What do you think?
Rate this book
Coventry
Despite promises to his pregnant wife and dead mother never to follow in the footsteps of his father, Calvin Gaddy takes a job at Coventry Prison in the North Carolina Piedmont. He soon finds himself snared in the literal prison of Coventry-and in a cell of his own making. He watches as his father, Mac, a retired iron-willed, old-school chain gang guard, descends into madness. And when Calvin unwittingly traffics in contraband on the prison yard, he begins to realize that the prison is on the verge of disintegration from within.
261 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2006
29 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Bathanti
32 books19 followersJoseph Bathanti was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. He came to North Carolina as a VISTA Volunteer in 1976 to work with prison inmates. Bathanti is the author of four books of poetry: Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; and This Metal, which was nominated for The National Book Award. His first novel, East Liberty, winner of the Carolina Novel Award, was published in 2001. His latest novel, Coventry, won the 2006 Novello Literary Award. They Changed the State: The Legacy of North Carolina’s Visiting Artists, 1971-1995, his book of nonfiction, was published in early 2007. Most recently, his collection of short stories, The High Heart, winner of the 2006 Spokane Prize, was published by Eastern Washington University Press in 2007. He is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council; The Samuel Talmadge Ragan Award, presented annually for outstanding contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina over an extended period; the Linda Flowers Prize; the Sherwood Anderson Award, the 2007 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize; and others. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. On August 30, 2012, Joseph was named Poet Laureate of North Carolina.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 11, 2009
“You’re either a convict or a guard, one.”
When 30-year-old Calvin Gaddy finds himself working as a guard in Coventry Prison, he is plagued by misgivings. He had promised his mother that he would not follow his father, MacGregor Gaddy’s example – especially since the aging, retired “Mac” Gaddy had become a legend at Coventry due to his reputation for cruelty. Now, Mac is haunted by visions of taunting demons (the souls of former prisoners) who speak to him from his fireplace where he spends his nights drinking and talking to spirits. During the day he works on a stonewall between his farm and an encroaching housing development (which he views as an evil invasion)
Ah, but life has a way of forcing concessions. Elizabeth Mac Gregor is now dead (struck by lightning) and Calvin is living in a trailer on his father’s land with his pregnant wife, Rachel. Calvin feels prompted to build his own home – that means he needs a stable job with health and retirement benefits. Despite some misgivings, he finally applies for a position at Coventry.
As Calvin adjusts to his duties, he gradually shifts from a lackadaisical, pot-smoking employee to a man who views his job as a “calling.” Confronted with the suffering and despair of life’s “throwaways,” he begins to view the prison as a metaphor for human existence, and his father’s oft-quoted credo, “You’re either a convict or a guard, one,” makes him mindful of his role as an agent of implacable order. When he witnesses casual acts of bestial cruelty, he becomes increasingly convinced that Coventry demands unquestioning adherence to the enforcement of a system of implacable rules – a duty performed with pitiless detachment.
Ironically, Calvin also perceives paradox and revelation in Coventry even as he witnesses its worst horrors. At times, he senses a kinship with the prisoners and even fantasizes about exchanging roles – he can easily imagine himself entering the lock-up while “Pitch,” one of Coventry’s most intractable inmates, returns to Calvin’s trailer – and his wife.
One of the prison’s worst abominations is a prisoner called “Frank” who, because his grotesquely burned features remind others of Boris Karloff in the film, “Frankenstein,” undergoes a mysterious transformation. Castrated, imprisoned, defiled and mutilated, Frank becomes a servile “life-to-die” convict who, in addition to helping Mac Gaddy capture runaways, endures daily abuse and humiliation. When Frank finally dies, his tragic existence seems the epitome of a meaningless, wasted life; yet Coventry’s prisoners conduct a funeral (near the prison’s garbage dump) that seems to confer a kind of sainthood on Frank.
Then, there is Pitch, Coventry’s “warlock” who can evoke terror in both prisoners and guards with an onion and a bit of rag. After driving a brutal guard named Thrake to suicide, the enigmatic Pitch turns his attention to Calvin, who asks his father how he should deal with Pitch. Mac notes that a man of evil intent has as much power as his victim is willing to give him. Armed with this knowledge, Calvin moves toward a fateful encounter that will alter the fate of all he knows and loves.
