Chaplain Discusses 'Death House' Ministry

DATE May 19, 2008 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Reverend Carroll Pickett, who ministered to 95 death
row inmates in Texas from 1982 to 1995, on why he is now against
the death penalty, and what the job is like
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

As the chaplain at the Huntsville unit of the Texas prison system, known as
"The Walls," my guest, Pastor Carroll Pickett, ministered to 95 men who were
put to death by lethal injection. During the 13 years he served in that
position, 1982 to '95, he became an opponent of the death penalty, something
he didn't tell his colleagues. Now Pickett is the subject of a documentary
called "At the Death House Door." It premiers on IFC, the Independent Film
Channel, May 29th.

Pastor Pickett is now retired from the prison system, but still preaches near
Huntsville. During the years he was a death house chaplain, after each
execution he made a cassette recording describing what happened. Those tapes
are excerpted in the documentary. Here's an excerpt of the recording he made
after ministering to the first man ever to be executed by lethal injection.
The man was Charlie Brooks. The date was December 7th, 1982. It was the
first execution in Texas since 1964.

(Soundbite of audiocassette)

Reverend CARROLL PICKETT: The time came, I went to the cell, told Charlie it
was time to go. He walked straight inside. They just strapped him down and
he didn't say a word. He was lying there on the table just waiting. All the
people were brought in. The first injection of lethal medication began
flowing to the arms. He opened his mouth, "All," as if he was trying to say
"Allahu Akbar," which means "Allah, the most great." His eyes closed, and he
moved no more. I breathed a sigh of relief. Charlie Brooks died calmly,
peacefully, talking to Allah.

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: Reverend Pickett, welcome to FRESH AIR. In the film, we hear excerpts
of tapes you made following each execution. Why did you make them?

Rev. PICKETT: I was living alone at the time, and I lived in that house
right across the street from the prison, and I have a degree, a doctorate in
clinical pastoral education, and I also majored in psychology. And I knew all
along that--I've counseled people all my life--that you've got to talk. If
you have a problem, if you've got something inside you need to get out, that
you need to get it out. But what I was going through over in the execution
chamber and the death house was something that nobody else could understand.

So I just decided that after Charlie Brooks died, I came home and I sat on the
couch, and I looked over in my bookcase, and there was my little tape
recorder, which I had used before to record my sermons and then listen back to
them, and I then could correct them. But then I decided, `I'm going to talk
to this tape recorder, and I'm going to get everything out that took place
from the time Charlie Brooks got there at 6:00 in the morning until he was
executed at midnight, and then I went over to visit with his family at 3 or
4:00 in the morning.' So I really began talking to this tape recorder to get
it out, but I never intended for anybody to hear it.

GROSS: When you became the prison chaplain, no one in Texas had been executed
since 1964, and you were the death row chaplain for the first lethal injection
in Texas and in the country. You describe in the movie that you had
rehearsals to work out the details. What had to be worked out? Why did you
need the rehearsals?

Rev. PICKETT: Nobody had been executed in the world by a lethal injection,
and it's a totally different process than, say, like Gary Gilmore had a firing
squad, and Texas used to have the electric chair, and some places still have
the gas chamber; but nobody had ever done a lethal injection. And nobody knew
what was going to react, you know, that nobody had ever been injected with
these three particular types of drugs. So what the warden wanted to do was to
train his staff where we would all go through this, and everybody would have a
job or responsibility, let's put it like that, and get it done, and get it
done as quickly and as cleanly and as neatly as possible. And we rehearsed it
several times, several times.

GROSS: And what was your job?

Rev. PICKETT: My job was to go to the door at midnight and say, `It's time
to go.' And a guard would open the door. And I had already trained the inmate
to tell him that, you know, `When the time comes I'm going to tell you it's
time to go, and just follow me.' And I would lead him into the death chamber.
And the guards would be on both sides because the warden wanted it that way,
in case one of them became angry or got upset or got scared, and either
attacked me or ran backwards, which never happened, thankfully. And I would
lead him into the death chamber, and I would stand right next to his side and
show him where to back up to and then how to get up on the gurney. And then I
would stay there and watch everything.

GROSS: Yeah, in the film you say you can't imagine how somebody could like
walk to his own death like that and step up onto the gurney on which he's
going to be executed.

