Hi all
I'm looking for suggestions of novels, plays and short stories that are about heavy drinkers, or that have especially well drawn alcoholic characters. I don't mind whether these are nasty and abusive, rosy-cheeked and comical, or sleeping off a hangover throughout the entire story. The novels needn't be 'great', 'classic' or celebrated in any way. They just gotta love the booze and be well written. Any language.
Accompanying comments would be very welcome. Better still, name the character and tell me a little about him/her.
The characters needn't be appealing (real alcoholism rarely is), so the stories needn't be fun.
I'll get the first round in:
Erofeev in
Venedikt Erofeev's
Moscow to the end of the lineFranz Biberkopf in
Döblin's
Berlin AlexanderplatzLeopold Bloom in
Joyce's
Ulysses The Good Soldier Švejk by
Jaroslav HašekThe entire (almost) cast of the
Asterix books
Any one of the many boozers in
William Trevor's short stories, although 'Swann' in 'The day we got drunk on cake' is the first that springs to mind.
Fyodor and Dimitri Karamzov
The Brothers KaramazovMessage edited by its author, Nov 13, 2009, 10:08am.
Thanks bookmomo.
The characters needn't be appealing, just well written, irrespective of whether they are realistic. Maybe I'll clarify that in the first post.
Message edited by its author, Nov 13, 2009, 3:47am.
It might almost be easier to make a list of novels that are
not about heavy drinkers, there are so many alcoholics and near-alcoholics in fiction...
http://www.librarything.com/tag/alcoholi... or
http://www.librarything.com/tag/Alcoholi... (almost, but not quite the same list) seems to be a good start.
Under the volcano (one of those classics-I-never-quite-got-to) comes near the top of both lists. There seems to be a lot of
Charles Bukowski, too. A couple of things that stand out are
The power and the glory (Graham Greene's celebrated "whisky priest") and
Brideshead revisited (although I don't think anyone would read it just for the description of Sebastian's descent into alcoholism). One I didn't expect to see in the list was Trollope's
Doctor Thorne - of course the drinker is Sir Roger Scratcherd, the character based on Samuel Morton Peto, the millionaire ex-brickie who rather implausibly drinks himself to death because he isn't accepted by polite society.
4> Quite right, fiction is full of alcoholics. That's fine. I'm casting the net pretty wide.
Message edited by its author, Nov 13, 2009, 4:03am.
Not a novel, but it kind of reads like one is Pete Hamill's autobiography
A Drinking Life: A Memoir. It was terrific and prompted me to go out and buy some of his fiction, which wasn't nearly as good as the real thing.
If it's well written - 'literary' - then autobiography is fine. Thanks varielle.
I really enjoyed
The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch earlier this year - it describes his recurrent alcoholism and bouts in rehab, as well as the stories of some of the other characters in rehab with him. It was a surprisingly amusing read, given the subject matter...
This message has been deleted by its author.
8> Just done a little web-searching on The Mighty Angel. It looks interesting - thanks.
I listened to the Audio book of
Dry which is about a Gay alcoholic and his climbing onto and falling back off of the wagon.
It was pretty good, I listened to it when I was commuting from PA to MD every weekend.
thinking...
The old Philip Marlow (
The Big Sleep etc) liked the odd tipple.
The Mayor of Casterbridge had some unfortunate experiences with alcohol.
hmmm. I don't doubt that there are a lot more, but i guess they don't appeal to me.
12>
Marlowe's drinking in Chandler's novels is similar to the smoking you find in the movies of the period. Marlowe drinks, especially when he's feeling a little lower than usual, but it's generally incidental to his mood, rather than affecting it, as if it were just like smoking. I've always found the aesthetics of Marlowe's drinking strangely attractive, just like the smoking in film noir - there's no denying the actors look good doing it. It reminds me of Harrison Ford's drinking in the movie Blade Runner, where Deckard is basically played as Marlowe. There's a melancholy scene in which he sits at the piano with a glass of bourbon, a scene which I found so attractive as a teenager that I may have consciously modelled my drinking behaviour on it, just as some people might model their smoking on Lauren Bacall's. It earned me a fine taste for single malt whiskey.
However, Chandler's prose is so terse that a single allusion to alcohol can, in the right context, provide a powerful argument for the relationship between alcohol, violence and repressed desire in just a handful of words. In the Big Sleep, we get little direct reference to the underlying psychology of Marlowe, but then along comes a line like the following, completely unexpected.
Note: Marlow has just arrived back at his flat to find a beautiful girl, incidental to his investigations, uninvited in his bed. He tells her to leave and, after she's gone, Chandler writes:
"I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely."
