Book Review: Convict's Candy (pt. 2)

Convict's Candy is a controversial novel that pushes the boundaries of street fiction and makes a good argument to the genre's legitimacy and purpose in today's literary market. Meadows and Poole give the reader a sympathetic (albeit sometimes confused) look of a MTF Tran-sexual, which is almost unheard of in African-American lit. By allowing the reader to see Andy grow from an innocent child with inherent feelings and desires, to an adult who has made the to choice to live life the best way she knows how, gives the reader a non-deviant look at Trans people, and how they come to be.

Another important topic is the issue of HIV/AIDS which is ravishing the black community. Candy gives the reader a view of how the virus spreads within prisons. The book inadvertently expounds the importance of condoms within prisons by showing the improvisation of prisoners who use things such as the fingers of latex gloves. The image of a man putting a tiny latex finger from a glove onto his penis is not an image I'm sure to forget.

Poole and Meadows wrote the book while in prison and claim to have based Candy off of real MTF transsexuals they came in contact with behind bars. This raw book could have only been written by someone who has spent a significant of time behind bars, not by someone who has spent years studying literature in graduate school.

Candy is not without flaws. The authors make cameos within the novel, giving it an awkward meta-fictional tone within some passages. Ironic that when the authors do appear, they spend their time defending their "manhood" and hetero-sexuality. Some of the dialogue given to the author-characters can be seen as downright homophobic, such as when Poole's character tells a fellow inmate not to call Candy a she since "it" was a he. Funny since Meadows and Poole make a painstaking effort to refer to Candy as "she" throughout the entire narrative.

The quality of the writing is not the best I have ever read, but it is not bad either. I would describe it as mediocre at worst and sufficient as best. But again, as I said earlier, the novel could not have been written by an MFA graduate, but by someone who has lived closely within the prison environment.

Convict's Candy gives a good argument for the need of "Street Fiction." Just as the writers of the Renaissance wrote and published controversial stories and poems about the rawness of black life, so do the authors within this new movement.