Novels about alcoholics... [hic!]

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 line
Franz Biberkopf in Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz
Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses
The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek
The 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 Karamazov

Two plays come to mind: A delicate balance and Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?, both by Edward Albee. The woman who walked into doors by Roddy Doyle is also about alcoholics.
Don't know if you will like them, they're all about the pain of alcoholism.

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.

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/alcoholism,+fiction or http://www.librarything.com/tag/Alcoholics,+fiction (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.

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...

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.

Probably the best - Tortilla Flat and, to a lesser extent Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, all by the sublime John Steinbeck.

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.

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).

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.

Of course! Fyodor and Dimitri Karamazov - whoever argued that the human brain is 90% water obviously hadn't encountered these two.

The title story from Robert Stone's Bear and His Daughter is one of the best pieces I've ever read to describe a bender.

20> Thanks Jesse. I've heard a lot of good things about Stone's writing.

The Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

If I may add a movie: The Days of Wine and Roses

The Last Bridge by Teri Coyne

22-24>

Anyone want to tell me a little about the relevant characters - that'd be really helpful, thanks!

Among the Brontes, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

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.

"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..."

30/31> It's a good post, thanks rolandperkins. But twice?!

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 scott.stricker:,

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.

What about Long Day's Journey Into Night? I read that one for the first time this year.

>33 Larxol:-36

...Made me smile, I can ask for little more.

>37 Sandydog1: '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.

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).

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.

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.

45> Sounds educational, and interesting thanks rp. The research list just get's longer (and better).

I think this one is not mentioned yet:
John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London

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)

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton and even though it's not a novel I heard you calling in the night.

Keep 'em coming. Thanks all!

Ooo it's a long time since anyone's posted on here. You still reading Third-cheek? I'm surprised the rather lovely 'The Beautiful & The Damned' by Scott-Fitzgerald hasn't been mentioned....one of my all time fave novels & authors with a roller coaster of booze & disillusionment. James Kelman, with his hilarious trampy scottish character in How Late It Was, How Late...the opening pages where the guy's scruffy shoes are robbed whilst he's out for the count is pure genius comedy, gets me cackling away everytime I read it. James' Kelman's early writings eg. his short stories Not, not while the Giro' portray the gloomy, old boy's pub & era brilliantly.
I was bought to this thread whilst searching for more writing/writers like Patrick Hamilton. Read 20,000 leagues by him years ago (pub in there!), and am now reading Hangover Square.

I second Bukowski. Also, "Angela's Ashes" its a memoir.
Huckleberry Finn mentions the Huck's father, a bad alcoholic. If you read between the lines, you'll notice he actually get the DTs in one scene, when he feels snakes all around him

Since the thread's come back to life, another one - what about De helaasheid der dingen by Dimitri Verhulst? Quasi-autobiographical story about four alcoholic brothers in a Flemish village. Well-written, but not very appealing.

Without doubt, the grimmest novel I've ever read about an alcoholic, and one of the grimmest novels I've ever read (and I read a lot of grim novels), is The Drinker by Hans Fallada. Partly autobiographical, it is suffocating in parts, horrifying in parts, and overall bearable for me only because I wanted to find out how low he would go (pretty damn low). Fallada wrote this book while he was in a Nazi mental "hospital" for the criminally insane, back and forth over sheets of paper to save the paper he had (and, I guess to hide it from the wardens). In places it could have benefited from editing, and it isn't up to Every Man Dies Alone or Wolf Among Wolves, but it certainly is the cry of a lost soul.

Has anyone read Rummies by Peter Benchley?
My reading of it broke off; Iʻm not sure just what, to my mind, was wrong with it. But one thing was that I c an "always" tell if the author him/herself is an alcoholic. With
Benchley I couldnʻt.And I was probably contrasting it with a Richard Yates, post-Revolutionary Road title that was about being institutionalized off and on. Any opinions?

Did we already mention the Whiskey Priest, ie The Power and the Glory?

And what about Under the Volcano?

