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 “fiction, nonfiction, sometimes a hybrid of both,” the narrator of Vengeance, a character much like Lazar himself, tries to accurately view a world he knows is “beyond the limits of my small understanding.” 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 “free people” while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as “I just need to get out of here.” 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.

It is common knowledge that we have an incarceration crisis in our country. Vengeance, by way of vivid storytelling, helps us to understand the failure of empathy and imagination that causes it.

Praise for Vengeance

“Zachary Lazar's Vengeance is an elegant act of imagination and empathy that shows just how easily these can curdle, sometimes irretrievably, into skepticism and self-doubt. It's the story of a writer with a haunted past who meets, on a visit to Angola, a prisoner currently serving a life sentence for murder. Does he belong in prison, or is he, as he credibly claims, an innocent man? Or is the truth only ever a matter of speculation and the stories we choose to tell?” —Joshua Ferris

“With such a novelistic collage, the way things hang together is what counts, and Lazar’s novel makes a powerful and unusual totality of its disparate parts, an impressive cumulative experience.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“Lazar’s brilliant novel of spiritual discovery features Meyer Lansky, an American journalist, and an Israeli poet’s murder. . . . The book weaves like a melody.” —Rich Cohen, New York Times Book Review

“Unforgettable. . . . Mr. Lazar concocts a beautifully written hybrid text of remembrance, essay, speculation, and poetic prose.” —Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

Zachary Lazar is the author of four previous books, including the novel Sway, the memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder, and the novel I Pity the Poor Immigrant, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and the 2015 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “a writer in mid-career whose work has demonstrated consistent excellence.” Lazar’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He lives in New Orleans, where he is on the creative writing faculty at Tulane University.