For readers who are familiar with the arts in Southeast, Joseph Bathanti is a familiar name. A native of
Pittsborough, Pa., Bathanti arrived in North Carolina in 1976 as a VISTA volunteer. (Joseph’s early work with prison inmates influenced his work for the next thirty years.) Among Bathanti’s achievements are: four award-winning volumes of poetry; East Liberty, a novel which received the Carolina Novel award in 2001 and “Afomo,” a dramatic work which won the Wachovia Playwright’s Prize. At present, Bathanti is the Co-Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Appalachian State University and the Guest Editor of “The Cold Mountain Review.” The novel, Coventry (the subject of this review) has received the Novello Literary Award for 2006.
In a recent interview with the author, Smoky Mountain News asked Bathanti about the autobiographical, historic and literary details of Coventry.
SMN: One of the most striking aspects of Coventry is the language. The descriptive details teem with vivid imagery and metaphor. Is it fair to say that when a poet writes a novel, he remains a poet?
JB: I think that the poet, even when writing prose, in this case fiction, holds tight to poetic language when setting up a narrative. I think we’ve been made to believe that the craft of fiction and poetry are mutually exclusive, but that’s simply not true – especially as the genres these days tend to bleed into each other. It seems also that the trend is for poets to invade fiction, writing novels and stories, rather than fiction writers embarking on careers in poetry. It’s interesting to point out that Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s first books were poems. When I write prose, I’m interested in employing the same compression and musicality that invest poetry. I think it’s possible to do this and still drive a discursive narrative.
SMN: Would you comment on the names of people and places in Coventry? I am thinking that maybe there is something “numinous” about characters named Friend, Journey and Frank, motels called Heart of Dark, and an isolation cell called Alone.
JB: I wasn’t trying to be too determined in naming folks in the novel. Some of the names simply came to me. Friend, of course, ends up being an ironic name. Frank is short for Frankenstein, Shelley’s legendary misunderstood monster, of whom I’ve always been rather fond. Heart of Dark is a bit of theft from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul and even from St. Paul’s “through a glass darkly.” Cal experiences a dark night of the soul as he enters his own heart of darkness and he’s also having trouble seeing himself and the world he’s ensnarled in with any type of clarity. The prison is that same heart of darkness that Conrad found in the Congo. There is also a dubious hotel in Durham (or was many years ago) called The Heart of Durham. I called the “holes” in the novel the Boot and Alone because I was trying to call attention through different takes on language to the horror of what happens to people thrown in isolation or holes.. Because Coventry is a kind of fable, I also wanted places like the Boot and Alone and the Cook Shack to embody a malevolent consciousness.
SMN: Is there a connection between Calvin’s dream about the axe in the ceiling (and his memory of the old fable) and the death of Pitch’s child? Any connection with the Sword of Diamedes?
JB: I didn’t consciously connect that axe imbedded in the ceiling with that iron poised above Pitch’s little boy, but the same dynamic is at play. We often live in the midst of inevitable cataclysm, and fret ourselves to death over it, when it would be simple enough to simply reach up and remove it – like that axe stuck in the ceiling. Of course, simply removing it is a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the picture. It’s the terrible anxiety of consciousness, magnified exponentially in a prison, for inmates and guards alike, and even their families, that that sword could fall arbitrarily at any given time.
SMN: Is it fair to say that Coventry proves that “anything is possible”? I am thinking about the fact that “the magical” and “the real” often mingle in this novel. (Flying saucers, ghosts in the garden, dead women who play the piano, etc.)
I think that anything is possible if you can pull it off. So far I haven’t been criticized for the license I took in melding the real and the fantastic. I knew I was out on a limb with all those inexplicable things occurring like fish with the faces of convicts, and dead people walking around, etc. But I believe that prisons defy reality, conscience, and any sense of cosmos, so I wanted a kind of chaos ordered through impressionistic language. I decided I’d simply take my chances. It was the only novel about prisons I was equipped to write. I remember George Garrett saying about Randall Kenan’s often disorienting surreal novel, A Visitation of Spirits – and I paraphrase - that Kenan attempts to do everything in the novel and pretty much gets away with it. I was hoping that would be the reaction to this book. I have no regrets.
