Books: A Second Look

(5 of 5)

In writing about convicts, as in writing about anything else, there are few substitutes for experience. Malcolm Braly did a stretch for armed robbery at San Quentin, and knows only too well that prison is the only world a convict has. Cons either adapt to it or it destroys them. In On the Yard, this inescapable fact is driven home by the sadistic breaking of "Chilly Willy," a boss con who traffics in cigarettes and Benzedrine inhalers. Prison officials frame him in a homosexual plot, and he is shunted into the psychiatric ward. Though a swift, engrossing narrative in its own right, Braly's novel stands as a caustic indictment of the American penal system. From Dostoevsky to Genet, writers have used prison as an effective metaphor of the human condition. Braly strips away the literary conceits and makes life on the inside painfully real.