It gets a paragraph all to itself.
Message edited by its author, Nov 13, 2009, 7:11am.
I recently read
The Lost Weekend by
Charles Jackson which is a rather old novel about an alcoholic's weekend binge. It came out long after the book was published that the novel was pretty much autobiographical. It was very dark but very good. There was a movie made from the novel.
Anyone that has read the Yorkshire novelist David Peace's novels will find many of the characters liberally soused with various boozes throughout, especially the Red Riding series and The Damned United. But, as with Marlowe, in the Red Riding books the alcohol seems largely incidental, atmospheric, whereas in
The Damned United it's presented as essential to the protagonist's character (being modelled on a real-life boozer).
Message edited by its author, Nov 13, 2009, 7:27am.
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
Gripping tale, about a women's 20 year stuggle to reach sobriety and to successfully remain sober.
11, 13, 15, 17> thanks. Lots for me to pursue.
"Keep 'em coming!" gasped Third, biting down on another shot. His glass cracked onto the bar, rattling with spent shell-casings.
Message edited by its author, Nov 13, 2009, 7:51am.
Of course! Fyodor and Dimitri Karamazov - whoever argued that the human brain is 90% water obviously hadn't encountered these two.
20> Thanks Jesse. I've heard a lot of good things about Stone's writing.
22-24>
Anyone want to tell me a little about the relevant characters - that'd be really helpful, thanks!
To Third_Cheek (#1):
Leopold Bloom an alcoholic!!?? What edition of the book did you read? (Not that there arenʻt alcoholics in
Ulysses, but none of them hapens to be named Leopold Bloom. If I had to name a NON-alcoholic in 20th c. literature in English, Bloom would be the first name that came to mind. True he did somewhat parallel an alcoholicʻs difficulty in getting home before dawn, but Iʻm sure that Joyce meant for a very different cause than the alcohlicʻs. As an outsider (because of his Jewish ethnicity*) in Dublin, and yet very much an insider (to his own mind) he would be much preferred by Joyce as a character paralleling Odysseus of the
Odyssey to your average Dublin alcoholic.
* I say ethnicity rather than religion, because Bloom is unreligious and, technically, is not even Jewish in religion, having had both a Church of Ireland and a Catholic baptism.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned
Charles Bukowski yet. An unapologetic alcoholic himself, his novels usually feature one Henry Chinaski, who is a warts-and-all stand-in for his creator.
His novels (I've lifted the list from wikipedia) are:
*
Post Office (1971)
*
Factotum (1975)
*
Women (1978)
*
Ham On Rye (1982)
*
Barfly (script) (1984)
*
Hollywood (1989)
*
Pulp (1994)
Dashiell Hammett's
Thin Man novels would probably also fill the bill. As I recall, Nick and Nora were pretty much always drinking.
27>
You are right, but I interpreted his difficulty in getting home as partly explicable by the fuzz of alcohol. Of course he's far from being a Dublin alcoholic, and the characters he encounters are typically those which are explicitly drunk, not him; moreover, as an analogy for Ulysses himself, he's obliged to have some difficulties - still this Ulysses is rooted in the everyday, and booze is an everyday explanation... he's returning to his neglected Mrs, and going for a quick one down the Nag's Head and then taking the long way home is arguably an everyday equivalent to such neglect. I accept that it may not be an authentic reading, but I read it for my own benefit rather than for authenticity. It is, after all, a difficult read in places. You'll be appalled by what I have to say about Finnegan's wake. :)
However, it's at least ten years since I last read Ulysses so my preferred reading may by now have completely obfuscated the source.
Message edited by its author, Nov 15, 2009, 5:54am.
"Difficulty getting home as partly explicable by the fuzz of alcohol..."
"heʻs far from being a Dublin alcoholic. . ." #29
Yes, to both quallifications.
The parallels to the Odyssey are strengthened, I think, by the fact that Bloom is meeting other individuals of "many"* different life styles just as Odysseus met whole peoples of different life styles. And alcoholics can be expected to be frequently met, if not predominant --or else the fabled "heavy drinkers who are NOT alcoholic" who are so well known in the folklore of drinking
(but most of the heavy drinkers Iʻve known --and Iʻve known thousands--WERE alcoholics.
*"many": "pollon" in the 1st line of the Odyssey:
"Andra moi enepe, Mousa, polutropon, hos
mala pollon..."
"Difficulty getting home as partly explicable by the fuzz of alcohol..."
"heʻs far from being a Dublin alcoholic. . ." #29
Yes, to both qualifications.