SMN: On a second reading of Coventry, I noted that when the point of view shifts, “reality” changes. Pitch really escapes and invades Calvin’s trailer when the event is seen through Mac’s eyes. The escape never takes place when viewed through Calvin’s eyes. Would you please comment?
I suppose as much as anything, I wanted to get across the demonic nature of prisons in general – that they possess lives of their own. That they are haunting and powerful and that reality, as a fixed point on a chart, does not exist. I use a fellow like Mac – hard as nails and not one to go in for spirits and the inexplicable, etc. (and Thrake too) – as the lens for how a prison, if one spends too much time in it, embodies a parallel reality. If one believes in its power, then reality becomes a rather fluid term. Hence Mac’s devils and Thrake’s haunting. One might write off what happens to Mac and Thrake as mental illness, but it’s something even more pernicious than insanity. It’s diabolical. It strikes me that prisons and the death penalty and our conventions of punishment and retribution and judgment are close to what hard-shell Christians are talking about when they discuss the Devil’s hold on the planet – though, as a culture, we have endorsed horrifying futile punishment as righteous and even effective. I would not say the Devil is behind drugs and alcohol and fornication, etc. But I see old Scratch perched gloatingly at the pinnacle of the prison empire we’ve established in this country, an increasingly lucrative empire for those who stand to profit from it. It’s absolutely our most visible monument to evil. What one believes is what is real. It’s the dilemma we find Cal embroiled in. You’ll notice that the women – Rachel and Elizabeth – the chief agents of Redemption in the novel – do not fall prey to the doubt and evil influences that the key men in the novel do. Their points of view, their consciousnesses, are the only things keeping their men in any way sane. The novel’s lapses into what some reviewers have called magical realism is the only way that I could convey the insanity, the utter impossibility, of the prison world. There is no reality, no one point of view.
SMN: Would you agree that Coventry is an example of the Southern Gothic Tradition?
JB: I surely hope that it is. The two Southern writers I been most profoundly influenced by are Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. I wanted Flannery’s sense of Catholic rectitude in the novel, her crisp, no-nonsense, clear-eyed declarative sentence. But I also wanted the dreamy impressionistic air of Faulkner, though I wish to be clear that I do not league myself with these geniuses. It was a kind of nod to Flannery to make my prison chaplain a Catholic priest, and also a reflex I simply can’t quell.
SMN: To what extent did your VISTA experience influence this novel?
JB: Coventry is not an autobiographical novel. Yes, of course I embezzled liberally from things I saw and heard while working as a VISTA in a number of prisons in the South Piedmont area, and then later, up until now, dipping in to do short stints teaching creative writing workshops in prisons here and there around North Carolina. What I saw and felt initially as a 23 year old, fresh from his mom’s kitchen in Pittsburgh, on a prisonyard, became the initial impulses to write about prisons: the sheer unearthly inexplicable phenomena that it embodies. For me there was no better place to land than a prison. I wanted to write, but nothing terribly dramatic had happened to me. Prison is filled with hyperaction twenty-four hours a day: inimitable characters, unimaginable conflict and crisis (though little in the way of resolution) constant danger and mayhem, unearthly settings, plots, and points of view - of the keepers and kept alike. Wow! Right there before your eyes. So, I was handed a narrative and I couldn’t get it all down quickly enough. Then of course, thankfully, I began to mature as writer and, finally, though over the years I’ve published essays and poems and stories about prison, I was able to write the novel about prisons I had all along wanted to write and in the way I wanted to write it: Coventry.
