Pitiful Criminals
(Counterpoint Press, 2014; paperback $16.95)
By Greg Bottoms
Drawings by W. David Powell
It’s hard to describe why I’ve come to love this book as much as I do. It could be because it took me by surprise — no one recommended it to me, I hadn’t read a review, hadn’t even heard of it. One morning I was at the Mason Library in Great Barrington browsing the “new nonfiction” shelves (somewhat absent-mindedly) and Greg Bottoms’ book was face out with its bright orange cover, the word “criminals” in the title accompanied by a prominent rendering of jail bars.
When I flipped through it and saw the short chapters, more than normal amounts of white space, and the stunning photo-like black-and-white drawings (by W. David Powell) paired with each short tale, the lazy reader (and busy person) in me immediately got on board. Short essays (described as “genre-bending” on the back cover)! White space! Pictures!
Then I read the first paragraph of the first piece, called “A Message from Prison,” and was definitely hooked: “I received an email from a Department of Corrections social worker in 2008. She had a message for me from my older brother, Michael. He wanted contact with his family after fifteen years in a prison psychiatric treatment facility, to which he had been sentenced after trying unsuccessfully to murder my mother, father, and younger brother in an arson attempt at our home in suburban Tidewater, Virginia.”
This personal story is the clothesline that each of the criminal tales in the book hangs from — tales about violence and addiction and the luck of the draw, about poverty and privilege, about how narrative and storytelling influence guilt and innocence in a court of law, in our culture, in a family. It’s about the writer’s attempts to understand how he escaped the path that many of his friends and classmates (and brother) did not.
The author is personally connected to each of the crimes — by one degree or two — because he knew someone affected or involved — the victim or the perpetrator — or because the crime took place in his hometown, or near his hometown.
What adds to Bottoms’ earnest investigation into his own beliefs and actions in regards to crime and violence and victimization, is Bottoms’ earned skepticism in regards to authority, the media, and justice.
In a passage after Bottoms tells a social worker at a facility that neither he nor his mother will be speaking to Michael, he writes “Call me cold, but our problem — his problem, but ours by extension — was intractable. I wish I had some kind of easy prescription, something to do with politics and policy, with therapeutic philosophies or biochemical treatment protocols. I wish I could trust in some earthly authority, any authority, but my experience of authorities has always been a letdown, to say the least. We barely know a thing.”
One chapter, “The Shooter,” tells a sad tale about a teenaged girl who shoots and kills the writer’s friend Sammy. Sammy had been at the shooter’s house with two of his friends. He’d had had a crush on her little sister. There were different versions of what happened. “There was no way to prove she knew the gun was loaded,” writes Bottoms. “She had the better lawyer, the better story … and the process of law is the process of storytelling.” Later, the girl would go off the deep-end — drugs, suicide attempts — but then become “born again” through a local mega-church. “Believe what you will, but who can doubt the power of a full-hearted acceptance of those two words — born again — to shift the meaning of a person’s life? . . . What is your life if not an organized, believable story about your life?” There are lines like this last one throughout that make me go back and re-read so I can experience them again and again, searing doorways into thinking about what it is we are all doing here and what “here” actually is.
In “Scarface,” a white, upper-class college student, “Something something something, Jr. Something something Something III,” who “tried to talk like a black gangbanger from Baltimore or Richmond even though he grew up in a mansion on a historic Virginia river,” becomes a somewhat lucrative pot dealer. “Privilege,” writes Bottoms, in one of my favorite lines in the book, “has its privileges, one of which is the freedom to flush your life.” He ends up a victim of a planned and violent robbery, proving, of course, that while privilege may be a guard against legal punishment, it’s no guard against the rules of crime. “The burglar pointed the shotgun at the dealer’s head…and pulled the trigger.” Something Something Something III survived but with half a face and a severe speech impediment.
You get the idea. This is not an easy book. There are thirteen such tales in total, with thirty-eight illustrations (that add some amount of reprieve from the intensity of the stories). The stories are riveting and sad and funny. They are also incredibly thoughtful and fair, accessible and smart. Bottoms references Heidigger, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the movie Dazed and Confused, and the critic-artist-writer John Berger, among others. In other words, there’s no way to really define this book, which is why I love it.
I love how the prose reads almost like a letter — intimate, honest, conversational, vulnerable even.
I love how it pulls all these adjectives out of me as I try to convince you that despite its disturbing content you should read it too.
I love, most of all, Greg Bottoms’ reason for writing the book in the first place: “The mystery of mental anguish, of the mind on the outs with itself to the point of violence, of a version of hell made manifest in a suburban living room, has been the one thing in my life that has brought me to the point where my only option seemed to be to pray, and then, later, to look carefully at life, both present and past, to write life down, to turn these confusing bits of reality into the ephemeral meanings of stories.”
I could not have articulated my own reasons for writing quite so accurately, “to turn these confusing bits of reality into the ephemeral meanings of stories.” He does what he sets out to do, creating meaningful stories that seem to not just ask for my attention and care, but gently demand it.
Pitiful Criminals is available at your local independent bookseller. To find an independent bookstore near you, click here.
