“Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books”
By Daniel Genis
Viking, 320 pages

Combine the clean prose of Hemingway, the urban drug tales of William S. Burroughs, and sensibilities of the New York Review of Books and you have a good idea of what you’ll get from “Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books,” by Daniel Genis.

This absorbing memoir tells the story of how a New York City kid from what the author calls a Jewish intellectual clan got addicted to heroin and went to prison, where reading helped him survive.

Now 43, he is the son of Alexander Genis, a critic and author of more than a dozen books who arrived in New York from Russia in 1977. Daniel Genis attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School and then NYU, graduating in 1999. As he began a career in publishing working for a literary agency, he was also getting hooked on dope. 

In 2003, Mr. Genis was sent to prison for 10 years after being convicted on five counts of robbery, a “spree” that lasted all of a week after his money ran out and he began using an old pocket knife to take other people’s. His remorseful demeanor got him dubbed “the Apologetic Bandit” by the press.

Mr. Genis has been free and sober since his release in 2014 and lives with his wife, Petra Szabo, in Brooklyn.

“Sentence” is compelling reading, combining as it does two different genres: literary criticism and the prison memoir. It’s not unusual for an inmate to discover literature — it certainly changed Malcolm X — but it’s less common for a criminal to go into the joint knowing Proust from Sartre. (While awaiting sentencing, Mr. Genis read William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” twice in a row.) This fresh angle gives the book real momentum and a kinetic energy. Mr. Genis is also very funny. “In the beginning was the word,” his book opens. “That word was ‘guilty.’”

He traces his addiction to the way he romanticized some seamier writers. Luc Sante’s “Low Life” was “exactly the type of book that had led me to this juncture. My love of obscure tales, print artifacts from a city devoted to words, and the seamier side of the past primed me to become a bookish New York junkie with my head into opium clouds of the nineteenth century.” 

When he landed at Rikers, things got real. Mr. Genis’s location was “an unspeakable secret to the social world” of his parents, who thought their son’s fall was too shameful to mention in public. 

Mr. Genis found himself with “men who amuse themselves with raw cruelty and debasement.”  He read to escape, keeping a long list of books on his wall. There was “Ulysses” and Sartre’s “No Exit” — whose observation that “hell is other people” found immediate expression behind bars — and Primo Levi’s “The Drowned and the Saved” allows Mr. Genis to compare the “conversion process” in prison to the death camps, but only up to a point: “The fact that much worse than I experienced was suffered by innocent people in ‘The Drowned and the Saved’ made my flicker of self-pity laughable.” 

Still, “much of what I read in books of the German and Russian camp life was familiar” — the barked orders, insults, and even occasional violence.

Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” taught Mr. Genis that memory was a powerful antidote to the feeling in prison that time was slipping away. Not surprisingly, he found a soulmate in Jean Valjean from “Les Miserables.”

“I learned as much about modern prison from Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky as I did when trying to make sense of what I experienced directly,” Mr. Genis writes. “Those many books enabled me to understand my fellow man and my own corrupted self.… Reading may have been the very thing that made me return from inside whole.”