Book Club Recap: Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
Reading Literary Fiction can sometimes feel like a bit of a trade-off. You get deep character exploration written in beautiful language, but the plot is oftentimes quiet—an uneventful backdrop designed to let the character shine.
Danya Kukafka’s Notes on an Execution pulls a hat-trick, though—delivering a riveting plot, stunning character exploration, and lyrical writing.
Everyone who knows me, knows I am a worshiper of quiet books. I don’t necessarily need a page-turning plot or loads of narrative drive to keep me going. I’m perfectly happy reading books where little happens except for how the character processes their emotions.
But every once in a while, there’s a book that grips me with its plot, where the need to turn the page has me glued to the book for hours on end. Usually, these books aren’t those that make me pause to underline beautiful sentences.
It seems to be an either/or type of thing.
Either you get a page-turning plot, or you get a book that makes you stop to memorize its sentences.
Books that cover both grounds are as rare as unicorns. Notes on an Execution is one such book. The story at its heart is riveting. The characterization is sharp and detailed, and far from stereotypical. The pacing is impeccable. The structure perfectly hugs the shape of the actual story. The language—well, you want to print every other sentence on your t-shirt.
Needless to say that most members of the Writers’ Book Club felt the same way. In many ways, this was the least contentious discussion we’ve had in months. But rest assured, we weren’t any less opinionated and loud! 🙃
Here are our main takeaways:
STRUCTURE
As writers, we’re often facing a dilemma that’s invisible on the readers’ side of things, and that’s the dualism between the STORY (the essence of what we want to say), and its CONTAINER.
This means that, first, we need to figure out what the story really is, and then how best to tell it.
Should I do a single timeline with flashbacks, or multiple timelines? Or should I do a fragmented narrative?
Is it better if I tell this story from one person’s POV? Or should I use multiple POVs?
Everyone who’s ever written (or tried to write) a book with a rich backstory knows how complicated these choices are—especially since they have to be made before you actually write the darn thing (which means, before you fully know the ins and outs of your Story).
Most readers, on the other hand, don’t really pay attention to how the story is delivered, as long as they can get to the heart of it. All they really want is to have all the necessary info to paint a full picture.
When reading as a writer, though, you start noticing things like this, where the structure could have been more efficient, or where it could have served the story better. For instance, in The Paper Palace, there’s a whole section of the book where the protagonist tells her parents’ backstory—and it felt a bit unnecessary. She could’ve easily dropped that part, or sprinkled it in in shorter snippets at best.
The structure needs to serve the story. It needs to be the easiest and most efficient container, making itself seamless to allow for the Story to really come through and shine.
And Kukafka made it seem like a child’s game.
At the heart of Notes on an Execution is the story of Ansel Packer, a serial killer. The story isn’t about the murders themselves—they are conveyed with very little information—but about how Ansel became a serial killer, and how his actions ricocheted and rippled across many lives.
Now, if you’re a writer, try to put yourself in the time BEFORE writing this story. How would you write it? Would you write in first person (it is Ansel’s story, after all) or third person?
Would you have had an outside narrator tell the story (so as not to force the reader to really identify with the 1st or 3rd person POV character—since that character is a serial killer)? Would you have gone for an omniscient narrator perhaps, to allow for Ansel’s backstory to be delivered naturally—so that we could learn about Ansel’s painful childhood, which shaped him into the person he later became?
Those would be prudent choices, but Kukafka didn’t go down that route, and rightly so.
She split the narrative into two timelines—one, experienced by Ansel Packer hours prior to his execution. We follow him through the last 12 hours of his life. For the first six or so hours, he believes he has manipulated a female prison guard into helping him escape—and the reader is reading on to see if he’ll manage to escape (meaning, the narrative drive is created by suspense). The last six hours, after Ansel is transferred to the facility where the execution will take place, and his plan to escape has failed, the reader is reading to see how Ansel will face the inevitable—the execution (meaning, the narrative drive is created by dramatic irony. More on different ways of creating narrative drive here.)
This storyline (told, surprisingly, in second person POV) is interspersed with other POVs told linearly—covering years from Ansel’s birth all the way to his execution.
These stories are told by different women in his life: Lavender (his mother); Saffy (girl he was in foster care with), and Hazel (his wife’s twin sister).
