Slate Audio Book Club, one of my favorite reading resources on the web is currently discussing The Night of the Gun by David Carr, a book that I briefly previewed here. Also, next they’ll be discussing my favorite book, The Great Gatsby(!)
Thoughts on SABC review of The Night of the Gun:
One thing that the reviewers seem to miss (although I think the moderator gets it about halfway in) is that this book isn’t intended to offer emotional insight to “why I used drugs” or anything of the sort. In the same way that it eschews catharsis it must then avoid the lure of nostalgia and emotionalizing the situation. Although perceived at times as its weakness, the coldness and detached nature of his writing may not offer the insight that you’re looking for, but it at least makes an effort at being more of an “objective” account than most of the crap recovery novels out there. The point at which I am frustrated by the review is when they discuss someone else’s recovery novel in which the author kills himself before the end of the book (and it’s a true story). The desire and tendency to romanticize the work of those that are gone becomes tiresome. No, that author can’t engage in the “smugness” that Carr does about his current life, and I too am somewhat suspicious of the complete turnaround Carr had considering the brevity of the process, but that doesn’t make one book better than the other, it just captures two people at their most disparate states: alive, and still struggling versus dead and “at peace.”
Fundamentally however, I like a lot of the points raised, most notably that the book, by design lulled me in and out of caring about it. On one hand the construct was interesting and on the other the nature of the book had a kind of alienation effect in which I would remember I was reading a book and was not longer lost in the story. This was frustrating.
