In 1959, Truman Capote came across a 300-word New York Times article detailing the murders of Herbert Clutter and his family in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote’s fascination with the story led him to the notion that he could tell the tale of the murders, and the subsequent execution of the convicted killers, using a novelist’s techniques and tools. The result was the groundbreaking true crime work In Cold Blood (1966), a book to which Michael Winter alludes in the foreword to his new work of “documentary fiction,” The Death of Donna Whalen.
Based on a murder that took place in St. John’s, Winter’s book tells the story of Whalen’s brutal killing — she was stabbed in her home, thirty-one times — and the police investigation that followed. He uses a combination of court transcripts, police wiretaps, newspaper reports, and interviews with actual persons involved in the case to reconstruct, in collage-like fashion, the events surrounding Whalen’s death.
In this sense, Winter’s book less resembles Capote’s seminal work than another product of “new journalism”: Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize winner, The Executioner’s Song (1979). Winter does Mailer one better, concealing the characters’ real names and cutting up the story’s chronology. The short, polyvocal sections of the novel also recall William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. But if The Death of Donna Whalen wears its literary influences on its sleeve, it is also sui generis in the annals of CanLit: a non-fiction novel with a sensibility and a moral imperative more modernist than postmodernist.
Whalen was a single mother and small-time shoplifter; her boyfriend, Sheldon Troke, had a criminal record and a history of violence. Because he was known to police, he became the obvious suspect in her murder, and as the story unfolds the reader is able to piece together how the instruments of law enforcement built a case against him that was largely circumstantial and based on conflicting witness accounts. Further, it becomes apparent that the police coerced certain testimony from various witnesses, including, most reprehensibly, Donna’s young daughter, Sharon, who discovered her mother’s body. All of this congeals into a dark morality tale about violence, class, and state corruption.
Because the book cleaves so closely to the documents in the case, and preserves the precise rhythms and cadences of Newfoundland speech, it is not an easy read. However, as found by Gary Bemister, one of the investigating cops in the story, who “found the more you listened to the tape the more your ear got attuned to the voices,” the dialects become easier to follow as the book progresses. Moreover, as with any modernist work, the surface tension belies the craft underpinning it: Winter’s prose is austere and declarative, and he uses repetition as a kind of incantatory device, rendering the writing more rhythmic and euphonic than it might otherwise be.
This is a dense, difficult text that requires concentration and close reading. But it is a brave work that showcases a stylist playing to his strengths, and it will undoubtedly reward the patient reader.
