"Okay!"

The drunk across the street is in the back of the police car and the policeman is watching you. He is curious and it seems he will cross the street to meet you and you tell the man into whom you crashed about this and he is scared. "Let's pretend we're good friends saying goodnight to each other," you say, and you take up the man's hand to shake it. "Okay!" you say. This is what you imagine one good friend would say to another at three o'clock in the morning on the side of the road in Hollywood. "Okay!" you say again. "Okay!" the man says. He is crushing your hand and you are smiling. "I still think you're drunk," he whispers. You wink and return to the Toyota. The policeman has lost interest and is filling out paperwork on his dashboard; the drunk is watching you from the back of the squad car. You point to him and tip back a phantom bottle, and he nods. He points to you and tips a phantom bottle and you nod. The drunk then points skyward, toward heaven, and to his heart. This is a beautiful gesture from a man on his way to jail and as you pull back onto the road you decide to have a cry over it. You try to cry all the way home but can manage only a coughing fit and a few moans. You had hoped your crying would be so relentless that you would be forced to pull the car over and "ride it out," but you arrive home without shedding a tear. You fall asleep in the Toyota and when you wake up you are covered with sweat and your wife is hitting you and shrieking in what seems to be another language and you say to her, "Okay! Okay! Okay!" She is curious about the damage done to the front of the car and her sharpened red fingers stab crazily at the morning air.

(Patrick de Witt, Ablutions pp. 18-19.)

Patrick deWitt is a Canadian novelist who lives in Portland, Oregon. Ablutions (2009), was his first book, a pills-and-Jamesons narrative of self-destructive addictions in Hollywood. DeWitt has since written another three well-received novels, traversing different genres while retaining an undertow of comedy.

Ablutions is subtitled Notes for a novel and this accounts for the "you" (the narrator-protagonist addressing an audience of himself), the failure to mention his own name, and the various sentences beginning "Discuss.."  ("Discuss Brent the unhappy doorman.") But this suggestion of note-form isn't developed any further, and as the narrative flows along a better analogy is the "you" of a stand-up comic's anecdote, the "you" that invites the audience to identify with the typicality of the comic's experience even when its exaggerations verge on the surreal.

My own acquaintance with modern novels is so abysmally minimal that any meaningful comparisons with other books are out of the question. But the comedy and discomfort sometimes reminded me of Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man (1972); deWitt's prose is much more consistently relishable, but he makes no attempt at an original premise of the dice-rolling type. And the L.A. location also brought to my mind Dorothy B. Hughes' noir masterpiece In A Lonely Place (1947), which is hardly a fair comparison. Yet it's interesting how both books go about inventing a style and a mind to go with it; there's a similar integrity of imagination.

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/03/do-you-take-chance-fan.html
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2015/02/dorothy-b-hughes-in-lonely-place-1947.html

The style of Ablutions is highly infectious. You start to speak and think like its hero (not entirely reassuring), and everywhere begins to seem like a bar at which people are talking smack. I even thought I caught the Ablutions voice now and then in the book I started on next, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur:

Some of the kings had marvel of Merlin's words, and deemed well that it should be as he said; and some of them laughed him to scorn, as King Lot; and more others called him a witch.... 'Be we well advised to be afraid of a dream-reader?' said King Lot. 

That intrusive, dismissive voice might, admittedly, have something to do with Ablutions  containing its own prophetic Merlin, a 70-year-old chain-smoker with "desperate, deep-set gray eyes" whose "vocation is mired in the pall of alcoholic fiction".

DeWitt, an engaging interviewee, has said that he is not a political person.It had already occurred to me that Ablutions was a book that, for once, didn't keep making me think about Brexit. (Malory does, of course.)

The hero of Ablutions is unpolitical too, except when a change of scene generates inspired thoughts.

[W]hen you entered gas station number one your only idea was to purchase a phone card but your high made you dull-minded and there you were in the aisles, looking and pretending not to look at the coolers and at last giving in and purchasing the one can of beer, and later when you realized you forgot to buy a phone card you stopped at another gas station and again you forgot the phone card (you remembered the beer) but took comfort in the thought of the next gas station, and you wondered where it would be, and would the cashier be friendly or unfriendly, and you felt an uncommon patriotic shiver as you considered the country's innumerable gas stations and markets and rest stops, small businesses thriving or going under, the owners gambling their very lives on customers like yourself, travelers in need of single cans of beer and forgettable phone cards... 

That, as far as I recall, is the only time that the concept of a nation-state ("the country") flickers across his innocent mind. And in fact a European reader is likely to be struck by how very little these alcoholics have to do with the state, except sometimes in the form of law-enforcement. An uncaring society, committed to letting people go to hell in their own way; this land of the free.

"Innocent" may seem a doubtful word, given some of the hero's nastier behaviour. In fact the book shows us an identity in disintegration, which calls into question any overall definition. Still, I think "innocent" in the childlike sense covers a number of the hero's features. He has, he recognizes, a broad streak of hate, but is also apt to fall "platonically in love" and to be overwhelmed by sentimental-hysterical emotions of love and loss (they always go together). He is profoundly aware of and disgusted by the constant lies of his companions (though he lies just as compulsively as all the rest). Though it seems apparent that nothing can help him but changing his own thoughts -- so in that respect the book is an argument for personal responsibility -- there is also the blurry vision of a society that could be better than it is; kinder, more honest, less driven by its own ego-pursuits. Developed a bit further, that awareness could be the basis of a political discussion.

This book was part of a splurge at the local garden centre: four at 20p each, and two for donation-only. Books have never been more available nor less esteemed.

I've already finished the excellent short life of A.H. Clough by Rupert Christiansen -- leading to an attempt to read Clough's "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich" on-line (the jury's still out on that one) and a renewed absorption in Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis", to a certain extent an elegy for his friend Clough.

I've also read or skimmed a lot of Hattie Ellis' Planet Chicken. This was published in 2007 and that seems a long time ago when the debate on our society and environment is evolving so rapidly; but debate is one thing and change another. The vast chicken industry no doubt remains the same horror depicted in this book. Ellis is a chef and not a vegetarian, so her book is focused on eating less but better chicken: organic, local, slow food, real meat etc. From our perspective 12 years on, the question that the book poses is more likely to be about veganism. At any rate I questioned last night's omelette (though the eggs were organic of course). But that's the wrong place to start... Most of us get most of our food while out. It's the eggs in those innocent-looking veggie breakfasts and egg-and-cress sandwiches that ought to be bothering me.

For the rest of my money, I have Helon Habila's epic of rural Nigeria to encounter, and long-overdue revisits to Malory's "booke" and to the Austen novel I know least well, in one of those lovely Everyman hardback editions.