While Justice Sleeps - October CC Book Club Discussion

Parents Forum Parent Cafe
101

This is one of the things I love about this book club. I can like or dislike a book, but the discussion here always makes me appreciate what I read a lot more.

4 Likes
102

Some of the best discussions were for books I really didn’t care for.

3 Likes
103
  1. As she begins to grapple with her role as legal guardian, Avery meets Justice Wynn’s son, Jared, and also contends with her own relationship with her mother. How do family dynamics play a role in the novel?

Both Avery and Jared have abandonment issues, each losing a beloved “level-headed” parent to death, while being estranged from the surviving, selfish parent (losing one to drugs and the other to
 workaholicism?).

Of the two parents, I found Justice Wynn to be more layered and interesting than Rita. He was extremely harsh (and I suspect a little paranoid even before Boursin’s struck), but he did have his chivalrous moment on the train platform. As Avery said to Jared, “Justice Wynn is a hard man, but he was always good. Not kind, no. But good” (p. 338).

Rita, on the other hand, had no redeeming qualities, at least not believable ones. I know drug addiction can change people and destroy relationships, but I never felt like there was a real person in there anywhere – she was so one-dimensional.

At nearly every appearance in the novel, Rita calls Avery horrible names (and even slaps her). “A lifetime of carefully plotted escape from this woman, this mother, and she’d never been able to shake her” (p. 117). I just didn’t buy the warm post-kidnapping reunion, where Rita is angelic and affectionate, and Avery is back to calling her “Momma.”

4 Likes
104

I’ve never had to deal with drug problems, but it’s my understanding that Rita’s behavior is not as unlikely as it seems. She also seems to have been bipolar or something as there are references to her father trying to explain her behavior even before he died.

I found the judge’s behavior to his son less understandable. Twenty year silence? He seems like a bundle of contradictions. His flowery and wordy note to Avery hidden in the bed (Ch 31) versus his terse summary of the hiring interview. Can’t find the page, but wasn’t it “She’ll do.”?

3 Likes
105

I liked Avery’s comment. It reinforced the picture of Justice Wynn I had in my mind. I somehow felt that Chief Justice Roseborough would have described Justice Wynn in those same terms.

1 Like
106

Stacey Abrams brother is bipolar and has addiction issues, has been in and out of prison, so while the mother in the novel may not have been “believable “ ( Agree about the reunion after the kidnapping didn’t seem authentic ) sadly she certainly is familiar with these issues.

“ For one, her remarks were deeply personal, so much so that Abrams broke down in tears at several points, touching on her own family’s experiences with incarceration, what she thinks is still broken in her home state, and why the governor’s job is so damn important.”

“ Abrams grew up working poor in Mississippi, but all six siblings were high achievers, including Walter, who enrolled at Morehouse College. For years, she said, he struggled with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and used drugs and alcohol to cope. Eventually, he landed in prison, where he finally received his diagnosis and got access to medication. But when he was released, Walter lost his access to that medication, couldn’t afford it on his own or even with his family’s help, and wound up being sent back to serve more time due to a parole violation.

“There are few things that bring tears to my eyes and emotion to my voice but clarity to my thinking and it is the commitment to justice in our criminal system,” she said.”

4 Likes
107

I didn’t know that – how sad. And who am I to say what is “believable” when the situation is not part of my lived experience, as it is for Stacey Abrams.

And yet
I’m not alone in feeling that the depiction of Rita felt too shallow:

If there’s one thing While Justice Sleeps wants to communicate about Avery’s mother, Rita, it’s that she’s an addict. And not just an addict but a mean, dirty, and manipulative addict. Indeed, it almost feels as if Abrams went out of her way to depict Rita in as loathsome a way as possible, invoking a shockingly wide range of stereotypes and negative descriptors.

^ That’s from a review in The New Republic. There are several paragraphs after the above, all focused on Abrams’ description of Rita (including objections to how the novel depicts sex work as a source of shame and/or moral failing). The writer adds, “All of this might just be dismissed as run-of-the-mill insensitivity, but it is notably confounding given Abrams’s thoughtful discussion of addiction in Our Time Is Now” (in which she discusses her brother Walter).

