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Through authentic voices and moral complexity Work Like Any Other shows prisons can be of our own making.
About the Book
(from the publisher)
Roscoe has set his sights on a new type of power spreading at the start of the 20th century: electricity. It becomes his training, his life’s work. But when his wife Marie inherits her father’s failing farm, Roscoe has to give it up, with great cost to his pride and sense of self, his marriage and his family. Realising that he might lose them all, he uses his skills as an electrician to siphon energy from the state, ushering in a period of bounty and happiness on a farm recently falling to ruin. Even the love of Marie and their son seems back within Roscoe’s grasp. Then everything changes. A young man is electrocuted on their land. Roscoe is arrested for manslaughter and – no longer an electrician or even a farmer – he must now carve out a place in a violent new world.
My Thoughts
Roscoe is a man imprisoned by his father’ s narrow views, then by his ambitions, then by his penance and the debt he feels he can never repay. Told primarily through his point of view, and interspersed with third person accounts of what happens to those Roscoe leaves behind, Work Like Any Other paints a morally complex and intriguing picture of an impatient man forced through his own actions to learn humility. Each character is torn apart by his actions and his wife’s response is heartbreaking. You can’t help but relate to Roscoe, who grows and matures emotionally though what he endures in prison could scar his psyche as much as it does his body.
Reading this novel is like stepping into a slightly grungier version of Woods’ painting American Gothic. Alabama in the 1930s is beautifully realised. In a world of injustice and opportunity, each character is rich, flawed and absolutely real.
Work Like Any Other is subtle, the writing spare, and the novel is all the more powerful for it. This is a story to savor, and one I shall return to again and again.
Highly recommended
My copy thanks to Simon and Schuster Australia
About the Author
Virginia Reeves is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her fiction has appeared in The Common and The Baltimore Review and has been shortlisted for the Tennessee Williams Fiction Contest and the Alexander Patterson Cappon Fiction Award.
Virginia has spent the majority of her life in Montana, but currently lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and two daughters.
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