I couldn’t tear myself away from this novel. It opens with Noa P. Singleton, inmate number 10271978 in the Pennsylvania Institute for Women, introducing herself and telling us that “…I pulled the trigger. Post-conviction, I never contested that once.” She is on death row and nearing her execution date.
Noa is unnervingly calm as she begins to tell us the back story. She is adamant about her guilt and sees the past ten years spent in prison and her impending execution as the logical outcome of her crime, the murder of pregnant Sarah Dixon. She isn’t even particularly ruffled when high-powered attorney Marlene Dixon, Sarah’s mother, visits her to announce that she no longer believes in the death penalty and will be pursuing a clemency petition for Noa. Marlene just wants to know why — why did Noa shoot her daughter? Noa has never answered this question publicly, and does not intend to now. Noa’s story is so knotted and convoluted that it takes the entire book to tease it out.
This novel is about identity– self-identity and imposed identity, and about all of the little (and enormous) factors that go into making us who we are, or, at least, the factors that propel us to a certain place and time and point of action. The opening passage sets the tone beautifully:
In this world, you are either good or evil. If not, then a court or a teacher or a parent is bound to tag your identity before you’ve had a chance to figure it out on your own. The gray middle ground, that mucous-thin terrain where most of life resides, is really only a temporary annex, like gestation or purgatory.
In telling Noa’s story, author Silver does not tackle the morality of capital punishment directly. She never asks us explicitly if Noa deserves to be on death row. She doesn’t push us to judge. Feel as you will about capital punishment, she seems to say, but consider the person; consider the process. And then maybe consider it all a little further. Noa P. Singleton is subtle, complex and quite stunning.