But these other POV characters don’t just tell us Ansel’s story: they each tell their own story, and paint Ansel’s story as they go—almost peripherally, but nonetheless precisely.
Lavender tells us the story of a neglected girl who ended up marrying young, which led to her practically being imprisoned by an abusive husband, with two young children and no contact with the outside world—with anyone who could help her.
Saffy tells us a story about a girl in foster care, whose mother died; a girl who had never met her father, and whose only connection made after the loss of her mother (that with her foster sisters Kristen and Lila) was ruined in more ways than one by Ansel Packer (first, by Ansel forcing her to move away, and later by his murdering Lila).
Hazel tells us a story about the (twin) sister rivalry. About how it is, always feeling less than your sister; how it is to love someone so deeply as she loved her twin sister, all the while resenting them their beauty or success. How it is to be intertwined with them, and long for your identity, but hate being separated, and left behind, all at once. (On a side note, we agreed that adding the aspect of twins was a brilliant decision on Kukafka’s side. It lifted the narrative to a whole new level—from sister connection, to sister rivalry, to just the thought of looking exactly the same as a murder victim. This simple choice amped up Hazel’s story tenfold.)
So, all of these characters were telling us their distinct stories, each one fully fleshed-out, but at the same time, they were telling us Ansel’s story too, even when it didn’t feel that way.
What’s even more fascinating is how the author paced each segment. Not in one single point or POV did we feel the story lagged or that the focus was too much on the POV character when it should be on Ansel. Each POV was perfectly balanced both in terms of delivering that person’s story vs. Ansel’s story, and in terms of delivering enough info to be interesting, but not overstaying in one POV, delivering unnecessary info. In other words, both the attention to detail, and time spent on each character felt perfectly calibrated.
POINT OF VIEW
Second-person POV is a rare choice, and for a good reason. Rarely does it serve the story well. But here, by using it, the author managed to achieve a double effect: first, to tell the story from Ansel’s POV but without using first person or third person narrative. The reason why the author avoided these classic POV choices was probably because (unless you use an outside narrator for 3rd person POV) they have the effect of sucking the reader inside the POV character’s experience.
In other words, 1st and 3rd person POV have the effect of making you feel like you are the protagonist, feeling what they’re feeling, seeing what they’re seeing, thinking what they’re thinking. And who in the world would love to experience the world from a serial murderer’s POV?
In order not to ask that of a reader, but to still have HIM (and not an outside narrator) tell his story, Kukafka used the 2nd person POV.
The second reason why this was the best POV choice for this story was that using it created a feeling of intimacy in a very specific way. If felt as though he was addressing the reader directly, asking for interaction from us. As if he were telling us — put yourself in my shoes. The members who listened to the book on Audible reported that this effect was extra powerful through that media. It was as if the killer was talking into their ear. How creepy is it, to be addressed by a serial killer directly? I bet Kukafka was deliberately going for this effect.
WRITING EMOTION
Let’s face it. It’s hard to describe how stuff feels without resorting to a cliché description of that feeling/sensation it creates.
And the reason why it’s so hard is—because these emotions are commonplace. They feel pretty much the same for everyone. When we’re experiencing fear, our hearts have a tendency to pound. Or beat hard against our chests. When we are embarrassed, our cheeks flush. When we’re in love, our heats feel like they’re so overflowing with emotion, that they’ll burst.
As a writer, you want to evoke the familiarness of those emotions. You want to provoke the exact same feeling in your reader that your protagonist is feeling. So what better way than writing it how it really feels?
His heart pounded in his chest. Her cheeks flushed. Her heart almost burst with emotion.
And on the other side of your book, the reader goes, “Meh.”
The thing is, the more these common expressions are used, the more the readers skim over them.
So, paradoxically, if you write the exact way how an emotion feels (e.g. heart pounding) so that your reader recognizes the emotion, the reader will actually gloss over that because it’s cliché and they’re hardly even seeing the words on the page.
The description that was supposed to evoke the emotion ends up falling flatter than a punctured baloon.
So obviously, you want to avoid the usual (cliché) phrases when describing emotion.