When 30-year-old Calvin Gaddy finds himself working as a guard in Coventry Prison, he is plagued by misgivings. He had promised his mother that he would not follow his father, MacGregor Gaddy’s example – especially since the aging, retired “Mac” Gaddy had become a legend at Coventry due to his reputation for cruelty. Now, Mac is haunted by visions of taunting demons (the souls of former prisoners) who speak to him from his fireplace where he spends his nights drinking and talking to spirits. During the day he works on a stonewall between his farm and an encroaching housing development (which he views as an evil invasion)
Ah, but life has a way of forcing concessions. Elizabeth Mac Gregor is now dead (struck by lightning) and Calvin is living in a trailer on his father’s land with his pregnant wife, Rachel. Calvin feels prompted to build his own home – that means he needs a stable job with health and retirement benefits. Despite some misgivings, he finally applies for a position at Coventry.
As Calvin adjusts to his duties, he gradually shifts from a lackadaisical, pot-smoking employee to a man who views his job as a “calling.” Confronted with the suffering and despair of life’s “throwaways,” he begins to view the prison as a metaphor for human existence, and his father’s oft-quoted credo, “You’re either a convict or a guard, one,” makes him mindful of his role as an agent of implacable order. When he witnesses casual acts of bestial cruelty, he becomes increasingly convinced that Coventry demands unquestioning adherence to the enforcement of a system of implacable rules – a duty performed with pitiless detachment.
Ironically, Calvin also perceives paradox and revelation in Coventry even as he witnesses its worst horrors. At times, he senses a kinship with the prisoners and even fantasizes about exchanging roles – he can easily imagine himself entering the lock-up while “Pitch,” one of Coventry’s most intractable inmates, returns to Calvin’s trailer – and his wife.
One of the prison’s worst abominations is a prisoner called “Frank” who, because his grotesquely burned features remind others of Boris Karloff in the film, “Frankenstein,” undergoes a mysterious transformation. Castrated, imprisoned, defiled and mutilated, Frank becomes a servile “life-to-die” convict who, in addition to helping Mac Gaddy capture runaways, endures daily abuse and humiliation. When Frank finally dies, his tragic existence seems the epitome of a meaningless, wasted life; yet Coventry’s prisoners conduct a funeral (near the prison’s garbage dump) that seems to confer a kind of sainthood on Frank.
Then, there is Pitch, Coventry’s “warlock” who can evoke terror in both prisoners and guards with an onion and a bit of rag. After driving a brutal guard named Thrake to suicide, the enigmatic Pitch turns his attention to Calvin, who asks his father how he should deal with Pitch. Mac notes that a man of evil intent has as much power as his victim is willing to give him. Armed with this knowledge, Calvin moves toward a fateful encounter that will alter the fate of all he knows and loves.
For readers who are familiar with the arts in Southeast, Joseph Bathanti is a familiar name. A native of
Pittsborough, Pa., Bathanti arrived in North Carolina in 1976 as a VISTA volunteer. (Joseph’s early work with prison inmates influenced his work for the next thirty years.) Among Bathanti’s achievements are: four award-winning volumes of poetry; East Liberty, a novel which received the Carolina Novel award in 2001 and “Afomo,” a dramatic work which won the Wachovia Playwright’s Prize. At present, Bathanti is the Co-Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Appalachian State University and the Guest Editor of “The Cold Mountain Review.” The novel, Coventry (the subject of this review) has received the Novello Literary Award for 2006.
In a recent interview with the author, Smoky Mountain News asked Bathanti about the autobiographical, historic and literary details of Coventry.
SMN: One of the most striking aspects of Coventry is the language. The descriptive details teem with vivid imagery and metaphor. Is it fair to say that when a poet writes a novel, he remains a poet?
JB: I think that the poet, even when writing prose, in this case fiction, holds tight to poetic language when setting up a narrative. I think we’ve been made to believe that the craft of fiction and poetry are mutually exclusive, but that’s simply not true – especially as the genres these days tend to bleed into each other. It seems also that the trend is for poets to invade fiction, writing novels and stories, rather than fiction writers embarking on careers in poetry. It’s interesting to point out that Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s first books were poems. When I write prose, I’m interested in employing the same compression and musicality that invest poetry. I think it’s possible to do this and still drive a discursive narrative.
SMN: Would you comment on the names of people and places in Coventry? I am thinking that maybe there is something “numinous” about characters named Friend, Journey and Frank, motels called Heart of Dark, and an isolation cell called Alone.