Rev. PICKETT: That's right, and it's difficult to. And everyone was
different. You know, some of them would hesitate, and some of them would say,
`Can I have five more minutes?' And there were couple of them who hadn't
accepted anything about religion during the day, and they would say, `Can I
have five more minutes for you to save me?' And I'd call the warden and I'd
say, `Warden, give me five more minutes.' And he'd say `OK.' But...

GROSS: What would you do with those five minutes?

Rev. PICKETT: Well, there was one boy who said, you know, `Would you teach
me to memorize the 23rd Psalm?' And I told him, I said, you know, you can't
memorize it. And then he wanted to say it on the gurney as he was dying. And
I said, `I will teach it to you, but you're going to forget it in there.' He
said, `Well, when you get in there, would you repeat it as I'm dying?' And I
said, `OK, that's fine.' You know, `I'll do that for you.' He said, `I'm sorry
I've waited so long to accept this.' Said, `You've been here for 18 hours and
you've been good to me and you've been here all day long. You've gotten me
anything I wanted--Cokes, Dr. Peppers, whatever you wanted, but I never
brought up my lack of religious faith until now, and here it is midnight.' And
I went ahead and did it. And I prayed it with him, and then the time came,
and I took him in and he crawled up and he said, `Hold my hand.' And I said,
`All right. Are you ready?' And he started repeating it, "The Lord is my
shepherd." And then the drug went to work. So I went ahead and finished it as
he was dying.

GROSS: Did you feel that he was saved as a result of that?

Rev. PICKETT: I never felt like I was on the judgment committee. I never
put myself in judgment on any of these people. I didn't read their record
before they came there. I didn't know what they had done before they came to
the prison, to my prison. I just wanted to start off fresh with them as
people, that each one of them was a person. And if you wanted to tell me
things that he had done, I'll listen. If he wanted to confess some things,
I'd listen. But I wanted to start off, and I didn't sit in judgment. That
was done by judges and juries, and that was not my responsibility.

GROSS: There is one man who you were pretty confident was not guilty, and his
name was Carlos De Luna. He was 27 when he was executed, and he had been very
worried about the execution. He was afraid of it, and he was afraid of the
possibility of pain, of it taking a long time. You told him it would take
like 12 seconds for the chemicals to take effect and end his life. And you
even rehearsed with him, in the sense that like you'd count down to 12 seconds
with him, and practice with him what 12 seconds felt like. You made a tape
after that execution, recording your thoughts. And an excerpt of that tape is
included in the documentary about you, "At the Death House Door." And I
thought we'd listen to an excerpt from that tape that you made as you spoke
into your recorder.

(Soundbite of audiocassette)

Rev. PICKETT: He was squeezing very tight as they inserted the needle.
Fortunately it went quickly. He had previously asked me to stay in touch with
him, so I moved down to touch his leg right above his ankle. The needle went
in well on the right arm. The sodium thiopental began to flow, and he began
breathing slowly. After about 10 seconds he raised up his head and looked at
me with those big, brown eyes. The warden looked at me and I looked at him.
Something was not going right. After about 10 seconds more, he raised his
head up again and looked square in my face and my eyes. I just simply
squeezed his leg. I don't know what he was trying to say, but I wish I did.
Nothing was happening. I had told him. I had promised him it wouldn't hurt,
it wouldn't take long. He might have been thinking, `You lied to me.' I was
sick. This bothers me, and probably will forever and ever.

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: That's an excerpt of the tape that my guest, Reverend Carroll Pickett,
made after the execution of Carlos De Luna, and Reverend Pickett was the death
house chaplain for The Walls prison unit in Huntsville, Texas, from 1982 to
'95. There's a new documentary about him that includes some of the tapes,
like the one we just heard, which he made following each execution. And the
documentary is called "At the Death House Door."

Reverend Pickett, does that execution still haunt you?

Rev. PICKETT: Yes, ma'am, it certainly does. And every time I've seen the
documentary, I can feel it. I can feel it, because he and I were very close
that day.

GROSS: You had said you tried not to get to know a person's--what they were
convicted of, you just wanted to treat them as a person for the hours that you
knew them before their death. So how did you become so convinced he was not
guilty?