This is where Kukafka excels. Here are some examples:
[Lavender, describing that sinking feeling of utter loss.] “The last photo in the collection felt, to Lavender, like hyperventilation. Ellis and his wife hunched at a long oak bar seemingly blind to the camera. Little Blue was tucked between them, her parents’ cheeks resting on either side of her head. Looking, Lavender could almost smell the girl’s scalp. That child’s scent, sticky and sweet.”
[Lavender, describing how it feels to be haunted by your past or mistakes.]“So Sunshine understood how time could be like a knife. Lodged already, just waiting to twist.” [This really gets to the heart of that feeling when you have a huge catastrophe happen in your life, and time offers a reprieve, allowing you to forget. But when you remember, it’s a knife, lodged already, just waiting to twist.]
[Saffy, on finding the dead fox on her cot.] She knew better than to scream. Instead, she held an inhale. Gathered her shock into a little ball. [We all remember that feeling when you’re so scared, but screaming (the go-to reaction) won’t help—or it may even make things worse, so you swallow it down and gather your shock into a little ball.]
[Lavender, on getting a not-so-clean break] “Dear Julie, Lavender thought, as she boarded the first of many buses. The shaking fear in her chest was tinged with something else now. A pulsing in the glands behind her teeth. It was not freedom—too wrecked for that, but it was close. Dear Julie.
Wait up. I’m coming for you.”
[Hazel, on calling Captain Singh—Saffy—behind Jenny’s back; after Jenny had told her Saffy suspected Ansel of being a murderer.]“She dialed. The first ring felt like a dunk in a frigid pool—shocking, harsh.” [We all know this feeling—of making a difficult call, when that first ring makes you wince, realize what you’re about to do/say and how it will impact someone’s life.]
[Hazel, on missing her twin sister.]“Grief is a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long, Hazel forgot her own legs.”
[Ansel, on finally feeling like he belongs—all because Blue is (unbeknownst to him overtly) his mother’s spitting image.]“Blue looks like a summer evening. Like dusk spent wading through fields of bluegrass, like gentle hands brushing your hair from your eyes. At the sight of Blue’s freckled nose, you hear your mother’s voice, clearer than ever before.”
[Hazel, on going to Ansel’s execution—on going somewhere where you’re going to face difficult emotions.] “As Hazel helps her mother into Linda’s car, which smells like saltine crackers and air freshener, she feels a magnified sense of helplessness. The dread curls in her gut, a dozing animal.”
These are all familiar feelings, and a less capable writer would have resorted to the obvious wording—to the surface-level emotions and explanations.
For instance, Lavender could have said, upon escaping—“Lavender was finally free, but her freedom was tainted by what she had left behind. Still, she took a deep breath, and then let out an even longer exhalation. Wait up, Julie, I’m coming for you.” But, that would be too direct and way less engaging for the reader.
So this is a good reminder that we need to spend time reinventing how those common feelings really feel. To give them the right context, layering, and depth, so that when the reader is reading them, they are both surprised and reminded that—yes, this is exactly how it feels.
CHARACTERIZATION
While we’re at clichés, it’s so hard not to resort to them in one more aspect—characterization. We all know certain types of people, so naturally, the writers turn to ‘the type’ to paint an image inside the reader’s head—as if saying, this is THAT sort of person; you know the type.
By giving the reader ‘the type,’ the reader’s imagination does half the job. If I told you that ‘she was the most popular girl in the school,’ I wouldn’t have to go into very many details to tell you how she looks or behaves. Your own version of the most popular girl in school—the one you knew—would fill in the blanks. With that one sentence, I would’ve conveyed the things I haven’t said about the character. In your eyes, she would be blond, beautiful, a good dresser, always followed by a group of minions, confident, dismissive.
Just like pounding hearts are the easiest way to show fear, stereotypes are the easiest way to create an image of a character.
But like with showing emotion, you don’t want to be evocative in overt ways.
We all know the basics of what makes a serial killer type—the classic sociopath. They are intelligent and charming. They draw people in, something about them is inviting. They lack empathy. They’re great at manipulation. They are intriguing. They are plain evil (Hannibal Lecter, anyone?)—evil in its purest form.
