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.

September 1, 2024
The fictional realms Ball (The Diver's Game, 2019) constructs are unnerving in their depictions of social and physical austerity, facades behind which emotions roil. In this bleak world, Abel, a sanitation worker, is called to much-dreaded jury duty He joins hundreds of the summoned in an enormous building, where they're treated like prisoners while being methodically and brutally vetted to serve as the one to decide the fate of the accused, whose day in court consists of being dragged into the repeat room, a psychological torture chamber. The cold calculation behind this cruel winnowing is explained to Abel as he advances through the harrowing process: "We are choosing a new society." The perspective shifts to that of a boy in the repeat room, who recounts his surreal childhood, a heartless parenting experiment in deprivation in which he and his sister are forced to enact monstrous scenarios designed to squash their sense of self. Ball's vision is chilling, his writing flawless in this stark, grueling tale of humans bereft of care and compassion, of love denied, sanity endangered, and judgement weaponized.

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