The Repeat Room

June 3, 2024
In the loosely sketched dystopian world of Ball’s blistering latest (after the memoir Autoportrait), trials are conducted by ordinary people who gain access to the mind of the accused. Several decades into the future, following the dissolution of an unnamed country’s “primitive” criminal justice system, garbageman Abel Cotter is chosen to act as judge and juror in the trial of a teenage boy for an unspecified capital crime. (One way the totalitarian government remains in control is by keeping its laws secret, so people never know whether they’re breaking them.) In the second of the book’s two parts, Ball switches to the unnamed boy’s point of view, telling the story of his life as it’s witnessed by Abel through a kind of consciousness-melding technology. It would be a spoiler to reveal the details of the boy’s lurid and painful story, which casts him as a victim of his circumstances. Ball’s tragic character study of the accused stands in stark relief to the chilling depiction of the court system and its low estimation of human life (“The more people think people have value, the worse they are at killing them,” an official explains to Abel). This strikes a chord.