Rev. PICKETT: Well, he was number 33 that I had been with, and it's not that
I am so full of wisdom, but it becomes a feeling that you develop, and then
also it turns from feeling to fact when one comes in and you spend those many
hours with them. And when they talk, I began to realize they are either
telling me the truth all day long, or they start confessing to lots of things
after 10:00 at night. But Carlos never confessed to a thing. Carlos was a
scared person. It's just like his family said, he was scared of a Pekingese
dog when they delivered papers. We had a thunderstorm that night, as we did
on many executions, and Carlos backed away from the front of the cell where I
was leaning on the cell, and he went back in and put his head in a corner. He
was scared of thunder and lightning. And come to find out that, historically,
he had been very much afraid of all sorts of things. And there was no way in
the world that a man with that fear could ever, in my opinion and my feeling,
use a knife and kill somebody.

GROSS: In spite of the fact that you came to feel that he was not guilty, you
encouraged him not to fight. And you said to fight even though you're
innocent will just bring about more suffering. Why did you believe that, and
do you still believe that?

Rev. PICKETT: Yes, I believe that. I believe that with all of them. Once
you get to that point, you don't come out of the cell until--there's two
telephone rooms that're in the executioner's room. One of them comes from the
attorney general, which says there's nothing working legally, and the other
phone is connected to the governor's office, and the governor says, `I'm not
giving a stay. I'm not giving any reprieve. I'm not doing anything.' So as
soon as those are done, there is nothing that can stop an execution,
absolutely nothing. So when you walk and when I say it's time to go, he's on
his way to die. If we take him in there and, innocent or not, they're going
to kill him. And they've got procedures built in that go even beyond the
needles, whether or not they work, there's a cut down. And if you fight, if
you fight, it just gets worse.

GROSS: But what happens if the needles don't work, or if you fight it?

Rev. PICKETT: If you fight, those five big guards will hold him down and
they will use force, which is legal. He would be strapped down, and they
would put extra tape and extra bandages on his arms so that he couldn't move.
There were some who might be able to flex a muscle, but if he's flexing his
muscle and moving around and they can't get a needle in, then there's a
procedure which says, `We're going to do a cut down.' And a cut down is where
they take a knife and open a vein, and that's very bloody. I've seen it in
surgery. I never saw it in the death house. But he was going to be killed.

GROSS: You told a man awaiting execution that it wouldn't be painful. It
would be quick and not painful. You watched each of them, 95 of them, as they
died. Having seen 95 executions, are you still convinced that the men don't
suffer pain?

Rev. PICKETT: No. No, I'm not. The way I got seven to 12 seconds was based
upon the history of the past, based upon their size and their weight. And one
of the things that--it's in the film, and it's also one of the mistakes that's
in the procedure--is that I was supposed to check their veins while they're
still in the chamber, before they go in to be executed, and to see if they
have a good vein. Well, I'm not a doctor. You know, doctors can't do that.
That's against the law. No medical people. We didn't have any nurses, we
didn't have any LVNs. And so, you know, I would just check and say, `Do you
have a good vein?' And he would, most of the time, by 10:30 or 11, they had
trusted me to know that if they showed me a vein, that's where it would be
used. Most of the men who were executed were either high on drugs or alcohol
when they committed their crime. And so I would check the vein. And if there
was a good vein, I would tell the warden. He would tell the executioners
where to put it in.

GROSS: And were the prisoners--I get the impression, since a lot of prisoners
use drugs, that they knew if they had good veins or not. Would they willingly
tell you that information and suggest a vein for their own execution?

Rev. PICKETT: Yes. They wanted to get it over quick. There were many of
them who told them, you know, sometime during the day or even when they got
there early in the morning, said, `Why can't we do it right now? I don't wait
all day long, you know. I'm going to get killed anyway. You know, let's do
it now.' Well, that's not--the law says, in Texas, you shall be executed at
some hour before daybreak on such-and-such day. Like Charlie Brooks, the
document that was signed by the governor says, `You will be executed before
daybreak on December the 7th.' So we couldn't do his on December the 6th. And
so they would say, `Let's get it done.' So the majority of them were willing
to cooperate.

And where I got the seven to 12 seconds was from the majority of those that I
had been with before. And that was the way I could tell them, you know, that
ordinarily this is going to take seven to 12 seconds.

GROSS: But you're not convinced that they weren't suffering, that there
wasn't pain?

