Rich Mintz

(Warning: if you read past the third paragraph or so, you may feel you’re seeing a spoiler or two; although I’m not saying anything here that the author didn’t say out loud in his lecture before I read the book, and it didn’t bother me none.)

In Even the Dogs, Jon McGregor has done something remarkable: he’s written a novel about heroin addicts, and heroin addiction, that I’ve actually read through to the end. And I read it through not in small doses, but in one sitting (with, admittedly, a long break to sleep, wake up, and spend a day at work).

Addiction is not a literary topic I have ever thought I was particularly interested in, especially because most fictional treatments of addiction and other conditions of mental illness are so untrue to life. They’re either mawkish or romantic, or they’re unrealistically redemptive, or they fail to capture the mundane lived reality that underpins the life of even a “crazy” person.

Compare Next to Normal, last year’s “acclaimed, groundbreaking musical” with a “thrilling contemporary score” that “pushes Broadway in new directions.” NtN, of course, is “about” bipolar disorder, and it (apparently, and I say this because I couldn’t bring myself to sit through it, although I endured endless plot summary from my excitable friends and on the Internet, and saw the production number at the Tonys) celebrates — nay, fetishizes — the condition and the “conflict” it causes and the “consequences” in its wake. Forgive the grumpy-old-manitude, but as one of the people I know who lives with a chemical imbalance said to me, more or less, “I can’t imagine feeling anything other than anger and frustration as a result of seeing that show.” People living with untreated or untreatable mental illness don’t romanticize it at all, as far as I can tell; it’s just there, an unavoidable pain in the ass, an inconvenient handicap that insists on being reckoned with just as you’ve finally managed to put it out of your mind, an inhibitor and complicator of social functioning, a monkey on your back that you never adjust to and will never get rid of. People with mental illness of course come to terms with the way God made them, and learn as best they can to accept themselves the way they are (what else can you do)?… but their success in building happy lives, if they’re lucky, doesn’t eliminate or even neutralize the pain and dislocation that they feel; it’s all jumbled up together.

Ditto with addiction. And McGregor (whom I heard speaking about the book here in New York at the Center for Fiction) has told a very clear, plain, believable, and not at all romantic story about addiction and addicts on the street — about their pain, their realism, and above all the daily schlep that is their lives. This despite a narrative form that is unusual, experimental, even a bit magical. As the characters remark time and again, it takes a lot of work, daily grinding work, to hold yourself together if you’re addicted to heroin and living on the street, and these people (and they are very much fully realized people) plod through it (each in his or her own style) with a determination that is to their credit. A bleak novel, a novel whose protagonists are largely unsophisticated and one that does not resolve in a satisfactory way; but I laughed out loud at least a dozen times, and was gripped through to the end.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Arts & Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.