alcoholism

Detroit (9/18/2010)

brittany — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Chicago, Illinois

Half of the U.S. population lives in suburbs, places where there are no theres there. In the suburb outlying the eponymous city in Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit, all the streets in the Bright Homes subdivision are named after light. If Bill Vaughn’s observation is correct—“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them”—then this particular development is consistent in its dearth of light, literal and figurative.

The lives that unwind on Sunshine Lane and Feather Boulevard portend the end of pretense and dawn of overwhelming futility, as dreams of ex-urban idylls decay along with the plywood of their construction. Director Austin Pendleton leads the sharp and talented cast—Laurie Metcalf, Kevin Anderson, Kate Arrington and Ian Barford—through a labyrinth of sharp and winding dialogue that leaves its characters stranded.

Ben and Mary are two happy homeowners who graciously welcome their neighbors, Rob and Sharon. Mary’s (Metcalf) twisted energy abounds as she offers the newcomers shelter beneath a vicious umbrella. Wired but not manic, her role is a perfect check to Ben’s persistent affability. He speaks a dialect of bonhomie that Rob (Anderson) will eventually emulate—“Let’s throw these puppies on the grill!”—or perhaps deride. Rob’s girlfriend Sharon establishes the standard of impropriety in the first scene, and in each subsequent scene emotional exposure and physical damage increase as drastically as the characters’ futures plummet.

Kevin Depinet’s set is a monumental replication of two tract home halves, thoughtful and precise: the laid-off bank worker Ben (Barford) builds the website for his nascent financial consulting business on an outdated clunking home pc. The obvious question is never addressed: how do you gain clients as a financial manager when no one has any finances to manage?

The new neighbors, Rob and Sharon (Arrington), have occupations typical of the new economy: warehouse worker and call-center service representative. The individuals, the community, the nation—all are going down in a spiral of low wages and lower expectations. Recovering addicts Rob and Sharon fall off the wagon, at first “just for one day.” In the few days of camaraderie between these old and new suburbanites, the veneer of civilization, is degraded unto destruction, but the viewer is not certain why. Were Ben and Mary primed for annihilation by recent events? Was the community’s stability in comparison to explosive cities always tenuous at best? The two couples sling finely crafted banter culminating in a bacchanal, and then Robert Brueler appears in a final scene in order to provide revelatory details and reminisce about the golden age of Bright Homes, of lights and gardens and children rushing to greet fathers emerging from cars as they returned from work at five o’clock. The closing monologue comes across as a somewhat sentimental ramble at the end of a superbly executed farce.

The play entertains, but audience members might depart with the certainty that the theater was aiming for something more. For some there there.

Photo credit: Michael Brosilow

Detroit runs through November 7.

Written by: Erika Mikkalo, October 2nd 2010

Blame

admin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Michelle Huneven

Picador

Michelle Huneven’s Blame spans twenty years in fewer than 300 pages but avoids any frantic pacing or strange leaps. Patsy MacLemoore, the main character, is an alcoholic. A young academic, her scholarly accomplishments initially help to balance negative effects of her alcoholism. Huneven’s protagonist has a professorship at a at a small liberal arts college. She had a small but sunny house, friends, family nearby, and was pretty, with long blonde hair, long tanned legs and a dazzling smile. At the county jail, the regular inmates call her “Professor” when she wakes up there after having had too much to drink.

When Patsy wakes up in jail—again—she assumes she’d simply had too much to drink; perhaps she’d driven even though her license had been revoked. She tries joking with the officers, the lawyers. She’d blacked out—again—and doesn’t know what she’d done to land in jail. “What is it?” she asks, “I really don’t remember. Did I kill someone?” She’s joking. Then they read her the police report. A mother and daughter, killed in her driveway, hit by a car.

Patsy pleads guilty and goes to prison. Huneven’s depiction of prison is sobering and not heavy-handed. She doesn’t romanticize Patsy’s prison experience, but neither does she withhold from her readers the moments of grace Patsy does experience there. In prison, Patsy sobers up, leaves prison and returns to town.

Patsy loses many friends, but miraculously (isn’t friendship and forgiveness always a miracle?), she is not left completely alone. Her ex-boyfriend visits her every week, becoming one of her most faithful and loyal friends. Her parents are gentle with her. Her brother looks out for her. When she leaves prison, she comes home to an apartment lovingly appointed by her best friend and his boyfriend. She meets an older man in AA and remains sober, gets married. Many years later, Patsy learns what happened when she blacked out in the car that night. That new information changes Patsy’s new and hard-won self-perception.

