Book Report: Notes on an Execution

19. Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution (2021) (8/23/21)

This is not a thriller, though it is about a serial killer—but we know from the start who he is, and gradually we learn why he did what he did, including, perhaps, on a more existential level. It's really something of a character study—multiply. The killer, for one, as well as his mother, who abandoned him at age four, for urgent reasons; his wife's twin sister; and the homicide detective who tracks him down, who also happened to be in foster care with him as a teenager. And also the four victims: they are characters too, though their lives were cut short. The way they all intertwine brings an emotional complexity to the story.

The book is structured in such a way as to keep the reader's interest. It begins "now," twelve hours before Ansel Packer, inmate 999631, is scheduled to die by lethal injection. In this section we are given a few clues to stories that will be fully developed much later on, though for the moment they are simply puzzles: who is Blue, and why did she write him a letter? what is the Blue House? We then move to 1973 and his mother, Lavender's story. Over to Ansel, with ten hours to go, and again back, to 1984 and Saffy—the detective, but now she's a teenager, smitten with but then repulsed by Ansel. Eight hours to go, and then 1990 and Hazel, the day she first met Ansel, who would become her sister's husband—and eventually, killer. And so forth: the chapters alternately count down to zero and Ansel's execution, and detail, at various points in time, a few of the women who knew him and continue to think about him, for various reasons. 

I found the writing to be excellent, and the emotional resonance strong. Throughout the story, Ansel refers to his "theory," which is basically that we all, always, have multiple (infinite) choices available, and depending on what we choose, that's how our life will play out. Though of course he's wrong. Some aspects of our lives are set in motion well before we're even born, or are spinning certain inevitabilities off on the sidelines somewhere, until the moment we engage. It's nice to think we have control, but as this story itself demonstrates, it's just not the case. One thing, too often, simply leads to another. 

Kukafka writes, "There is a universe out there, made up of girls and women, stranded by a fiction we insist upon repeating. I wrote this book to give them a chance to exist beyond the men who steal the narrative. The story of the serial killer is bigger than the bodies he leaves behind—it encompasses an infinite web, an elaborate tangle of predominantly female trauma and endurance. There is a question lurking in the dark corners of that weary tale. I wrote this novel because I needed to ask. I needed to look. I am tired of seeing Ted Bundy's face. This is a book for the women who survive."

Her story works in this regard to a degree. But it also belongs to Ansel, who isn't presented as evil and monstrous so much as abandoned and hapless, a desperate misfit. I couldn't help but feel some sympathy for him, even despite the awful things he did. And the book ends with brief imaginings of what might have been, for the women he killed. Always that haunting wondering: what would their lives have become?