Rev. PICKETT: No. No, I'm not convinced. One of them kept saying, `It's
burning. It's burning.' What was burning? You know, he couldn't tell us what
it was. Whatever it was was burning. I watched the--one of my
responsibilities to assist the warden was he couldn't see the hole in the wall
where the tube went through into the executions room, and every time you
switched from one drug to the next, there would be a bubble, an air bubble.
And I was supposed to nod my head to him so he would know that, `Here comes
sodium thiopental, here comes pavulon. Here comes potassium.' And there were
a lot of them that they would not go completely asleep with the first drug,
which is sodium thiopental, which out to put most people to sleep if you
didn't fight it.

But the second drug, which is pavulon, which has been banned by the American
Veterinarian Association because they said it's too painful for dogs and cats,
and yet we use it for people. Sometimes when that drug would come in there,
you could hear noise in the chest. You could hear sound come out of their
throat or their lungs because that was supposed to paralyze the lungs. But
sometimes, the noises were not just air coming out, it was a pain. And you
could tell the difference between a pain and just air.

GROSS: As the person was getting the lethal injection, would you make
physical contact with them or eye contact with them?

Rev. PICKETT: Both. From the very beginning, they wanted to maintain
physical contact. Most of them wanted me to hold their hand. If I'd been
with them, I'd learned their trust--earned their trust, let's say. Most of
them say, you know, particularly if they had no family there, they say, `Will
you hold my hand?' Well, I couldn't hold their hand because their hands, both
of them, were strapped down, and also they had tape wrapped around them, or,
in some cases, a Ace bandage. So I would stand at their right knee and put my
right hand on their--at their request, this was their request--and I would ask
them in advance, `Do you want me?' And they'd say, `Yes, I want you to
maintain contact.' And they said, `We're going to keep our eyes on you, and we
want you to promise to be there until it's all over.' I put my hand down there
and I put my finger on where a vein was in the leg so I could tell when the
last beat of the pulse was. But I never left contact with them, none of them,
physical or eye contact.

GROSS: I know you told the men as they walked to, you know, as they awaited
their execution, not to fight, that fighting would only make it worse. It
would mean restraints. It would mean, you know, the guards physically
subduing them. Were there times when you wanted to fight when you were just
so upset by the thought of the execution, particularly for the man who you
believed was innocent, you know, that you actually wanted to fight it?

Rev. PICKETT: Whether it was subconscious or whatever it was--let's go back
to Carlos. I felt so sympathetic towards him, and I was so 100 percent
certain that he could not have committed this crime--and this was before I
knew all the things that the Chicago Tribune found out.

GROSS: Yeah, and I should mention that, you know, the documentary about you,
"At the Death House Door," it's in part about you, and it's in part about
Carlos De Luna, the man who you believe was innocent. And a couple of Chicago
Tribune reporters investigate his conviction and the story behind it.

Rev. PICKETT: It was--having been with him all day, I knew in my heart that
this man--and I had a son who was identically the same age, and so you going
to call that transferrance, you call it transferrance--but he was a super
person, as far as being able to administer to during the day. And then, of
course, when nightfall comes, it gets difficult, you know, it gets difficult.
Because they know that when the sun goes down, it's not long till midnight.
But I knew Carlos was not guilty. And there wasn't anything I could do about
it. You know, I mentioned to one of the guards, and it was Fred Allen, the
one that's in the...(unintelligible). I said, `Fred, I don't think he's
guilty.' And Fred said, `By the way he acts and by the way he talks,' he said,
`I don't believe he's guilty, either.' He said, `But you know there's not a
thing we can do about it.' And there wasn't. Who would I fight? I mean, who
could we fight? The warden had already heard from the governor. The Supreme
Court had already ruled. And in this country, they have the final say-so.

GROSS: You oppose the death penalty now. You've certainly lived through the
death penalty many times, 95 times to be precise. Did you oppose when you
were asked to take on the job? And I should explain, when you became minister
at the prison, the death penalty--no one had been executed in Texas for years,
for nearly 20 years. And then lethal injections were started while you were
there. So you never really expected to be presiding, you know, to be the
minister for men awaiting lethal injection. But were you against the death
penalty when you started working at the prison?