JB: I wasn’t trying to be too determined in naming folks in the novel. Some of the names simply came to me. Friend, of course, ends up being an ironic name. Frank is short for Frankenstein, Shelley’s legendary misunderstood monster, of whom I’ve always been rather fond. Heart of Dark is a bit of theft from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul and even from St. Paul’s “through a glass darkly.” Cal experiences a dark night of the soul as he enters his own heart of darkness and he’s also having trouble seeing himself and the world he’s ensnarled in with any type of clarity. The prison is that same heart of darkness that Conrad found in the Congo. There is also a dubious hotel in Durham (or was many years ago) called The Heart of Durham. I called the “holes” in the novel the Boot and Alone because I was trying to call attention through different takes on language to the horror of what happens to people thrown in isolation or holes.. Because Coventry is a kind of fable, I also wanted places like the Boot and Alone and the Cook Shack to embody a malevolent consciousness.
SMN: Is there a connection between Calvin’s dream about the axe in the ceiling (and his memory of the old fable) and the death of Pitch’s child? Any connection with the Sword of Diamedes?
JB: I didn’t consciously connect that axe imbedded in the ceiling with that iron poised above Pitch’s little boy, but the same dynamic is at play. We often live in the midst of inevitable cataclysm, and fret ourselves to death over it, when it would be simple enough to simply reach up and remove it – like that axe stuck in the ceiling. Of course, simply removing it is a bit of an oversimplification, but you get the picture. It’s the terrible anxiety of consciousness, magnified exponentially in a prison, for inmates and guards alike, and even their families, that that sword could fall arbitrarily at any given time.
SMN: Is it fair to say that Coventry proves that “anything is possible”? I am thinking about the fact that “the magical” and “the real” often mingle in this novel. (Flying saucers, ghosts in the garden, dead women who play the piano, etc.)
I think that anything is possible if you can pull it off. So far I haven’t been criticized for the license I took in melding the real and the fantastic. I knew I was out on a limb with all those inexplicable things occurring like fish with the faces of convicts, and dead people walking around, etc. But I believe that prisons defy reality, conscience, and any sense of cosmos, so I wanted a kind of chaos ordered through impressionistic language. I decided I’d simply take my chances. It was the only novel about prisons I was equipped to write. I remember George Garrett saying about Randall Kenan’s often disorienting surreal novel, A Visitation of Spirits – and I paraphrase - that Kenan attempts to do everything in the novel and pretty much gets away with it. I was hoping that would be the reaction to this book. I have no regrets.
SMN: On a second reading of Coventry, I noted that when the point of view shifts, “reality” changes. Pitch really escapes and invades Calvin’s trailer when the event is seen through Mac’s eyes. The escape never takes place when viewed through Calvin’s eyes. Would you please comment?
I suppose as much as anything, I wanted to get across the demonic nature of prisons in general – that they possess lives of their own. That they are haunting and powerful and that reality, as a fixed point on a chart, does not exist. I use a fellow like Mac – hard as nails and not one to go in for spirits and the inexplicable, etc. (and Thrake too) – as the lens for how a prison, if one spends too much time in it, embodies a parallel reality. If one believes in its power, then reality becomes a rather fluid term. Hence Mac’s devils and Thrake’s haunting. One might write off what happens to Mac and Thrake as mental illness, but it’s something even more pernicious than insanity. It’s diabolical. It strikes me that prisons and the death penalty and our conventions of punishment and retribution and judgment are close to what hard-shell Christians are talking about when they discuss the Devil’s hold on the planet – though, as a culture, we have endorsed horrifying futile punishment as righteous and even effective. I would not say the Devil is behind drugs and alcohol and fornication, etc. But I see old Scratch perched gloatingly at the pinnacle of the prison empire we’ve established in this country, an increasingly lucrative empire for those who stand to profit from it. It’s absolutely our most visible monument to evil. What one believes is what is real. It’s the dilemma we find Cal embroiled in. You’ll notice that the women – Rachel and Elizabeth – the chief agents of Redemption in the novel – do not fall prey to the doubt and evil influences that the key men in the novel do. Their points of view, their consciousnesses, are the only things keeping their men in any way sane. The novel’s lapses into what some reviewers have called magical realism is the only way that I could convey the insanity, the utter impossibility, of the prison world. There is no reality, no one point of view.
