... a compact cluster bomb of satire that kills widely and indiscriminately ... If you get it, there’s something rewarding about Chapman’s manic humor, the special satisfaction of catching his references to Foucault, Pentagram or Martin Baron. His satire of academic pomposity, the commercialization of the prison system and the infectious influence of marketing zaps with the power of a highly charged stun gun ... if you’re part of the Venn diagram that subscribes to N+1 and McSweeney’s, this is the most fun book you’ll read all year.
This is not a typical setup for a work of comedy. But somehow, Chapman's book is one of the funniest American novels to come around in years, a sharp satire of the literary scene as well as the broken prison system. Despite the grim subject matter, Chapman packs more laughs into 128 pages than most sitcoms do in an entire season ... the narrator's sheer punchability actually works in favor of the novel. Freed from the obligation to sympathize with him, the reader is able to appreciate the absurdity of the book, and the obvious fun Chapman is having with the story ... Chapman uses pitch-black humor to highlight how broken the system of criminal justice is ... Modern satirical novels sometimes make the rather obvious and fatal error of never approaching anything close to humor, but Chapman avoids that trap. Dark, daring, and laugh-out-loud hilarious, Riots I Have Known is one of the smartest — and best — novels of the year.
Chapman revels in literary parody as his imperiled narrator describes his editorial coups and shares eyebrow-raising tales of his past ... Chapman’s bravura performance is piquant, rollicking, and richly provoking.
... [a] funny and excellent debut ... The narrative gets its most solid comic charge from the ironic disparity between the rough circumstances of prison life and the incongruous need of humans to intellectualize ... dazzling virtuosity. Supremely mischievous and sublimely written, this is a stellar work.
The novel’s being marketed as a guaranteed laugh, but at whose expense? It’s true the novel makes short side-trips to mock wealthy donors and publicity-hungry wardens. But these don’t quite balance out the jokes about anal rape or the stories of casual murder in the showers. Here is a story in which being incarcerated has so little real human effect that MF can insist his 'idle hours' as a doorman 'made the transition to Westbrook relatively painless' ... None of the prisoners, MF included, is especially rounded: The book gives far more space to puns, digressions and asides than to character development ... less concerned with the prisoners themselves than with its late-night-comic’s trope of prisoners, but is repeating a trope with a lilt of irony enough to satirize it, or does repetition merely impress it further into the Silly Putty of our collective imagination? Is Riots I Have Known a rumination on the thoughtlessly dehumanizing way we treat our incarcerated, or simply one more example of it?
... a debut novel that is as eccentric as it comes but also fitfully funny and murderously wry in its humor ... The book is purposefully messy—the prose is breathless, meandering, and riddled with pop-culture references and responses to real-time events on platforms like Instagram and Reddit--but Chapman demonstrates an arch humor that mimics French existentialism as much as it does traditional American satire. It’s even easy to gain an odd affection for our superarrogant narrator despite his supercilious tone and his sentence, which is, as we learn late in the game, for doing something genuinely terrible. This is certainly not a book for casual readers, but those who appreciate a genuinely original stylist and acidly dark humor will find it an odd treat ... A frenzied yet wistful monologue from a lover of literature under siege.
