He’s sitting outside a South Austin coffeehouse on a breezy Sunday evening, raving about camel sightings in the American Southwest and ranting about the American prison system in general. He’s within whispering distance of the police station at Fifth and Oltorf, but Alexander Parsons isn’t whispering. He isn’t yelling, either. Yet I’m still afraid he’ll be plucked from the table at any moment, carried off by one of the cops coming in and out of the Diamond Shamrock adjacent to the station.
I’m not sure why I feel this way. He’s a white male wearing glasses and a Wesleyan fleece, after all, well-spoken, drinking ice water and eating some kind of chocolate cake. But he’s talking about camels. Bad government. Jefferson Davis. Militiamen in New Mexico. And then there’s his first novel. Leaving Disneyland (Thomas Dunne Books, $23.95) is everything its title implies: fleeting and joyless, its onslaught of broke-down characters ricocheting off of each other, disappearing into the dark heat of Nevada or the stormy violence of Washington, D.C. It begins in the fictional Tyburn State Penitentiary’s Cellblock B with Doc Kane, an old-school con awaiting parole. He has served 16 years of a 20-year sentence for killing his daughter’s abusive husband.
“I got respect,” Doc lectures his new cellmate, a 21-year-old serving life without parole, early in Leaving Disneyland. “Spend thirty years fighting for who you is and not getting beat and you get that. But you — you a mark and fellas is gonna move on you. Come into Bone Hill and you got to know who you is. Got to have certainty of who you is and what you stand for. I’m Doc. No sucker, no punk, no weakling. And if you here to fuck up my shit you best think twice.” A man of uncompromising pride and a moral code fueled by a superiority complex and comic books, Doc doesn’t like prison. Doesn’t like the system’s skewed sense of rehabilitation. Parsons, who has lived in Austin for a year after graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a stint at New Mexico State’s creative writing program, doesn’t either.
“I guess what I was hoping was less to say, ‘This is what we need to do,’ because it’s more complex than that, but to say, ‘Here is a man guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted, but what does that mean, what should we do with him?'” Parsons explains. “He’s still a member of our society — he’s a fellow human — and if you can see him with some compassion, then maybe you can start to think of some of the other people who are in jail with some compassion, and if you do that, and if you’re interested in them, it’s more likely that we can we reach consensus on a more beneficial system. I guess I started with this high idea — ‘Yeah, social criticism!’ — and then I realized more and more that the story was about a guy and that I should stick with that.”
That guy is black. Most of Parsons’ characters are. Many are criminals. Where does a thirtysomething white man in a white man’s world, a guy blessed with more privilege than all of his characters combined, get off? And, more importantly, how did he pull it off?
“I like reading books that take me to a different place, and I’ll probably stick with these departures that are intensely research-based,” says Parsons, whose second novel, El Malpaís, is about a New Mexico ranching family who lost their land to the federal government during WWII trying to take it back 40 years later. “Good fiction should often elicit a sense of disquiet,” he smiles. “It means you’ve broken out of a set way of looking at something. Real art uses that desire for comfort in a subversive way.” 
This article appears in October 12 • 2001.