“Addiction Fiction”

Coming-of-Age Drug Novels

Call it “addiction fiction.” In the past few years we have seen a blossoming of this genre, where the private eye goes to 12-Step meetings, and one day your sponsor may just save your life by gunning down a rival in the street. Or, where the wise-beyond-their-years prep school drug addicts engage in Brett Easton Ellis-style sex and ennui.

Fiction readers of a certain age will recall that this is not a new thing under the sun. From Junky to The Man With the Golden Arm, from Naked Lunch to Less Than Zero, drug novels have always been with us. Addiction fiction has two distinct subgenres: addicts with money, and addicts without money. For obvious reasons, the latter genre is the prevailing one—Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream come to mind. But the wealthy end of the spectrum is not without representation. Consider The Basketball Diaries, or Bright Lights, Big City.

As an example of the first type of book, the one where the addict has no money, we have Spoonful, by first-time author Chris Mendius. As for the upscale second type, there is the recently released novel, No Alternative,  by William Dickerson, a budding film director with an MFA. I would judge both authors to be well south of the age of 40, making both of them pure examples of Generation X. 

Ah, the 90s. As time passes, it seems clear that the death of Kurt Cobain has been added to the touchstones of American youth culture, in a tradition going back to the 60s. Where were you when Kennedy died? When Lennon died? When Cobain died? This last question matters, since Nirvana and Cobain are threaded thematically through both of these new novels. As Chris Willman wrote at Stop the Presses: “April 5 is to many contemporary rock fans what November 22 is to older baby boomers: the day you can almost certainly remember where you were or what you were doing when you heard that ___ died. That's not to say that Kurt Cobain's suicide represented a loss of national innocence in the same way that JFK's assassination did. For one thing, Cobain's whole life and career already symbolized lost innocence, long before he died.”

In Generation X drug novels, lost innocence isn’t lost—there was never any innocence in the first place.

Michael, the narrator of Spoonful, is the kind of drug addict with no money. Michael is forthright, if not one to probe the philosophical ironies of his condition: “Nobody ever says, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a junkie.’” End of story. Well, the beginning, really. In this well-written junky novel, author Chris Mendius brings his tragic characters to life in a manner that calls to mind Hubert Selby, Jr.’s stark New York classics of addiction without redemption.

Set in Chicago’s Wicker Park area, young Michael and his pal Sal find their way to heroin in a hurry. They also quickly learn the flip side of the illness—the sickness of withdrawal, “like having a debilitating combination of food poisoning and the flu, with periodic muscle cramps.” No matter. “Once we made it through all that, we decided to stay off dope. A month passed with no discernible improvement in our lives and we promptly resumed getting high.”

It’s heroin he craves. Michael is no fan of cocaine: “You’re up all night, running your mouth, jaw twitching, nose burning. You might want to fuck but you can’t. All you can do is keep going. Before you know it, the birds are chirping and the garbage trucks are rolling. You’re out hundreds of dollars and for what?” And they scoff at pharmaceutical efforts at non-addictive synthetic opiates, “engineered to not let anyone feel a moment of undeserved pleasure.” One character likens kicking methadone to “getting your skin pulled off with pliers.”

The debate over freely distributing the drug naloxone as an anti-OD safety measure is referred to obliquely: “That’s the thing with smack. It’s a fine line between the time of your life and the end of your life…. More often than not, the difference between life and death was having someone there to revive you or call somebody who could.”

Mendius is good at drawing a picture of the addict’s endless grind: “Finding the ways and means to score is a twenty-four-seven gig. You might get lucky and hit it big now and then but you’re always looking ahead. Plotting. Planning. No matter how much you get or how close the scrape, you always gotta keep at it. Day in and day out.”

Michael never quits for long, and when he is off heroin, he buries himself in marijuana and booze. There is no redemptive ending. He walks off into the sunset.

From seedy Chicago to the upper reaches of Westchester, New York. Like Spoonful, No Alternative by William Dickerson features characters whose collective memory goes back no farther than the 80s. Which sucked, as we all know, and as Thomas, the narrator, never tires of telling us. Thomas and his friends are drug and alcohol abusers with money. The drugs of choice are prescription medications, not heroin or cocaine, for these products of Fordham Prep. 

