Long before the NSA was snuffling up our e-mails, philosopher Jeremy Bentham traveled to Belarus to visit his brother. Samuel Bentham worked for Prince Potemkin, and he gave his crusading brother an idea. One could construct a building in an arc around a central unit. Workers, employees, and — Jeremy later theorized — prisoners would never be unwatched.
Bentham's prisons were never made, but his idea has become a powerful touchstone today. Is there anywhere we aren't watched, and how has all this observation changed us?
In her fabulously sharp-elbowed debut novel, "The Panopticon" (Hogarth, 282 pages, $22), Scottish poet Jenni Fagan breathes life into a heroine who would have an opinion or two about these questions.
Anais Hendricks is a 15-year-old with a rap sheet longer than most Elmore Leonard villains. Bounced from one foster home to the next, cared for by prostitutes and drug pushers, she is hauled in to the Panopticon Home for chronic offenders, covered in blood and determined not to take any guff.
"It's not that I think I'm perfect," she says, after a bit of arrival peacocking, "I'm so imperfect it's offensive."
On its surface, "The Panopticon" is marginally a familiar story about a young orphan trying to make her way in the world. Find out a bit about where she actually came from. Maybe even help other kids like her survive.
And in a satisfying way, the novel delivers all this, from the ragtag bunch of screw-ups and victims who share the home with her. There's Isla, a cutter, John, a cross-dressing thief, and Shortie, who likes to scrap. Angus, one of the smarter, gentler workers in the home, keeps an eye out for her.
Fagan is too smart a writer, however, to simply recast this story in the modern era. Just when it approaches sentimentality, Anais' broken, but not beaten, cynical voice yanks the narrative back.