The parallels to the Odyssey are strengthened, I think, by the fact that Bloom is meeting other individuals of "many"* different life styles just as Odysseus met whole peoples of different life styles. And, in Dublin, alcoholics can be expected to be frequently met, if not predominant --or else the fabled "heavy drinkers who are NOT alcoholic" who are so well known in the folklore of drinking
(but most of the heavy drinkers Iʻve known --and Iʻve known thousands--WERE alcoholics.
*"many": "pollon" in the 1st line of the Odyssey:
"Andra moi enepe, Mousa, polutropon, hos
mala pollon..."
30/31> It's a good post, thanks rolandperkins. But twice?!
Message edited by its author, Nov 15, 2009, 1:20pm.
32> Are you seeing double? Does this happen a lot?
To Third__Cheek:
Twice is something that happens occasionally on my posts, Iʻm not sure why --probably from something Iʻm doing wrong.
You probably just get impatient and hit submit more than once. It happens.
Thanks, MerryMary (#35)
>22,
I was just going to suggest
The Sun Also Rises, but I just saw Scott's post. People were always getting "tight" throughout the story.
I've never read this, but loved all those crazy 1930s Nick and Nora movies. How about
The Thin Man?
Glancing through
The New Lifetime Reading Plan, I can't come up with too many classics where drinking is a real major theme. Again,
The Mayor of Casterbridge was mentioned.
The Brothers Karamazov was also already mentioned. I love that term for that debauched father and son duo: Sensualists!
Heck, people drank all the time in
War and Peace. But the book wasn't just about dangling from windows and pranks with bears.
And don't forget there were some pretty rude outcomes to drinking, if you read between the lines in The Bible.
>33-36
...Made me smile, I can ask for little more.
>37 'Sensualists' - "C'est parfait, n'est pas!.. Mais je pense que je suis aussi un sensualiste!", cried Monsieur Troisieme, his fingers twitching about his shirt-collar (or something)
I agree, it's a great expression, I wonder how it is in the original.
38> The reviews look intriguing, I'll keep an eye out for it.
Message edited by its author, Nov 16, 2009, 3:55am.
The Alcoholics by Jim Thompson takes place in a rehab center. Not Thompson's best work but there are scenes of how the patients manage to smuggle liquor into the center and have conversations about why they drink.
The Cracker Factory by Joyce Rebeta-Burditt is the story of a married woman with children who is depressed and an alcoholic. She checks herself into a hospital in order to seek help.
I loved this book when I read it (20 or so years ago).
Message edited by its author, Nov 16, 2009, 9:45pm.
Ironweed by
William Kennedy There's also a great scene near the beginning of
A Tale of Two Cities - a barrel or cask of wine is spilled into the streets of Paris, where it is greedily drank of the ground by a frenzied crowd.
Just reading
The Way of all Flesh by Samuel Butler, and the new wife of the main character (Ernest Pontifex) is an alcoholic. Or as it's referred to in the book, a drunkard. The character itself isn't fleshed out, but it's quite descriptive of classic alcoholic behaviours (lying/hiding etc), which i found interesting in a nineteenth-century novel. I kept expecting someone to suggest an intervention.
43> That does sound interesting. Alcoholic, female AND in a 19th C novel. I'll look that one up, thanks.
Message edited by its author, Dec 2, 2009, 6:09am.
Frederick Exley belongs on any lilst having to do with alcoholism. I donʻt know about his own career in alcoholism, (Touchstones gives me a clue here). But I htink only an alcoholic could have written Exleyʻs A Fanʻs Notes.
A Fanʻs Notes is completely uncompromising, doesnʻt give an inch to Alcoholism, doesnʻt try to pass it off as a "drinking problem". And yet the reader is kept on the side of the narrator, the alcoholic, even as Exley reels off the alcoholicʻs
inveterate rationalizations and ploys for maintaining his addiction.
Message edited by its author, Dec 2, 2009, 2:48pm.
45> Sounds educational, and interesting thanks rp. The research list just get's longer (and better).
I havenʻt read
John Barleycorn, but I did hear at 2nd hand that somewhere at or near the end, he said, soemthing like:
"I will continue to drink, but ever so much more carefully."
I therefore wouldnʻt read it without a 26 oz. box of salt nearby, for use on whatever aphorisms he came up with about alcohol.
That's good advice from Jack. It would be a shame to spill any.
Also, the salt would be handy for margaritas.
To Mr.Andrew:
L O L!! (hoping this is a laugh that was
intended to be elicited)
Keep 'em coming. Thanks all!
(back to top)