What, then, are we to make of the disconnect between Abrams’s sensitive depiction of Walter and her dehumanizing depiction of Rita? It is too easy simply to invoke the differences of form and function—the informality of a novel compared to the caution of a politician’s treatise—for Abrams is clear in the acknowledgments that While Justice Sleeps had a “twelve-year journey” and numerous “second readers” along the way. It seems more like a failure of imagination. Abrams-the-sister can know that addiction is a disease, not a moral failing, while Abrams-the-novelist can fall into the trap of stereotyping.

There’s more here – really good analysis and worth your time:

1 Like
108

Yes, that was a nice analysis. I feel like she hasn’t yet written the book she is capable of writing.

2 Likes
109

Sex work for drugs seems like a different topic than just sex work. I don’t know if I can jump on board with that criticism in The New Republic review. Still, I agree that Rita’s character was not strong.

Agree!

4 Likes
110

I don’t really understand Justice Wynn’s lack of a relationship with Jared. Why didn’t he pursue one. Just too busy? Was there more that I’m forgetting?

1 Like
111

It is odd, but maybe not unusual?

112

I agree with you,@caraid, I’m not on board with the authors criticism of Abrams depiction of Rita Vs her real life brother-

Abrams wrote about a daughter of a drug addicted woman- she painted a vivid and gritty picture of someone on the streets.
The seething anger, disappointment of the daughter, Avery seemed real, understandable.

Even their reconciliation was a daughters longing for her mother’s love- although it was a bit too tidy, a forced happily ever after moment, but understandable.

2 Likes
113

I agree. There is a distinction between sex work as a job and sex work as an act of drug-related desperation, so that comparison in the article is kinda apples to oranges. However, I agree with the reviewer that “it almost feels as if Abrams went out of her way to depict Rita in as loathsome a way as possible, invoking a shockingly wide range of stereotypes and negative descriptors.”

2 Likes
114

Sadly, not unusual. I have a close friend whose parents divorced when he was five years old and his father, completely involved in his life up to that point, walked away and never looked back. It seems unfathomable to us, right? But it happens.

4 Likes
115

I thoroughly appreciated While Justice Sleeps for being exactly what it is just when I needed it. Yes, I noted its flaws but really didn’t care. I stepped away from my real life and entered Avery’s life. I would have rolled my eyes should she have been competent on a pogo stick while at the same time thinking “you go, girl.” I decided I am a mood-reader. And I was in the mood.

Anyway we hadn’t read a thriller in a while. Interestingly, each Clinton has one out at the moment, coauthored: Bill with James Patterson and Hillary with Louise Penny. I wonder if there might be a subtle competition, i.e. “my book has better reviews” vs. “well, mine has more readers.” :upside_down_face:

5 Likes
116

Before women were Supreme Court Justices


2 Likes
117

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww . . . . .

1 Like
118

Oh my!

1 Like
119

I just read an article about political thrillers, which pre-dates While Justice Sleeps, yet still captures its essence. The novel’s shortcomings are typical of the genre as a whole (a genre that got its start in 1890 with bestseller Caesar’s Column by MN Congressman Ignatius Donnelly).

Politics is messy—you lose your majority, you get impeached, the whims of the voters are capricious. People are complicated, their motives unknown and ambiguous. Sometimes, the facts support your philosophy, but more often they don’t. The life of a politician is inevitably frustrating, but in your own fictional universe you get complete control over the narrative.

How a politician structures that fictional universe reveals a lot about his or her worldview. Instead of embracing the world’s messiness, and using the novelist’s tools to puzzle through that disconnect between fact and philosophy, political fictions reduce the world to its lowest common denominator, condensing the messy, complicated world into good vs. evil. And in the writers’ quest to prove good will prevail over bad, civil liberties are suspended, presidents recruit terrorists to work on their side and compromise is useless—story details that in the end elide the difference between good and bad in the first place.
When Presidents Write Fiction, Sometimes Things Get Weird - POLITICO Magazine

1 Like
120

@Mary13 's comment above made me think of Jake Tapper’s book, The Hellfire Club. Tapper is not a politician writing a book, but a journalist who reports on politics. That book didn’t capture me. In fact, there’s a sequel and don’t have any desire to read it, and I love sequels. Despite the flaws in Abram’s book that we’ve discussed, I enjoyed it so much more than Tapper’s. That’s saying something considering Tapper is the journalist.

2 Likes