What is the Best Novel About Justice?
Let us know your answer in the comments....
Jonathan Franzen, Author, The Corrections:
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson is the most underappreciated of Mark Twain's novels and one of the best books ever written about American slavery. It's about an antebellum small-town Missouri lawyer who dabbles in the new science of fingerprinting; it's also, deftly, comically, about justice in every sense of the word.
Alice Walker, Author, Overcoming Speechlessness:
Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. In the character of Jean Valjean, Les Miserables shows that what society narrowly considers criminal behavior is often caused by impoverishment, hunger, and desperation to which society has made insufficient address. I too believe that most “criminal” behavior has desperation, and the kinds may be varied, at its root. A truly just society would mean no one who is starving, or seeing those around her starving, would be punished for stealing bread.
Tom Wolfe, Author, I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel:
I can think of many good novels in which justice triumphs and many in which it crashes and burns. But as for how justice lives, I don't know how you can top Bleak House. Justice lives not in this world but in a play world. In Homo Ludens, the law is Huizinga's favorite example of . . . Man Playing. Not for nothing, he says, is a court of law called a court. It is by no means a case of mere linguistic coincidence. Justice, he says, is not a court of law's concern. The game is. Is there or has there ever been a prosecutor who got up in front of a jury thinking about justice? Has there ever been a civil lawyer who cared so much about justice that he would stand up in court and utter a word that wasn't paid for and put in his mouth? Of course not, says Huizinga. Homo Ludens! And there you have the story--and the message--of Bleak House. How would Dickens know? His first job was recording court testimony verbatim for newspapers.
Elizabeth Alexander, Professor at Yale, Poet, and Author, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color:
Alice Walker's Meridian. This is a novel that shows us that the beloved quest for justice that characterized the Civil Rights Movement was not without its challenges and conundrums."
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Lawyer and Author, Prozac Nation:
The best novel about justice I've ever read is also my favorite book: The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer. But i'm not sure it's a novel exactly.