Rev. PICKETT: No, I was in favor of it. And a lot of it had to do with the
siege that took place in 1974, when I was a minister at the Presbyterian
Church, across town, when three inmates took over the library and they were
going to break at. And that siege lasted from Wednesday morning at 1:00 and
afternoon, and the shootout occurred 11 days later at between 9:30 and 10:00
at night. Two of those who were hostages were my members of my church. And
one was shot in the chest, and the other one shot five times in the back. And
when after I went and I told the family and got them home, I was called by the
director to come across, and it was one of the most horrible scenes I've ever
seen in my life, particularly knowing that both of these were members of my
church. One of them, I was getting ready to do her daughter's wedding the
next Saturday. And I talked to them on Saturday afternoon, and they planned
their funeral.

So this really angered me, you know, because here they were murdered, and the
person who was convicted of murdering them came up for execution 12 years
after I went to work there. And I didn't want to be with him, but I began to
see more and more of the broken system we have. Many of those people were
mentally retarded, a great majority of them were either Hispanic or black; and
out of those 95, we only executed one that had a college degree. All the rest
of them, their education was ninth grade and under. So the more I saw the
system, how it was against justice, and I began to see this is wrong.

GROSS: So when the convict became a hostage taker, and two of the hostages
were women from your church, and those two women were killed, at that point
you believed in the death penalty; but after becoming the death house
minister, you came to see this pattern, that it was poor people, sometimes
retarded people, uneducated people, people with the deck stacked against them.
When you started to feel this is wrong, the death penalty is wrong, why did
you remain in the position of being the minister to the men who were going to
be executed?

Rev. PICKETT: Because they were people. They were people. You know, God
had called me there to be at that chapel and that prison, just not 50 yards
away, in our hospital, we had the third floor was another death row. I had
100 people there, convicts, all of them, who were dying of cancer, COPD, AIDS,
sickle-cell anemia. So I really had two death rows. And to minister to both
of them was part of what God had called me to do. And I did not want to leave
them, as long as I felt like we were able to do it the right way; and I don't
mean this egotistically, but I felt like that I could do it better than
anybody because the warden and I worked together, and we had the system down
and it had worked, nobody had fought.

GROSS: Now, you said that one of the people who really changed your mind
about the death penalty, and changed your position to opposing it, was the
hostage taker, the man who was on death row because he executed--he shot--two
of the hostages he had taken, who were women who were members of your church.
And you had to minister him the night of his execution. Did you tell him
about your involvement in that hostage taking crisis, that you were the pastor
of two women that he shot and that you were ministering to their families?

Rev. PICKETT: Absolutely not. I went to the warden when I saw that Ignacio
had been given a date. I went to the warden and I said, `You know, I don't
want to do this one. I don't want to do this one, because I'm emotionally
involved.' And he said, `You can't back out.' He said, `Everybody out on death
row knows who's doing it.' We had 130 come in, and I ministered to them during
the day, and they got stays, and they would go back out to death row and tell
people everything I did: what I looked like, what I wore, what I talked like,
everything. And he said, `You can't change this.' He said, `But when you get
in there, do not let Cuevas know anything about who you were.' He said, `I
don't believe he's smart enough to figure out what he was convicted for and
the fact that you were the minister of Julia and Yvonne, and you conducted
their funerals, and they were on worldwide television.' He said, `But I'm not,
I'm not, going to let you out.' He said, `I want you to go down there, but
just don't let on. Now he brings it up, you're smart enough to try to cover
it.' But he never brought it up. He never brought it up.

GROSS: What were your feelings toward him and toward his execution at the
very end?

Rev. PICKETT: Well, at the very end, I was angry. During the daytime--first
of all, he faked--he kept telling everybody he didn't speak English, which
meant I had to get an interpreter because I don't speak Spanish. So I brought
in a sergeant, a really great guy named Sergeant Cervantes, to interpret for
me and for him, and after about 30 minutes, Cuevas says, `I've been faking you
guys out. I can speak English.' So we let Sergeant Cervantes go, and he and I
spoke, talked all day long. He told me about all the crimes he'd committed in
the free world, and he told me about all the bad things he'd done, where he
was from and where he got his name. That wasn't really his name; Ignacio
Cuevas wasn't his real name. And he talked and talked and talked. And then
from 11:30 until midnight, he began to tell me that he was sorry for this
crime, that he had confessed every day since 1974, and he had prayed that he
would be forgiven for the murder of these women.

GROSS: You believed him when he told you that?

