One cannot help but get immersed in this man’s harrowing but compelling story ... reality and fiction are muddled up. Like the tragedy of Hamlet, we get a play within a work of fiction that could itself be real—layers upon layers of story ... It would be tempting to call Vengeance a protest novel, though that label wouldn’t be fair because it makes it seem like art is secondary to the work, and it isn’t. Zachary Lazar is gifted writer, and his sentences often sparkle as much as they surprise ... Vengeance presents a unique challenge to the reader. If the old adage for reading fiction is to 'suspend disbelief,' then one must take the opposite approach for this book: to suspend belief.
Lazar blurs the lines of reality and imagination in this captivating, provocative novel that reads like nonfiction. The stark depiction of Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, strikes the reader with such force, the sting leaves an emotional mark ... Vengeance is profound in its exploration of the U.S. penal system. It's empathetic without being sentimental in the treatment of its characters, both in and outside the walls of the prison. Lazar's novel is a beautiful specimen of storytelling while simultaneously challenging its audience to reach deep and question the very core of their beliefs. Lazar delivers his tale with language that mirrors the dichotomy of his themes. He can be flowingly poetic or brutally blunt. But he's always effective. Settle in and prepare to be changed by this powerful novel.
What Vengeance really attempts to unravel is the problem of injustice, although it is not a protest novel. Despite its powerful social critique, it is cautious and prismatic, openly troubled by its own claims to authority ... To call Vengeance a 'novel,' therefore, is like titling one of M. C. Escher’s hallucinatory trompe-l’oeils 'Landscape' or 'House.' The art in question is far more deceptive and slippery than the name suggests ... Does life—anyone’s life—have an inherent design, and does that design hold meaning? In some ways, such a deft and supple novel can’t help but voice confidence in its own methods, or at least find redeeming value in the devices of fiction ... Vengeance, itself a tissue of echoes and associations that asks the reader to fill in its gaps, is not ready to dismiss the world’s jumble of shards as meaningless.
Lazar’s narrator is a complex creation, and his occasionally clueless privilege — an important part of the story of race in America — is balanced by painful awareness ... What too much autofiction has in common is a weakness for the self-indulgent, for spelling things out and for elevating the quotidian, the banal into thin profundities. In Vengeance, the frame may be wide (prison, racial injustice) but the range of motion can be narrow and Lazar, on occasion, falls into this trap ... But the lapses are few, and Lazar can be deeply moving as he captures the hopelessness that surrounds him ... The families of Vengeance are torn apart by injustice, and Kendrick’s incarceration leaves a half-dozen ruined lives in its wake. Throughout the novel, we feel heartbreaking possibility, the near miss of lives that might have been.
Mr. Lazar’s book is hesitant, self-conscious and anxiously preoccupied with 'the problem of seeing anything clearly in the time and place in which we live.' The terror and pathos of King’s tragedy are muffled beneath pages of embarrassed woolgathering about the propriety of writing about the case at all. This is doubly strange because it seems evident fairly early on that King was railroaded into his confession. Vengeance worries a great deal about the relativity of truth when its real subject should be the permanence of injustice.
This powerful new novel about a murder investigation, mass incarceration, and the monstrously powerful, profoundly entrenched structural racism in the United States, reads like the best investigative journalism. But it is also deeply literary?with vividly drawn characters, a compelling narrative arc, and philosophical reflections on the nature of justice and perception.
...a moving if hyper-intellectualized meditation on wrongful imprisonment and America’s broken criminal justice system ... Lazar ruminates on hot-button issues—racial profiling and discrimination, police brutality, incarceration and rehabilitation, poverty and privilege—but the lack of three-dimensional characters diminishes the impact of these ideas. Readers looking for an analytical, thorough examination of the justice system will find much to consider here.
Although the imagery in the novel is unfailingly vivid, the characters are too vague to elicit deep sympathy. Perhaps Kendrick needs to remain a mystery. But the narrator, too, is oddly insubstantial ... This heady novel could use more heart.