Obviously, Kukafka needed to draw on some of these aspects to paint Ansel for us, but she played with the perception. First, straight off the bat, she gave us Ansel’s backstory, the fact that he had a most horrendous childhood. But she left the area gray. Yes, Ansel’s early childhood was fraught with pain and misery and abuse, but at the same time, from his earliest days, he brought home beheaded chipmunks. With that, Kukafka opened a door to the whole nature vs. nurture debate. Was Ansel made into a serial killer because of his genetic make-up (given his abusive, sociopathic dad); Was he ‘forced’ into who he became because of the early-childhood abuse he suffered at the hands of his dad, and upon being abandoned by his mom? Or was he simply born with the deviation? Or, have all these aspects played a part in making Ansel who he ended up to be?
The author doesn’t answer this for us—because, let’s be honest, no one knows.
Apart from opening up his painful backstory to us, which allowed us to wonder (and sometimes even feel for Ansel), Kukafka did a great job showing how Ansel loves. In particular, he showed emotions toward Jenny and Blue. Especially Blue.
Psychopaths don’t have emotions, right?
The thing about his love for Jenny and Blue was that he never really loved them or felt empathy for them. He only loved Jenny because she silenced Baby Packer inside his head (a.k.a, made him feel better), and he only loved Blue because she reminded him of his mother, and he felt like he had a family when he was with the Harrisons. In other words, what emotions he had were for him, not for them.
The third thing Kukafka did to play with the serial killer/psychopath trope, is that at first she made us believe Ansel was intelligent, good at manipulation, and profound (in a philosophical way). But as the book progresses, we learn—alongside Ansel—that he isn’t really as smart as he thought he was, or even good at manipulation. In fact, he got duped by Shawna the prison guard, someone he had painted as a dimwit. Turns out she had played him. She had convinced him she would help him escape, and that she would send his life legacy, his Theory, out to publishers. By letting him believe this, she actually incapacitated him to try harder to achieve these goals on his own.
When he gets his notebooks back (the Theory), when he realizes there’s no time to send them out to publishers or newspapers, not in the time he has left—gee, you almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
This move is doubly brilliant on the author’s side. Not only did she debunk the myth of him being the smart, charming, manipulative psychopath, but she also debunked the myth of the naive, stupid, manipulated woman falling for guys like this. Shawna was shown as a stereotypical spineless woman falling for a psychopath, but the joke was, it seems, on him.
Another thing we loved about the characterization was that the characters were really well-rounded with their imperfections.
Everyone was painted in some shade of gray. Lavender, for leaving the boys, and for never fully accepting her responsibility for what happened to them. Also, for failing to visit Ansel before his death. Hazel, for that tiny bit of her that enjoyed her sister’s downfall. Saffy, for being so obsessed with exacting her revenge on Ansel that it’s actually her actions that pushed him into his last murder.
Kukafka’s characters are not cardboard people—they’re real. They have their good sides, but also those petty, selfish sides that make them every bit as human as you and me.
THE QUESTION OF ROOTING FOR THE PROTAGONIST
Anyone who’s ever queried their MS has gotten some form of this rejection: “Unfortunately, I wasn’t invested in the protagonist...”
We often hear that we need to write a LIKABLE protagonist in order for people to be able to feel invested in them. That’s the whole premise of the ‘Save the Cat’ methodology. Make sure your protagonist saves a cat at the beginning of your MS, so that the reader will like them, and therefore root for them.
So, many writers go on to write nice people. Those who save the cat, and the neighbor who owns the cat too. Who never have anything bad to say about anyone. Who only tolerate bad things other people will do to them, never striking back. They are more than nice, they’re good. Good people who never even think of doing a bad thing. Who wouldn’t think of abandoning their child (like Lavender), not even when their child had the third meltdown in three hours. Good people who, unlike Hazel, would never compete with their sister, especially not after their life is already notably better than their sister’s. These people are not only good. They’re perfect.
And they’re boring to read about.
The thing is, people will sooner be invested in a story portraying a serial killer, than in a story portraying the annoying level of perfection the reader will never achieve themselves.
Do we have to like the character to be invested in their story, if not in them? I feel like this story proves that no, we do not have to like the character to feel invested.
Usually in our book club, we have a small percentage of members each time who don’t finish a book because they simply couldn’t ‘get into it.’ Everyone finished this one, though, and the protagonist is a monster.
