Vengeance

Zachary Lazar’s powerful and important novel was inspired by a passion play, The Life of Jesus Christ, he witnessed at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. As someone who writes zfiction, nonfiction, sometimes a hybrid of both,y the narrator of Vengeance, a character much like Lazar himself, tries to accurately view a world he knows is zbeyond the limits of my small understanding.y In particular, he tries to unravel the truth behind the supposed crime of an inmate he meets and befriends, Kendrick King, who is serving a life sentence at Angola for murder. As the narrator attempts to sort out what happened in King’s life―paying visits to his devoted mother, his estranged young daughter and her mother, his girlfriend, his brother, and his cousin―the writer’s own sense of identity begins to feel more and more like a fiction. He is one of the zfree peopley while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as zI just need to get out of here.y The dichotomy between their lives forces the narrator to confront the violence in his own past, and also to reexamine American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice.