Hadrian's Walls: A Novel
Fri., May 14, 1999
Knopf, $23 hard
Hawthorne wrote somewhere that all utopias were doomed to failure because early on, the citizenry found that they had to build a prison (for sin) and a cemetery (for the wages of sin). Hadrian's Walls plays around with the idea of a little town in East Texas named Shepherdsville as a kind of potential Eden brought low by greed, corruption, and human folly. Shepherdsville (Huntsville) is a place where everybody is on one side of the law or the other, but then this is true of every town, isn't it? But probably more so in a prison town. You see, the thing is, the wardens and officers of the law and the jailkeepers are by and large as criminally minded as the losers behind the walls.
Hadrian Coleman, the 38-year-old narrator, checked in at the crossbar hotel at the tender age of 15 because he killed a perverted old judge whom everybody feared and hated. The judge made a homosexual pass at Hadrian's bosom teenaged buddy, Sonny Hope, setting in motion the murder, but Hadrian didn't stop there -- he gouged out the judge's eyes. Of equal importance, Sonny stood by while his friend went to jail. Another murder by Hadrian in jail, followed by a thrillingly told escape and a number of years of living underground, a pardon because of a good-samaritan deed, and a return to the scene of his childhood, the prison, the crime, and everything in his past in Shepherdsville -- all of this narrative, all of this "back story," is the novel's spinning out over a three-week period with layer upon layer of the past being opened up for us to see. Draper does an artful job of uncoiling his plot, and by book's end we have the whole story, all the dots connected.
The idea of a first-person narrator investigating a corrupt past and exposing the complex nature of human evil enacted in a political world of bribe and counter-bribe, good deeds and bad deeds hopelessly entangled, brings to mind Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. In that novel Jack Burden, the narrator, has a tough-guy voice inflected by Hemingway. Draper's narrator employs another voice altogether, softer, at times almost dreamy. Hadrian seems not to have been as scarred as one might expect from spending time in a Texas prison facility. Clyde Barrow was sodomized and it pissed him off forever more. Hadrian escapes that fate and retains a "romantic readiness" as another first person narrator spoke of another figure with a dark past, Jay Gatsby.
I may be wrong, but I think the engendering idea of the narrative in Hadrian's Walls comes not from fiction but from film noir, films like The Killers or Out of the Past or D.O.A. In such, the protagonist is ceaselessly digging deeper and deeper into the past. Constituent features include the charismatic friend who's also a betrayer and an all-around bad egg, the beautiful woman who appears to be the cat's meow and turns out to be cold, selfish, and ruthless (Mike Hammer used to put a bullet in such dames, right above the belly button), the wide-eyed seeker who keeps his faith while all around him are corrupt; and scenes in which a smart guy lays everything out for the puzzled protagonist and reader to finally, finally understand.
Let the casting begin. --Don Graham
Don Graham is the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor at the University of Texas and currently serves as the president of the Texas Institute of Letters.