It is 1994, and the grunge youth of Yonkers, the children of Vietnam vets and hippies, are rootless and confused. “There was no clear-cut path beckoning them. No modus operandi.” It was a generation, Dickerson writes, that “earned a label that was just about as vague as their sense of what to do with their lives: Generation X.” In this version, not much has changed since the crack-crazy L.A. 80s of Brett Easton Ellis. The names and the drugs have been altered, but otherwise the trappings are indistinguishable: high disposable income and excessive ennui.

Thomas supports his crazy little sister Bridget, who becomes a white rapper named Bri Da B. His sister’s drug of choice is cutting herself: “She was determined to be in control. If she was going to bleed, it was going to be a decision, it was going to be controlled, and she was going to bleed everywhere, not just from the abyss between her legs. If pain was to be a constant, might as well get used to it and build up a tolerance.”

No Alternative is readable enough, but it does not carry the campy forward motion of other rich-kid addiction books. It is more measured, dry, and there is an odd hitch in the narration, which is resolved, rather shakily, at the end, with a big Reveal that distracts the reader from the central relationships in the story.

So, two early novels, by promising young writers, about drugs and what they do to you. It will be interesting to find out what becomes of these authors, and what manner of new work they get up to in the future. The story never ends where you think it does.

Book Review: Addiction Noir

 
The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden

To date, I’ve only reviewed one novel here at Addiction Inbox—Steve Earle’s I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, featuring the ghost of Hank Williams standing in for the addictive pleasures that musicians are heir to. Now comes The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden, an exemplar of a new literary genre I am going to call addiction noir. Dial Press, the Random House imprint that published the book, is putting Barden forward as a recovering alcoholic who has grokked this scene from the inside. “Dan Barden knows firsthand the difficulties of sobriety…. The Next Right Thing is a powerful new take on the recovery narrative.”

“I’m a recovering alcoholic,” Barden said in the press release, “and I had always wanted to write something about that experience but I couldn’t find a way to tell that story that didn’t seem stupid.”

That changed one morning while Barden was reading the New York Times. “It occurred to me that I could put everything I knew about recovery into a crime story…. There are a lot of great novels about the disease of addiction itself but not so many about recovery, mostly because there’s something very oblique and mysterious about recovery.”

The elements of Barden’s novel certainly aren’t new—a knowing, seen-it-all reformed alcoholic who happens to be an ex-cop, for starters—and plenty of unsavory bad guys. Add in the requisite women, attractive and troubled, or, as our hero Randy Chalmers prefers them, “insane and beautiful.” Chalmers is looking into the suspicious heroin overdose of his AA sponsor, Terry, in a rundown Santa Ana motel, fifteen years sober at the time of his death. The investigation leads Chalmers, sober himself for 8 years, into a tangle of recovery houses fronting as marijuana grow sites and secret shooting sets for amateur porn videos. The crisp quips and one-liners are often focused on the world of addiction. There are nice set pieces, and Chandleresque observations:

--“Those were the days of crack pipes and precious little eating. Even after she got her bearings back, she moved with the anxious, staticky jerks of a cartoon cat. She radiated disease.”

--“I hit him without thinking… but I was surprised to be once again acting without my own consent. That’s the way people talk about taking a drink, as though it’s happening to someone else at some gauzy distance. Like your arm is lifting the glass, and your consciousness has nothing to do with it.”

--“Even with all the step work and therapy and success, people still imagine they will be okay when the are rich. Or married. Or have a baby. Life for an alcoholic is often a process of discovering all the things that don’t make any difference.”

However, the book is marred by the kind of bewildering rumination that can result when a soap opera full of characters is at full boil: “Something about the recovery house scheme didn’t sit right with me. And why was this Simon Busansky character missing in action? Why had Mutt Kelly parked outside my house? Who had made that call to Cathy? Who was the business partner who so preoccupied Terry during the birth of the child he’d always wanted?”

Nevertheless, the book reads quickly, like a noirish mystery should. For influences, Barden lists the usual suspects—Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, George Pelecanos. With decent sales, I could see this becoming a book series, with our sober ex-cop getting himself involved in helping the wrong addict, or helping acquit the right one. With the public recognition of addiction seemingly at an all-time high, and with the ranks of the recently recovered always in the process of being replenished, there just might be a market for this sort of thing.