Some of us even had to check ourselves not to root for Ansel at certain moments. His motivations and goals are so clear that they have a tendency of pulling you along. The narrative drive—the suspense of whether he’ll escape or not have you turning the pages, eager to see what will happen next. And when his plans fail, the missed opportunity feels like a bit of a let-down, not because you really rooted for him to escape, but because the window of opportunity is suddenly closed and it feels a bit anticlimactic.
And even though HE is incapable of empathy, the readers still possess it, so most of our members felt for him when his mother left him, or when Blue and her mother turned him away.
This is what Literary Fiction does. It creates complex emotions for you to dwell in. Nothing is straightforward, completely good, or inexplicably evil (though this doesn’t mean there’s an excuse for Ansel’s violence and his lack of inhibitions, it only means that it is possible to see the patterns that led Ansel to these heinous crimes, not that those crimes can be excused).
So what does this all mean for us writers? I believe it means:
The character doesn’t necessarily have to be likable for the reader to be invested in their story (if not in them). Oftentimes, it will be harder for the reader to feel invested in a perfect protagonist who never does anything wrong, or a protagonist with a victim mentality (the “woe-is-me” protagonist).
Setting up a good narrative drive (need to know what happens next) can make you feel like you’re rooting even for the character whose agenda you disapprove of.
Even the most despicable people can have backstories and emotions that can cause us to feel sympathetic toward them. In other words, they might lack empathy, but we can still have empathy for them in some aspects.
SHARP OBSERVATIONS
The author didn’t get very political. She had set out to tell a riveting story of a serial killer, without really intending to challenge our worldview—she didn’t set out to tell us that serial killers are, in fact, good people underneath it all, or victims of the system, or whatever else could be a spin on the trope.
Ansel is a bad guy and he remains the bad guy throughout.
But throughout the novel, some smart and sharp observations are sprinkled in. Most notably, the one where Hazel questions the real purpose of these executions. She says:
“What is the point of all this? Hazel wants to ask. Ostensibly, today is occurring for her own benefit. For Jenny, for their family, for some twisted form of recompense. But it feels backward. Almost like a gift to Ansel.
He gets all the attention. He gets the media, the discourse, the carefully regulated procedure. Real punishment would look different, Hazel knows—like a lonely, epic nothing. A life sentence in a men’s prison, the years rotting as they pass. The long forgetting of his name. A heart attack, a slip in the shower, the sort of faceless death he deserves.”
Hazel is right. Given the lack of empathy and narcissism, it is a great gift for a man like Ansel to go in such a spectacular way, being monitored, talked about, focused on.
But throughout the MS there were so many notable observations. Here are some of my favorites:
There are millions of men out there who want to hurt women—people seem to think that Ansel Packer is extraordinary, because he actually did.
Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.
The desperation is intentional, maybe the most important part of this exercise. It is why they made you wait for years, then months, now hours and minutes, the whole of your life transformed into a countdown. The point is this. The waiting, the knowing, the not wanting to die.
Hazel [on deciding whether to call Captain Singh to tell her about Ansel’s abusiveness, after Jenny had come clean that Saffy visited years beforehand to tell her she suspected Ansel to be the serial killer] had always felt confident in her vision of right and wrong, good versus evil. She had voted for Obama. She believed she would have been the kind of German to hide a family of Jews in her attic (though of course this theory had never been tested). For the first time, Hazel felt close to something that scared her.
Every brain was different in its deviance—human hurt manifested in select, mysterious ways. It was a matter of finding a trigger point, the place where the pain had landed and festered, the soft spot in every hard person that pushed them to violence.
This job was getting to her. Not the bodies, the missing children, or the rampant opioids. It was this. Men like Lawson, who believed their very existences afforded them lawlessness. Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.
Some of these phrases are bumper-sticker worthy, and placing those inside a manuscript is risky if not done correctly. Oftentimes, when a writer writes their own worldview into their MS, it comes across as an AUTHOR INTRUSION—the author pausing the narrative to insert their own thoughts into the manuscript and impart their knowledge, logic or wisdom to the reader.
So how does Kukafka get away with it?
The trick is to allow the character, not the author, to deliver these truisms. It needs to sound like it’s a part of their internal monologue, instead of the author pausing the narrative to sprinkle their own thoughts in.
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And that’s a wrap for this month’s recap. I hope you enjoyed reading—please let me know in the comments!
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