but he never disproves that the two killers are anything but. He also says that Capote's "criticism of the criminal justice system, if acted upon, would only strengthen and extend that system," but he never clearly explains how this would manifest ( 164). I found this kind of foundered argument in myriad places in Sentenced to Death, leaving me not only frustrated and disappointed, but wondering if Guest himself really believed his own theories. Guest writes that his concern is with "public perceptions of...