EDUCATION OF A FELON

The felon-turned-author (Little Boy Blue, 1997, etc.) revisits the sorry, sordid scenes of his endless crimes.

Bunker claims he was conceived during a 1933 earthquake and born during a great deluge; that his "first clear memories" are of his parents "screaming at each other"; and that his first robbery was at age four: a Good Humor truck. The memoir ends in the mid-1960s: Bunker is serving yet another prison sentence, this one at San Quentin ("always my joint," he says wistfully), when a phone call informs him that Norton will publish the novel he has submitted (the sixth he has written) and that Harper's will feature his story about prison race wars. Sandwiched in between are surprisingly tedious accounts of his indiscriminate felonies—ranging from check kiting to armed robbery—arrests, incarcerations, escapes, beatings, and start-and-stop efforts to educate himself. Bunker declares his talent in several places (his IQ was once measured at 152), but this memoir contains little supporting evidence. When he pauses to reflect, which is rare, he can manage only banalities like "Truth is the distilled meaning of facts" or "I believe that anyone who doesn't read remains dumb." At other times he refers to the monster as "Frankenstein," observes that the "past is prelude" rather than "prologue," and does not seem to know the precise titles of two novels (The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf) by fellow ex-con and autodidact Jack London. His metaphors are sometimes so mixed as to be meaningless: "Amid the ozone of fear of the unknown ahead there was a convivial leavening." Although there is an inherent poignancy in the tale of a man struggling for redemption in the worst of conditions, the effect is often vitiated by excess—as in Bunker’s paragraph of explicit directions for committing a perfect murder.

Needs a jolt of energy, an injection of craft. (Author tour)