David Moloney’s debut novel Barker House comprises 11 narratives spoken by and/or about correctional officers at a New Hampshire prison, an intake facility housing prisoners awaiting trial. Today Moloney teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell – but starting at age 23, from 2007 to 2011, he worked as an officer at the Hillsborough County Department of Corrections.
The voices and stories in Barker House gripped me. While the actions and conditions depicted are sparking critical comment about America’s correctional system, my own reaction hinged on the familiarity of the voices, attitudes and gestures – the sense that Moloney had managed to capture the density of the actual, the qualities of and deficits in our humanity. “It takes certain people to understand the world inside these walls,” says the narrator of “Broken Unit,” and Moloney is certainly one of them. It’s a remarkable performance – produced by a writer who is highly attuned to the sonic and rhythmic qualities of his prose and the effects they trigger. Here below is an excerpt from “Property,” a story about Brenner, a female officer:
“The toothless prostitute stood before her in a ragged pink Juicy Couture shirt, silver-jeweled, ripped Juicy jeans, and high winter boots.
“Show me your hands. Good. Wiggle your fingers. Now run them through your hair. Mouth. What’s that?”
“A tongue ring.”
Brenner had grown tired of the searches, the monotony of ceremony, the stripping down of another woman to nothing. She could make them feel violated inside the inelegant Property Room, calling to order their wrongdoings. There, in their nakedness, Brenner could make them feel any number of ways. Because of this, she may have dreaded the searches more than the inmates.
“You need to remove the ring,” Brenner said and held out her gloved hand.
The new admit fumbled with the rod but got it out. After she placed it on Brenner’s hand, a strong of saliva hung from the inmate’s fingers to Brenner’s. The inmate shook her hand, disconnecting the two of them, and wiped the saliva on her leg.
After dismissing the inmate, sending her back to the tank in Booking to await her transport, Brenner waited in the Property Room for Tully.
He came in and quickly looked away from her. She looked past him at the rows of black bags., the cubbies underneath with boxes of wedding rings and keepsakes, black trash bags of dirty clothes last worn by people losing their freedom.”
Ron Slate / Barker House lays down some strict rules for me as a reader. Its world is so acutely observed and its prose is so efficient that the narrative becomes a kind of enclosure, its patterns highly regulated. I felt that I was being tested — as if I were both an inmate and a rookie officer. I’m imagining — correct me if I’m off base here — that in writing this book, you had to contain yourself as well, to put a certain pressure on yourself that might result in this concentrated effect.
David Moloney / You’re correct. There was much restraint on my end. I’m typically a lyrical writer and I tend to enjoy lyrical prose. It was a concerted effort to deny that tendency I have. So when writing about the jail, and confinement, I paid close attention to the diction and sentence structure. After my first draft, I went back and took out much of the figurative language. Everything had to feel restrictive. It pained me to do so, but I believe the effect it has on readers was worth that significant revision. Since finishing this book, I’ve written stories with my lyrical prose, and it’s felt like being a dog released from a leash in an open field.
Ron / One of the risks of such regulated structure — the pared sentences beginning with predicates, one after another — is monotony. But you elude that pitfall. What’s in your toolbox — and psyche — that allows you to exploit this structure rather than be crushed by it?
David / The way the sentences began to fall into a — what you call — regulated structure, was at first accidental. I spent much of my time at the jail writing incident reports and documenting inmate and officer movement in my pod log. We were directed to state “just the facts” in our documentation. When I wrote a few drafts of some of the early stories, they began like incident reports and then pivoted towards traditional narratives. But I didn’t like the pivot, so I started writing the entire stories with the “just the facts” approach. It kept me in the intended sentence structure, and I believe some readers — maybe most — enjoy structure. It’s almost comforting. If I swayed from the sentence pattern, tossed in purple prose or convoluted sentences, it would have been jarring, and would have betrayed the mood I was aiming for.
Ron / For some readers, like the one I’m about to quote, Barker House shares the mission of nonfiction that uncovers “this country’s increasing inequities of class and mass incarceration.” My sense is that it is a deeply humane and unflinching portrayal of correctional officers. To what extent is your novel a critique of the criminal justice system, if at all?
David / The criminal justice system — particularly incarceration — is failing almost all individuals involved. The inmates have little to no say in their day-to-day time while behind bars. The county jail in my book details many inmates who are pre-trial, which means they haven’t been sentenced for a crime, just accused. But they are treated as if they are guilty. The correctional officers are burdened with enforcing this punishment, even though many of them believe the person should have the rights of an innocent person. They struggle with what they believe to be humane treatment, and what is the institution’s policy and procedure. That is the dichotomy I try to represent in the book. Some officers go too far with trying to treat inmates humanely, and it gets them in trouble. Others use their immense power to punish. I’ve witnessed both scenarios. As a correctional officer, I was guilty of crossing both of those lines — and I considered myself a good officer.