In a press release, Barden said the book was about “people who are trying to live sober lives against all odds. And what that’s like for me and my friends is complicated and beautiful and dramatic and terrifying. What’s it like to try to do the right thing by your family and friends when many of your instincts run against that?”

Or, as Randy Chalmers puts it: “Here’s another thing you learn in A.A.: when the drunk loses the woman he loves, you know you’re not at the end of the story. You know it’s going to get much worse.”

Photo credit: http://www.danbarden.com

Steve Earle and the Ghost of Hank Williams

Book Review: I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive

Musician Steve Earle made a solo name for himself with Guitar Town and Copperhead Road after playing in legendary country and bluegrass bands as a young prodigy. He was nominated for a Grammy, his reputations soared, he added rock and roll to his range—until 1991, when Earle put out the aptly named live album, Shut Up and Die Like An Aviator. Shortly thereafter, he was dropped by his record label for long-standing drug problems, and landed in prison with a heavy sentence for possession of heroin. He completed rehab successfully, earned his parole in 1994, and has gone on since then to make several highly successful albums, guest star in the TV series The Wire, and write music for the New Orleans-based series Treme.

And now he has written a novel called I’ll Never Get out of This World Alive, set mostly in San Antonio, with a main character who is an aging doctor and a heroin addict. Doc’s specialty is quick but relatively safe and sterile backroom abortions, commonly performed on illegal immigrants. His license to practice long ago taken away, Doc takes in enough to make his daily pilgrimage to the parking lot where his longtime dealer works the streets. The book’s title is taken from the name of a Hank Williams song, which is appropriate, because whether or not you enjoy this novel may depend upon your reaction to Hank’s ghost hanging around the main character, begging for a drink and some attention. Things get even stranger when a young Mexican girl, Graciela, falls under the doctor’s care, and begins to exhibit signs of stigmata and the power to heal drug addicts. Rather than choosing to tell his tale straightforwardly, Earle is working more in the tradition of Latin American magical realism. This is no One Hundred Years of Solitude, but a lot hangs on belief, and the power of unseen forces to organize events in unforeseen ways.

Earle has a fun, quick touch with character description and the telling anecdote, explaining, for example, that local narcotic detective Hugo Ackerman “rarely hurried even when attempting to catch a fleeing offender. He had worked narcotics for over a decade, and in his experience neither the junkies nor the pushers were going far. He caught up with everybody eventually.”

Set in 1963, the book carries us through the Kennedy assassination and other cultural events as background. And we get a nice, deft description of what starts the doctor down the road toward smackdom: “Then in the first year of his residency he befriended a crazy old pathologist who worked the midnight shift in the county morgue, and it was he who introduced Doc to the miracle of morphine. From that very first shot it was as if he’d discovered the one vital ingredient that God had left out when He’d send Doc kicking and screaming into the cold, cruel world.”

I won’t say that Mr. Earle should give up his day job on the basis of this outing, but I do think that critics who have dismissed his efforts have overlooked some of what the author is attempting to say about addiction, and about recovery--that recovery involves all kinds of intangibles like faith, hope and charity, and that these attributes can present themselves in myriad disguises. (And a lot of critics got it: Michael Ondaatje wrote that this “subtle and dramatic book is the work of a brilliant songwriter who has moved from song to orchestral ballad with astonishing ease.”)

I think this book is, in fact, written very much with addicts in mind. The shade of Hank Williams doesn’t dog Doc everywhere just because Steve Earle is a huge fan. Hank Williams was also a vicious, go-to-hell alcoholic and drug addict who could not make the turnaround Steve Earle has made, and therefore could not even get out of his twenties alive, let alone this world.  Earle has Doc stand in for him when it comes to lessons learned: “Doc was immediately sucked in by the big lie that all junkies want to believe in spite of daily evidence to the contrary, that this shot was going to be like that first shot all those years ago. He tied off, found the money vein in the back of his arm, well rested now because he had always reserved that one for the big shots, the teeth rattlers, and it stood at attention like a soldier on payday.”

I won’t give out any spoilers here, as the miraculous Graciela bleeds from her wounds and lays hands on dying addicts to save them. It’s the stuff of, well fiction—but fiction informed by the author’s firsthand voyage into heroin bondage. Steve Earle is living proof of the overarching theme of his book: redemption in its many guises.

Photo Credit:  http://www.troubashow.com/