Rev. PICKETT: I believed him. Between 11 and midnight, I believe almost
anything because they open up their hearts and souls, and they tell me things.
And most of the time I would check it out to be sure they were telling the
truth, but I believed him then, until he got on the table. And when he got on
the table, and then he was strapped down, and they started the sodium
thiopental, the warden said, `Do you have any last words you want to say?' And
he said, `I am innocent.' Which is a direct contradiction to what he had been
telling me from 11:30 to midnight.

GROSS: So he confessed to you that he was guilty, but still you thought he
shouldn't be executed?

Rev. PICKETT: Well, it didn't mean anything. Right after that I went over
and talked to Judy Standley's family. They were across the street, and they
said this didn't bring closure.

GROSS: This is the family of one of the victims?

Rev. PICKETT: Right. They said, `This did not bring closure. This didn't
help us.' Said, `Our children will never know a grandmother. They'll never
know the loving arms and kisses of a grandmother, and all we have is two dead
people.' They said, `This is just a waste.' And they didn't want him executed.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Reverend Carroll Pickett, and
from 1982 to '95 he was the death house chaplain for The Walls prison unit in
Huntsville, Texas. He ministered to 95 inmates who were executed by lethal
injection. There's a new documentary about him called "At the Death House
Door" that premieres on IFC, the Independent Film Channel, on May 29th.

You know, in movies about executions, there's always like the last words that
somebody says. Were there usually like carefully chosen last words that the
men being executed would say to you or to whoever was witnessing the
execution?

Rev. PICKETT: One of the policies--for lack of a better term,
policies--since there was nobody had ever written a document on lethal
injection procedures--is I decided early that I'd ask them what their last
words were going to be. And there were two reasons for that. One of them is,
I didn't want the warden to cut them off, because that would be unfair, and
that would be unjust. And if a person wants to talk and say something, he
should be permitted to give his last words. And we would practice it. You
know, sometimes we'd write it out and we'd go over it and over it and over it.
And then after we had finished it, I would go tell the warden what the last
words were so he could not kill him before he was through talking. OK?
That's, for lack of a better term. And he...

GROSS: Would you tell us one of the things that one of the executed men said
as his last words?

Rev. PICKETT: There was a man who paid a--he advertised in a magazine to--he
wanted to pay somebody $10,000 to kill his wife. And somebody came to Texas
and agreed to do it, and he paid him $10,000. And the killer got off with a
six-year sentence, but the husband was going to be executed. And he was a
pilot, and he loved to fly, and he did a lot of flying. And he said, `I'm
going to sing a song, and I want to die when I get to this particular point in
this song.' Well, I can't guarantee that, you know, and he started singing.
His last words were the song. And about the time it got to the point where it
was going to say "Up into the sky, fly," and I nodded to the warden, the
warden gave the signal, and they gave him a massive dose, and those were his
last words. Now that was just luck.

GROSS: We only have about a minute left before our time is up, and I
apologize for asking such a big question and leaving you so little time to
answer it, but having ministered to 95 men who were executed by lethal
injection, do you think that will affect how you will face your own death when
the time comes?

Rev. PICKETT: Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I had a heart attack not
long after I quit, and last year I had surgery. And I went to code blue
twice, once with a blood clot to the heart, and I died. They rushed me to
another hospital, and I began to hemorrhage four days later. My blood
pressure went to nothing, and they went to code blue. So I died twice. I'm
not afraid of dying, but I have seen these people, many of whom are not afraid
of dying, and I feel like most of it--and this is not egotistical, but I was
the one that led them those last eight steps. And many of them were not
afraid to die. And I'm not afraid to die. It's going to happen sometime.

GROSS: Reverend Pickett, I'm so sorry our time is up. I thank you so much
for talking with us. Be well and thank you.

Rev. PICKETT: Thank you. Thank you very much.

GROSS: Pastor Carroll Pickett is the subject of the new documentary "At the
Death House Door." It premieres on IFC, the Independent Film Channel, May
29th.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Maureen Corrigan with her summer fiction reading picks
TERRY GROSS, host:

Summer vacation time offers an opportunity to reach back for books you may not
have gotten to during the winter. In part one of her summer reading round-up,
book critic Maureen Corrigan recommends some books you may have missed and
previews a couple soon to be published.

