Manic creations

American mass-incarceration is the most overt object of the ‘protest’ of this novel’s subtitle. The author, Sergio De La Pava, works as a public defender in New York City, and calls on an intimate secondhand knowledge of the many different sorrows to be found in the ripples of a single criminal case. But Lost Empress is also about other kinds of losses and limitations to human freedom. One minor character, a Colombian immigrant striving on behalf of his children, endures labour that ‘felt like a prison sentence’ or an ‘abyss’, opened up by ‘the desaturation of meaning’. He is killed in an accident early on; for his son, the grief is ‘a form of imprisonment’. The 911 switchboard operator and paramedic who respond, and the doctor who tries to save the man, in turn discover the limits of empathy as well as mortality. Hospitals are another form of prison, and so, indeed, is the biological body: ‘Just machines running out of battery power.’

The novel is perhaps more of a depressive meditation on the human condition than a protest. Most of the action takes place in the benighted town of Paterson, New Jersey, where ‘the most basic social reassurances… had faded out of view’. Violence, accidental and deliberate, ‘is what human beings do to each other. Not some human beings, not sometimes. This is what humans are,’ concludes one character. Others come to feel that ‘everything’s already a mass grave with some of the corpses dreaming of life’; that ‘the resting state of life is a kind of dull pain’; or that ‘the main thing humans are meant to do is die’.

As consolation, the reader is invited to fall in love with the two main characters. ‘Impossibly magnetic Nina Gill’ — born wealthy; terrorisingly curvaceous in middle-age — is the world’s foremost genius of American football management and, by implication, of everything else besides.