Facing the swarm of asterisks

American fiction is rich in portraits of drunks. Alcoholics have belched and swayed through the pages of writers from Jack London and Ernest Hemingway to Stephen King and Raymond Carver. Fewer novelists have taken sobriety as their subject. Booze can provide a narrative with usefully lurid drama; when the drinking stops, the story often does too.

Early Sobrieties, Michael Deagler’s debut novel, begins a few months after its narrator’s final drink. At twenty-six, Dennis Monk is cloistered at his family home in Pennsylvania, his recent past an alcoholic blur and his future hardly any clearer. His backstory is lightly sketched: it is a “knee-capped bildungsroman” in which “a bright-eyed man from the suburbs goes down to Philadelphia and drinks himself into a series of increasingly dire circumstances until he is forced by a deficiency of skills and wits and second chances back to the Bucks County subdivision of his youth”. But Monk has no time to dwell on the past. His unsympathetic parents are about to turf him out into a world of couch surfing and gig work, where he will somehow have to find his way through his first dry year.

What follows is anything but dry. Back in the City of Brotherly Love, Monk drifts between the homes of old friends and new acquaintances, trying to put his English major to use – “I’d been misinformed regarding the centrality of F. Scott Fitzgerald to the American job market” – but he cannot help getting ensnared in all sorts of capers. Shocked to discover that the girls from his high school have grown up over the years he spent insensible on booze, he makes a series of fumbling (and mostly unsuccessful) passes at them. He leads two drunks on a deeply unwise mission to help them buy meth, and narrowly escapes a baseball bat-wielding dealer. Later, mesmerized by a friend’s liquor cabinet while babysitting his prized parrot, he allows the bird to escape and spends his afternoon searching for it through the city streets.

An outsider whoever he’s around – drinkers, happy couples, the gainfully employed – Monk is an ideal vehicle for Deagler’s fine observational skills. He is amusing on the hipsters who throng his gentrifying neighbourhood (“the sons of lawyers and pediatricians who aspired to look like the sons of miners and farmers”) and the indignities of low-end freelance work (the exotic tea brand for which he writes “flavour profiles” refuses to send him samples, so he has to imagine how they taste). And he is just as ready to make himself the butt of the joke: when a friend describes his footloose urban lifestyle as that of a flâneur, Monk replies that, no, he just can’t afford a car.

Though billed as a novel, Early Sobrieties is really a collection of ten linked stories, and its episodic form militates a little against its subject. Recovery from alcoholism and the best fiction have in common their reliance on character development. As Monk approaches one year sober, near the end of the book, he has got as far as paying the rent on a spare room, but, despite occasional bouts of lacerating introspection, he hasn’t yet figured out why he drank, or who he is: “Any idea I might conceive of myself necessitated a swarm of asterisks”. His tale is scattered with moving ruminations on shame and desire and loneliness, but the depths of his character remain as hidden to the reader as they are to him.

Still, he is always excellent company as we tag along on his scrapes and escapades, and it is refreshing that the author errs towards reticence and ambivalence rather than the evangelical tone usually favoured by the memoirs that, more than novels, have made recovery their subject. (This is a book about alcoholism that wants nothing to do with the redemptive nostrums of Alcoholics Anonymous.) Early Sobrieties marks the arrival of a writer of considerable gifts: Michael Deagler has a Dickensian way with names (Maeve Slaughtneil, Bors Sprang, Smashley Smaniotto), his dialogue is as crisp as a virgin mojito and his prose has the buoyant energy of a hangover-free Saturday morning.

Matt Rowland Hill is the author of Original Sins: A memoir, 2022

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post Facing the swarm of asterisks appeared first on TLS.