Ms. MAUREEN CORRIGAN: There are beach books full of sun and cotton candy,
and beach books dappled with shadow and sardonic humor. The very different
beach books I'm about to recommend, however, all have one thing in common:
they carry a reader far beyond the familiar. So even if you can't afford a
beach vacation in this summer of recession and sky-high gas prices, you can
still revel in these mental getaways.

Rachel Pastan's novel "Lady of the Snakes" came out this past winter, but I've
been saving it because I had a hunch that it would be my idea of the perfect
summer book. Was I ever right. "Lady of the Snakes" is a literary mystery
crossed with a funny feminist commentary on marriage. Think A.S. Byatt
linking arms in sisterhood with chicklette champs Susan Isaacs and Jennifer
Weiner. I was hooked from the opening scene, which finds Pastan's heroine,
Jane Levitsky, a hot-shot graduate student in Russian literature, in the midst
of 20 gruesome hours of labor. Finally, in a delivery room smelling of ocean
and rust, she gives birth to a daughter. When a nurse places a newborn in
Jane's arms, her first thought is that "the bundle was so light, it seemed to
weigh less than the completed chapters of her dissertation."

Jane is an expert on the novels of the fictitious 19th century Russian writer
and cad Grigory Karkov, and also on the diaries of his tormented wife, Masha.
As the story unfolds, Jane struggles with the demands of being on the mommy
track and the tenure track, as well as with the sense that her seemingly
emancipated life has some queasy similarities to Masha's wifely serfdom.
Crack open "Lady of the Snakes" on the beach, and I predict your funny bone
and brain will be exercised while your bathing suit stays dry.

Speaking of dry, if you like dry, British humor mixed with sinister
eccentricity, you might want to pick up "The Sisters," a clever debut novel
coming out in June written by the wonderfully named Poppy Adams. The
"Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?"-type story concerns two English sisters who
haven't seen each other in nearly 50 years. They reunite in the crumbling
family mansion, and gradually we readers learn about the fatal jealousies that
have kept them apart for so long. You can time your ocean dips to the
startling revelations in "The Sisters," which occur--agreeably--every 50 pages
or so.

A few balmy nights ago, I was at an outdoor party filled with English
professors. I mentioned to a small group that I'd belatedly discovered the
extraordinary British writer Jane Gardam. Four out of my five colleagues
looked blank. The fifth, our host, ran into his house and came out with two
early Jane Gardam novels that he insisted I take home and read immediately. I
think that mixed reaction typifies Gardam familiarity in this country. Since
a lot of her books are hard to find here, even many voracious readers don't
know her. So I'm declaring Jane Gardam my late-blooming discovery of the
summer.

In July, Europa Editions is publishing her short story collection "The People
on Privilege Hill," which is a stylistic hodgepodge of wit and weirdness,
compassion, and even a few examples of the classic supernatural tale. The
title story features Sir Edward Feathers, nicknamed "Old Filth," who's a
recurring character. My Gardam-loving friends assure me that her 2004 novel,
also called "Old Filth," is wonderful beyond description, and that her 1991
epistolary novel "The Queen of the Tambourine" is even better. I plan to
plant myself in the sand in August and find out if they're right.

My final recommendation may not sound so summery, but constant sunshine grows
tiresome. In his just-published ethereal novel "Exiles," Ron Hansen returns
to the subject that gained him literary recognition with his 1991 novel
"Mariette in Ecstasy." I'm talking about the mysteries of religious faith.
"Exiles" tells the intertwined story of the Victorian poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins and the sea tragedy that inspired his famous poem "The Wreck of the
Deutschland." Hansen's novel takes off from some biographical facts. When
Hopkins decided to become a Jesuit priest, he vowed to give up writing poetry.
He broke that vow in 1875 upon reading accounts of the sinking of the
steamship Deutschland off the coast of England. Among the dead were five
German nuns. Hopkins' poem and Hansen's novel both consider the question of
why bad things happen to good people. Maybe not the ideal summer topic, but
an eternally relevant one.

If you're lucky enough to find yourself sitting by an ocean this summer,
Hansen's novel will prompt you to stare at the waves and, to paraphrase
another great Victorian poet, Emily Dickinson, consider for yourself the
secrets the sea abides.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. You can
find her summer fiction reading list on our Web site, freshair.npr.org, where
you can also download podcasts of our show. Maureen will be back soon with
her nonfiction recommendations for summer reading.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.