I didn’t want this book to end. The story isn’t incomplete, not by any means. Huneven’s feel for just the right bit of detail was wonderfully effective. I felt attached to these characters, their lives and stories, their back-stories, and their private moments very early on and simply wanted even more by the time the book ended. I loved them. I loved the depth with which Huneven wrote them. I am a sucker for stories depicting people who are deeply flawed but who are nevertheless very much loved. This was one of those stories and I hope to find another one like it again.

Written by: kristina grob, August 8th 2010

Mesopotamia

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Arthur Nersesian

Akashic Books

Sandy Bloomgarten is a writer you either envy, pity, or outright hate. In theory, she's an excellent reporter, but often, to pay the bills, she resorts to working for gossip rags like The Enquirer. Who of us in a bind hasn't resorted to similar means? But when tabloid celebrity gossip takes over your professional ambitions and drives you to alcoholism, it may be time to reevaluate your work-life balance.

In an attempt to make ends meet after a bad divorce, Bloomgarten takes a freelance gig near her Tennessean hometown of Mesopotamia, where she's forced to briefly reconnect with the strange, confusing liberal Jewish family that adopted her from a Korean orphanage at birth. Her nearly-mixed-race heritage and her family's strained relationship history could have been teased out in a much more interesting way, but is instead only played up for its freak factor and used by Bloomgarten to demean herself through unnecessary use of slurs like "kook" (a portmanteau of "gook" and "kike") and offset her discomfort as the only "squinty-eyed Jewess" most people have ever encountered.

Along the way to finding a story worth reporting, one of Bloomgarten's sleuth companions ends up dead as they piece together the murder of several local Elvis impersonators. She ends up babysitting for a widow with seven children who sing various songs by The King as punishment. She has orgasmic sex with a Hunchback of Notre Dame-meets-Phantom of the Opera ogre who finds and saves her from being raped by a pack of local hoodlums. These are only a few of the slightly less than believable encounters the fill the first half of Mesopotamia. It only gets weirder from there.

Bloomgarten's legitimate problems—such as alcoholism, accompanying one-night stands with strangers, and other situations which call for an exercise in compromised, possibly poor judgment—are glossed over, which left me with an icky feeling. This is no doubt due in part to having encountered the destructive nature of alcoholism firsthand, though I was generally unsettled by the rampant drunk driving, possibly unprotected NSA sex, and pill-popping found in the book. Is it because I'm the straightedge monogamist type or because the novel, with a female protagonist, was authored by a man without an inherent sense of how a woman would act in these improbable situations? Do I simply misunderstand sexual liberation and flagrant drunkenness as gendered? All of these things are possible. I can often lose myself in fiction, but personal hang-ups aside, this was one novel that failed to sell me on the improbably destructive plot.

If you're going to be able to enjoy Mesopotamia for the hedonistic, celebrity-crazed cultural artifact that it is, you'll need to bone up on A-lister gossip from the past year and retain random Elvis trivia to make sense of the puns and wisecracks. Often, you'll feel like you're spying on some sort of Bizarro World skeptics convention with a few too many of the characters tossing around self-righteous anti-Bush, pro-global warming propaganda that the most devoted leftist thinker would find irritatingly cliche. If you'd like to finish the book without being tempted to hurl it across the room, you'll also want to cultivate a bit more sympathy for the protagonist than I did.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, August 5th 2010

Mathilda Savitch

admin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Victor Lodato

Picador

Despite years of being told not to, I immediately judged Victor Lodato’s novel Mathilda Savitch by the cover. I opened it expecting to speed through a mature version of Harriet the Spy with a twist of Tim Burton’s eccentricity. The title suggested a fantastic world not unlike Coraline; however, the fantasy of Mathilda Savitch is of the saddest shade.

Young Mathilda Savitch is a teenager who introduces herself in the first line of the book by saying, “I want to be awful.” Disoriented by the sudden death of her older sister Helene, Mathilda descends into an internal world of obsessive compulsive habits, nightmares, and delusion. Her home reflects her dark imagination, as her mother has succumbed to depression and alcoholism while her father weakly tries to maintain the family’s previous levity.

Mathilda Savitch is bitterly funny at times, reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye or The Bell Jar. While it’s supposed to be a coming-of-age story—addressing menstruation, sexual experimentation, as well as basic rebellion—it feels more like a moment fixed in time.

While there are wonderful moments in the book, it isn’t flawless. A parallel theme of terrorism felt superficial and gratuitous. I also wasn’t completely convinced by Mathilda’s voice, especially when it came to puberty and sexuality. As a woman, I did not sense authenticity in these moments as I did when she was frustrated with her parents or missing her sister. Her thoughts, which compose the majority of the book, often sound more like staged monologues.