Ron / I get what you’re saying about the failure of the system and how it shapes and warps people. But you’re not an op-ed writer. It seems to me there’s a vision in Barker House about humanity itself, our habitual nature — flaws and weaknesses, selfishness and gratification, failed relations and betrayal. In other words — that Barker House reflects what we simply are. For me, this vision comes as a relief from novels that mainly want to make you feel good about your supposed high ethics and wish for social justice.
David / Exactly. If I wanted to write an apology book for corrections officers, I could have done that. I wanted to write an honest book about the system.
Ron / Five of the chapters are narrated by characters — corrections officers — and seven other chapters and spoken in the third person. But the language is virtually identical in all chapters, a similar perspective throughout. That more than suggests a singular, shared mode of life and a way of thinking. The one and the many are identical. It’s like a stylized mind — and the sound of it is disquieting, even alarming at times. Why did you choose to employ this sound throughout the stories instead of cultivating a distinct voice or attitude for each character and there anonymous third person?
David / I like to think of this as a “work” novel. And when we spend this much time together at our jobs, we begin to take on a singular voice. Most of the characters describe large or heavy things as fat, but also things we normally wouldn’t describe as fat: fat tears, fat paperback, fat hand, fat freckles, fat envelopes, fat chest hair. It was how we described things as a collective voice. That’s only one example. I wanted to illustrate how working in this confined place, with rules, policies, procedures, takes away some of your individuality, even your voice. The institution wants the inmates to all look the same, because it strips them of freedoms. But they also want the officers to do the same. Fresh haircuts, no beards, no piercings. Strict uniformity can make one forget who they really are. And when you rely on co-workers in life-threatening situations, it’s even easier to conform.
Ron / There are so many telling details in the novel — the barely noticed raised to the familiar. One of my favorites — “She wore contacts that messed with her eye color, contacts that were chemical-spill blue, blue like porta-potty water.” Given the general context of the novel, this line truly resonates. The line also reminds me that Barker House is implicitly about class — the cohort from which the officers are drawn, and the inmates. And though race almost always comes up in journalistic discussion about incarceration, its relatively muffled here. What did you want your reader to sense about class and race as you were drafting your chapters?
David / I wanted to capture what it’s like to have a job that isn’t glamorous, but still somewhat respectable. Many people who work in corrections are satisfied with the pension and benefits. The job is also recession-proof, as I lived through in 2008. My father was a postal worker and my mother a janitor. I grew up being content with the safety of stable employment over happiness. In terms of race, the jail is set in the largest county in New Hampshire, which happens to be the third whitest state in the country, just after its neighbors, Vermont and Maine. I didn’t want to force race into a book that wouldn’t necessarily have race issues. Again, harking back on a previous question, I wanted to tell an honest story. The muffling had to do with demographics, realistic ones. There are Cambodian characters, like Rosa, whom you reference in the question. In Lowell, where I live and grew up, we have a large Cambodian population, and that population has crossed into our close border. Many of the inmates I watched over were Cambodian, and I loved being able to discuss the card games they were playing, Cắt tê, or food like butter skillet. But, for this book to mimic my experience, race couldn’t be at the forefront.
Ron / Tell me which authors have inspired your ambitions as a novelist — and which titles you’ve enjoyed recently and are on your shelf now waiting to be read.
David / I’ve been inspired by Tim O’Brien, Andre Dubus III, Ottessa Moshfegh, Joy Williams, and Jesmyn Ward among many others. I just finished reading Teddy Wayne’s Apartment, which was a fun read because it brought me back to the opulence of the late ’90s. I’m reading Emily Nemens’ The Cactus League, which has been extraordinary and a breath of fresh air because it’s a baseball book. I miss the fly balls that just didn’t make the fence, the sound of a ball hitting a leather glove, the smell of roasted peanuts and sausages at Fenway. I just placed a big book order at Bookshop.org, which is gaining significant momentum and picking up the slack of Amazon. I purchased only books by authors whose book tours were cancelled because of Covid-19, and especially if they are a debut author. I can’t wait for that box of books to come in.
[Barker House was published by Bloomsbury Publishing on April 7, 2020, 272 pages, $26.00 hardcover. available for $23.40 at bookshop.org]