No one enjoys jury duty, but few will find the process as harrowing as Abel Cotter does. In a dystopian future, Abel is summoned with others to undergo a series of bizarre tests that assess their worth as potential judges: “Only one person will be left, one fit person.” The chosen will enter the mysterious “repeat room” and render a verdict for the defendant.
This is the beginning of Jesse Ball’s “The Repeat Room,” the prolific author’s 20th book. The premise plays out like an inversion of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” in which we navigate a similarly nightmarish and Byzantine legal system through the eyes of the juror instead of the accused.
Abel enters the courthouse a sad and broken man. He calls himself a “heavy-machine operator” yet is quickly corrected. “Says here you’re a garbageman,” the receptionist replies. “Around here we want the truth.” We learn Abel’s child was taken by the authoritarian state after he and his wife at the time “were deemed incompetent, emotionally incompetent, culturally incompetent.” Just as arbitrarily as he was punished, Abel is soon elevated. Selected as the juror on a case, he is promised access to a better life. “We know the kind of person you are now. Most of the population are still question marks.”
Ball’s future is a cold one where human connection is scarce. “Who draws anymore?” another potential juror says. “If I want a picture of a diver or a musket or an elephant riding a canary, I just ask the telescreen and there it is.” This may seem like an extension of our present, but Abel’s society was reorganized after an upheaval called the Days of the Change. The speculative elements are minimally sketched yet effectively conjure a dystopia of despair and dehumanization.
However, the legal system of this impersonal future deploys a shockingly personal device. The titular “repeat room” is a chamber that allows Abel to experience the story of the defendant. At the halfway point of the novel, Abel enters the repeat room and Ball makes a bold narrative choice: The book you were reading ends, and a new one begins.
The second half of “The Repeat Room” presents a shift in character, setting and style. Ball’s stripped-down surrealism gives way to stream-of-consciousness prose poetry from the point of view of the accused. Raised by parents who “hated the way the world had become,” the man and his sister live in isolation. Their nuclear family is equally brutal and degrading though. The siblings are trained with an “electric shock device” and forced to play various fictional characters to prevent them from “trying to construct a self.” They form an illicit relationship that ends in tragedy. The back cover describes “The Repeat Room,” accurately, as “Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos.” If the first half remixes “The Trial,” the second recalls elements of Lanthimos’s breakout film “Dogtooth.”
Both halves are expertly written, and the second is visceral and moving. But do the halves form a whole? The accused is so removed from Abel’s world that the story could be set in another time and place. As for Abel’s society, what does it mean for a state to expend such absurd effort selecting jurors? How would the repeat room’s empathy technology change society?
The book opts not to explore, leaving the dystopia feeling indistinct from other fictional totalitarian states. Perhaps this is the trade-off of Ball’s composition process. Ball has said that he writes all his books in as little as a day and rarely as long as a week, hoping to “catch a firefly in a glass.” Ball certainly caught something here. “The Repeat Room” is compelling, eerie and dreamlike, even if, like a dream, the parts don’t fully cohere.
The post What if Jurors Could See Life Through the Defendants’ Eyes? appeared first on New York Times.