In fact, Lodato is a playwright and a poet, and this is his debut novel. Bits of the text read like poetry—“Window eyes, a window nose, and a door for a mouth”—while other parts sound like a play. Overall, however, Lodato has captured a painful stream of consciousness. I could imagine myself as a sometimes unhappy teenager wanting to find a dark place, alone, to obsess over Mathilda Savitch like a secret friend. This is a book worth reading, and although a fast read, it is not best suited for the beach.

Written by: Claire Burrows, April 16th 2010

Picara

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:02:00 +0000

By Pat MacEnulty

Livingston Press

Here’s the truth: right up front I judged Picara by its cover. The cover, a photo of a young girl sitting on a rail guard with a sideways gaze and unreadable emotion on her face, conjured up one word in my mind: Angst. Well, two words: Teenage angst. Having lately been exhausted by over-publicized Twi-hard* Sturm und Drang, I was anticipating a broken, lonely adolescent heart coupled with an empty highway metaphor to round out the cliché. Sans vampires, though.

I was wrong—about the angst part, not the “no vampires” part.

Eli Burnes is not your typical hurting heroine. For one, she was raised by her opera singing step-grandmother, Mattie, and their family maid, Miz Johnny. Her parents are not around; Mattie stole Eli away from her alcoholic mother when Eli was only two, and her father, Willie, has started a life as an anti-war activist in Missouri, light years away from the sheltered life Eli lives in Georgia under the doting care of Mattie and her cadre of opera friends. Many nights, she falls asleep under the piano listening to their voices, singing, and laughter.

However, when Mattie succumbs to cancer, Eli is faced with starting over. Unable to imagine life with her father and his other family, Eli takes off with a draft-dodging friend to try her luck in Canada. When plans go awry, Eli has only her insight and instincts to find herself a home.

MacEnulty does a wonderful job of capturing the dichotomous cultural forces at work in Eli’s travels, which are set mainly in the ’70s. She portrays the warmth and hospitality of the South alongside the escalating tension and violence of race relations there. She captures the hippies’ ideals of love and peace, but doesn’t shy from the bitterness of their resistance against the government and the war. Throughout, Eli provides a wide-eyed yet remarkably sage witness to race riots, Woodstock, and political turmoil.

My main qualm with the book is the fact that Eli is so perceptive and mature that it seems to belie her age (and hormones, in the case with her first boyfriend, Zen). In general, though, I welcomed her insight and, at times, marveled at their beauty. For example, when a friend tried unsuccessfully to kill herself, Eli reflects: “I wondered why she wanted to die. True, life was sad, but there was something nice about its sadness, something good enough to make you want to wake up and be sad for a little more.”

Yes, she is an adolescent, and yes, her life is characterized by loneliness and loss, but Eli’s resilience, levelheadedness, and knack for linking up with quirky, interesting folks helps this road trip novel escape most of the truisms associated with the genre.

Don’t hate, Twilight fans. I’ve got nothing against you. I just feel like there has been pale, undead bathos everywhere I turn as of late.

Written by: Jo Ristow, December 5th 2009

I Hate This Part of Texas #7/Keep Loving Keep Fighting #7

admin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:36:00 +0000

By John Gerken, Hope Amico

Microcosm Publishing

Though you may not know from reading it I Hate This Part of Texas #7/Keep Loving Keep Fighting #7 is a split zine. Composed of journal style entries recounting the grief of losing a city, the introduction page of the zine calls itself “more of a splicing of two zines about...the city we still love, New Orleans.” A layered and much needed marriage of accounts, this zine offers the kind of material and insight needed is we as a community are to make ourselves available to the psychic dealing and repair so lost to the Gulf Coast and its fighting residents.

Deeply honest, the zine unflinchingly details the fears and anxieties of upheaval, intermittent alcoholism, things to be grateful for, resentment, and displacement. “I can walk into the house and there's my old life, wracked and wrought and strewn about, moldy and collapsed...an eerie and terrible reminder of what might have been, had we been allowed to continue.”

Dedicated in large part to their friend, Helen Hill, a woman, wife, friend, and mother who, shortly after returning to New Orleans post-evacuation, was shot and killed in her home, this “zine-splice” is a heavy fifty or so pages of mourning, as well as remembrance. An entry from Mardi Gras 2007 acutely describes the wearing of such loss. “Don and I spoke of the fog as souls returning to the city, all the souls who have died here. Perhaps all the souls up and down the serpentine length of this vast river, this artery of dreams and desire and struggle and loss.”

The love and fervor written in the pages of this zine are a small miracle of words that do not die, but lay to rest - breathe. This work embodies the fullness of survival and dedication, an imperative read if the feeling that ought to end up lain in the dirt - isolation, despair, alienation - may seed and flower into hope and continuity.

Written by: Sara Holy, June 12th 2008