SMN: Would you agree that Coventry is an example of the Southern Gothic Tradition?
JB: I surely hope that it is. The two Southern writers I been most profoundly influenced by are Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. I wanted Flannery’s sense of Catholic rectitude in the novel, her crisp, no-nonsense, clear-eyed declarative sentence. But I also wanted the dreamy impressionistic air of Faulkner, though I wish to be clear that I do not league myself with these geniuses. It was a kind of nod to Flannery to make my prison chaplain a Catholic priest, and also a reflex I simply can’t quell.
SMN: To what extent did your VISTA experience influence this novel?
JB: Coventry is not an autobiographical novel. Yes, of course I embezzled liberally from things I saw and heard while working as a VISTA in a number of prisons in the South Piedmont area, and then later, up until now, dipping in to do short stints teaching creative writing workshops in prisons here and there around North Carolina. What I saw and felt initially as a 23 year old, fresh from his mom’s kitchen in Pittsburgh, on a prisonyard, became the initial impulses to write about prisons: the sheer unearthly inexplicable phenomena that it embodies. For me there was no better place to land than a prison. I wanted to write, but nothing terribly dramatic had happened to me. Prison is filled with hyperaction twenty-four hours a day: inimitable characters, unimaginable conflict and crisis (though little in the way of resolution) constant danger and mayhem, unearthly settings, plots, and points of view - of the keepers and kept alike. Wow! Right there before your eyes. So, I was handed a narrative and I couldn’t get it all down quickly enough. Then of course, thankfully, I began to mature as writer and, finally, though over the years I’ve published essays and poems and stories about prison, I was able to write the novel about prisons I had all along wanted to write and in the way I wanted to write it: Coventry.
September 22, 2015
This unusual and innovative novel involves a gritty Southern prison and the guard who has taken on his position there as a sort of family inheritance. The characters are believable and the action is gripping--if you don't mind a great deal of pretty graphic violence. I did get tripped up a couple of times in long dream sequences that I thought were part of the "waking" story, but most of the time I was kept right in the action even as the writing itself was quite experimental. http://sarahkennedybooks.com
January 2, 2018
Wonderful, dark, phantasmagorical. Hate and love. Father and son. It is also a story of love and the support evincing from that emotion. What a read! Maybe someone will republish it! Every author thinks of movie rights, simply because . . . Well, gee, money. This novel is plenty dark, with strangely graphic scenes that would lend themselves to a movie.
March 3, 2013
Calvin decides to work at the prison where his father served as a guard. This wasn't his job preference, but work is hard to come by so he follows in his father's footsteps. He wants to build a stable future for his family. Rachel his wife is expecting their first child.
Coventry prison reveals to Calvin a world of harsh and justified brutality. He tries to forget the daily grind and parade of pathetic personalities he must endure by toking on illegal cigarettes. Then paranoia of being busted as a user and weed trafficker forces him to straighten up his act. The need for a higher pay scale rather than a high mind triggers Calvin to apply for a warden's position.
Bathanti allows the reader to see life from both the perspective of inmates and guards. There are good and bad at both ends of this character spectrum. He uses a lyrical descriptive writing style that entwines the real world with the mystical one. It become believable through agents of voodoo and drugs.
Coventry prison reveals to Calvin a world of harsh and justified brutality. He tries to forget the daily grind and parade of pathetic personalities he must endure by toking on illegal cigarettes. Then paranoia of being busted as a user and weed trafficker forces him to straighten up his act. The need for a higher pay scale rather than a high mind triggers Calvin to apply for a warden's position.
Bathanti allows the reader to see life from both the perspective of inmates and guards. There are good and bad at both ends of this character spectrum. He uses a lyrical descriptive writing style that entwines the real world with the mystical one. It become believable through agents of voodoo and drugs.
April 27, 2013
Rendered in black and white. 2-D characters. PG-13 rating.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews