Fathers, Sons & Peppermint Schnapps

Decrying the prevalence of memoirs has become a cliche of book review pages. But as far as I know, no one has any empirical evidence of the rise in the number of memoirs published in the last few years. Besides, publishers have to make money, and to do so they must cater to the tastes of the reading public. All we can do – “we” being those who are interested in literature, as opposed to the publishing business – is celebrate when a good memoir comes our way, one whose author has taken the raw material of experience and turned it into art.Despite its distracting title, Nick Flynn’s “Another Bulls- Night in Suck City: A Memoir” (W.W. Norton, 288 pages, $23.95) is that kind of a book. “Suck City” (and how silly I feel typing that) is the story of Mr. Flynn’s relationship with his father, Jonathan, a part-time scam artist and full-time alcoholic – or rather their lack of a relationship, as shortly after Nick was born, his mother, Jodi, filed for divorce.This seems to have been the right decision. Jonathan’s constant drinking made him a washout as a husband and a parent, and his business techniques were less than honest. First his Renault dealership folded because of a combination of incompetence and indifference. Then he sold high-end used cars on commission – a more successful venture, except that Jonathan rarely paid his clients. According to Nick, “[Jonathan] assumed they were so rich that they wouldn’t miss the money, not right away, but he was wrong.” On his own again, Jonathan got involved in more scams and did some jail time, including a stint in prison for a check-kiting scheme. And he kept drinking.Meanwhile, Nick was growing up in Scituate, Mass., “the second most alcohol consuming town, city, or r.f.d. zone in the United States,” and demonstrating self-destructive tendencies of his own. High on marijuana, Nick rides his motorcycle barefoot: “I’m fast becoming the one who leaves things behind … [who] puts his stuff in your basement and never returns. Who steps out onto the sidewalk in a small city, into the stifling air, without his shoes, without remembering he was even wearing shoes, or ever wore shoes.” He gets home without injuring himself (although he does get a ticket “just for being stupid”); later, drunk on peppermint schnapps, Nick flips the motorcycle, rupturing his spleen and breaking his girlfriend’s wrist.Father and son share another trait: They both have literary aspirations. Nick seems to have followed a more modest, “natural” route towards becoming a writer: an early interest in reading; then the desire to give form to experience. He even chooses the marginalizing vocation of poet. But for Jonathan, assuming the role of a writer is a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. He claims that a stint in a Florida county jail is his opportunity to write a prison novel that will make “Solzhenitsyn green with envy.” But save for some crackpot letters to Patty Hearst and Ted Kennedy, he seldom puts pen to paper: “since high school, he has identified himself as a writer, but he has yet to write much, beyond notes scribbled out on cocktail napkins, titles for his novel-to-be.”A final parallel is an association with homelessness. Nick was fortunate enough to be only an interested observer, working for years in Boston’s Pine Street shelter (he writes about the poor, the addicted, and the mentally ill with startling specificity and compassion). Jonathan, however, was driven to homelessness by his deepening alcoholism. The issue becomes excruciatingly personal to Nick when his father checks into Pine Street.It’s best not to summarize how (or if) this humiliating situation is resolved. It would be a disservice to the clarity and insight with which Nick Flynn draws both his father’s decrepitness and his own discomfort. “Suck City” is not without its problems – Mr. Flynn uses lots of italics, and some chapters are self-conscious and ineffective prose poems. But among a surfeit of books by celebrities with profoundly uninteresting lives, or examples of the more self-pitying brand of “literary” memoir, Nick Flynn’s book is a tremendous tonic.Mr. Haber last wrote for these pages about Tim LaHaye.

Fathers, Sons & Peppermint Schnapps

Fathers, Sons & Peppermint Schnapps

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