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Surprisingly,
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City isn't one of those
uplifting "power of the human spirit" or "life is an adventure"
memoirs. This is the kind of memoir where Person 1 meets his
dad (Person 2) when the dad checks into the homeless shelter
where Person 1 works to pay for drugs and an apartment in
the scary part of town.
It's
a real feel-good time.
Nick
Flynn is a part-time college professor, author, and poet who
sat down to write a memoir of his tumultuous early years.
These years include his parents' early divorce, his initial
forays into petty theft, various adventures with various substances
(organic, liquid, and powdered), drunken car accidents, spleen
removal, and working for a drug trafficking group. But one
could easily become confused about whose memoir it is, as
lurking in the periphery of Nick's whole life, mirroring and
foretelling his actions, is his father, Jonathan Flynn: an
oft-homeless, raging alcoholic "author" with intense delusions
of grandeur.
Nick
occasionally feels like the moon to his father's planet, around
whom Nick revolves and by whom he is occasionally eclipsed.
His life seems like a bizarre mirror of his father's, despite
the fact that they had nothing to do with each other until
the author's college years. His father is such a massive character
that he often steals the show, working as both an impetus
for the events and a grim warning against them. He is a raging
alcoholic, frequently homeless, determined he's writing the
great American novel (a forty-year work in progress), and
he believes himself to be a close friend of JFK. It's hard
not to be swept up in his sickening car-wreck charm. One of
the duo's initial meetings has Nick finding his father "sitting
naked in a galvanized tin tub in the center of his room, bathing
and drinking straight vodka from a silver chalice, like some
demented king from the Middle Ages." It's difficult for any
person's life to compete with that for attention.
Nick
presents this double helix of a downward spiral through a
series of short vignettes. His writing comes in jagged coughing
fits of chapters, with terse sentences that reflect the severity
of much of the subject matter. In one- to four-page spurts,
he jumps around in time, detailing his parents' meeting and
separation; his childhood with his mom's numerous live-in
boyfriends; a parallel storyline of his dad's deeds and misadventures;
and myriad accidents, suicides, jobs, and crimes.
The novel's
tone is fairly reserved for such a series of horrible, life-shattering
events. If the narrative weren't written in such a matter-of-fact
style, though, it would quickly become too much. Either Flynn's
style reflects a type of detachment one would have to cultivate
to survive the events he has depicted, or he just doesn't
know how to feel about much of it. He clearly struggles with
sympathy for his father when his drunken actions land him
in trouble. His conscience battles with his pragmatism: How
can he truly leave his father out in the cold of Boston? But
how can he assist him without being dragged down to his level?
Does he do the right thing and help a man in need, or does
he avoid the embarrassment of being the son of such a disaster
when he hardly knows the man? He describes the struggle thusly:
You
must understand that Boston's essentially a small town,
its streets unplanned, sinuous, cow paths paved over and
widened. I could have risen from bed any night and walked
directly to where my father slept. In fifteen minutes
or less I could have found him, taken his hand, led him
home. Instead I locked my door, got high, slept until
the sun entered me again. The Zen master says that we
are adrift in a river of forgetfulness, which still, some
days, doesn't sound like the worst place to be.
Bullshit
Night amply fulfills its voyeuristic role as a memoir.
The reader gets a comfortable, armchair-safe look into the
fetid workings of life on the street, bilious nights of near-alcohol
poisoning, and tumultuous broken homes with mentally scarred
Vietnam vets and other unsavory characters. Even with Flynn's
truncated writing style and his practiced detachment from
the subject matter, he crafts a memoir with both pathos and
fascinating "characters" who inhabit lives none of us, by
the grace of God, will ever see.
(April,
2008)
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