Addiction Lit
Our Reading Habit
A Needle-sharp Habit
Some Hope, St. Aubyn’s trilogy of damage, descent and recovery contains some of the most vividly bad parenting in English lit. It features his evil dad, whose sadism and self-involvement inspire the young hero to abuse many expensive substances along his path to near-death. Mother’s Milk, a later, and to many a better novel, is not as vivid a portrayal of addiction, but it’s close enough. What’s really addictive, however, is St. Aubyn’s acerbic style and his psychological sophistication.
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When Telling All Means Telling Less
Addiction memoir is, evidently, not an easy genre to ace. Neither Clegg, who was a successful literary agent before he blew his wad on crack, nor William Burroughs whose Naked Lunch made drug addiction almost synonymous with modern underground consciousness, manages to fully evoke the swirling, out of control delirium nor the delectable debasement they sacrificed years of their lives to chasing, though Burroughs, who favored downers, is alert and interested in addiction in a way Clegg, who was an uppers man, is not. The size of their worlds don’t match, either. Burroughs travels the globe chasing heroin and a grab-bag of other narcotics, so that his habit takes on the quality of a quest, whereas Clegg catalogs chic Downtown social venues where he scored and soared, so that his book feels a little like an issue of New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer” section. Even when Clegg lands in Paris, he orders “the chicken” and “wine,” like he was eating at Denny’s. His most vivid descriptions are of the residues in his pipe. Addictions tend to diminish the telling details of life into a blur, a desire for Something Else. Burroughs writes about what a watchful victim makes of his own dissolution, but Clegg only conveys the blur.
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