Juan Carlos Onetti's books have lots of alcoholics in them:

La vida breve (The Brief Life)
El astillero (The Shipyard)
Juntacadáveres (Bodysnatchers)
Dejemos hablar al viento (Let the Wind Speak)

To name a few...I think the author was a heavy drinker as well. In my opinion, they're very accurate representations of what it's like to drink a lot, day after day. Easily purchaseable in English translation, they're some of the more underappreciated classics of 20th century Latin American literature.

Liver is still on my tbr pile but I expect it is apt. Digressing a little, the song Satin Doll could be seen as a gin tune.

Another book about drinking is The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch, a contemporary Polish satire about an alcoholic writer who's been in rehab 18 times; it got a little repetitive after a while.

The Matt Scudder series of crime novels by Lawrence Block has an alcoholic central private detective character. He gets sober in later novels, but he's deep into the booze in A Stab In The Dark(book 4 in the series), and there is a very good portrayal of a character trying to get sober in book 5 Eight Million Ways To Die.

The most recent Scudder, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, shows him during his first year of sobriety.

Dry: A memoir

It's about an alcoholic and gives a very good insight as to how he lives and his thought process for why he lived the way that he did. And how he felt every step of the way as he tried to recover.

Touchstone Fairy - Dry: a Memoir

If YA and not a likely classic-to-be is fine, there's Doppelganger, focus isn't really on the alcoholic father but how they cope and eventually deal with him amounts for a fair share of defining most of the main characters and seeing them grow.

In De ruimte van Sokolov by Dutch author Leon de Winter the main character Sokolov is an alcoholic.
I'll go to bed at noon is about a family of alcoholics in the seventies, that is unable to get a grip on their lives.
A million little pieces and it successor My friend Leonard by James Frey
A book with a message: L'Assomoir by Emile Zola, typical 19th century novel to warn against abuse of alcohol.
I believe The beautiful and the damned was already mentioned, but it can never be mentioned enough.
Several novels by French author Antoine Blondin who had an alcoholic lifestyle, especially Un singe en hiver and his autobiographical Monsieur Jadis ou l'école du soir.
Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree definitely deserves a place in the list.

Spider Robinson writes two related series located in a bar, Callahan's Place, and a bordello, Lady Sally's.

Patrons may come in to these places burdened with all sorts of angst, but they find fellowship of the highest order. This is obviously sci-fi/fantasy. But, for the amount of drinking that goes on, these are fun characters to hang with.

I'm joining this a little late in the game, but I think I can make up for it with depth and breadth - a while ago I blogged about novels about alcoholics written by alcoholics. I described the protagonists and, roughly, the plots (making sure not to give away too much), and I rated them on their literary merits and their realistic portrayals of alcoholism. A couple of the books have already been mentioned above, but here is my full list:

Richard Yates’s Disturbing the Peace (1975) (with a mention of Caroline Knapp's memoir Drinking: A Love Story (1996))
http://wp.me/pxMLa-1Z

Hans Fallada's The Drinker (1944)
http://wp.me/pxMLa-2C

Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944)
http://wp.me/pxMLa-37

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947)
http://wp.me/pxMLa-3n

Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968)
http://wp.me/pxMLa-3T

And a rundown of books that didn't fit the criteria (they were not novels, or the authors were not alcoholics) featuring How Late It Was, How Late (1994) by James Kelman, Ablutions (2009) by Patrick deWitt, Recovery (1973) by John Berryman, John Barleycorn (1913) by Jack London, The Cup of Fury (1956) by Upton Sinclair, The Invisible Enemy: Alcoholism & the Modern Short Story (1989) by Miriam Dow and Jennifer Regan, and Jean Rhys's After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) and Good Morning, Midnight (1938)
http://wp.me/pxMLa-4e

I wouldn't say my current read, Cham, is specifically about alcoholism though the protagonist, Itchy, does manage to put away a good few Flaming Sambucas during the course of the novel. I just loved this description of Itchy waking one morning after a heavy night out:

A gorilla must have attacked the apartment. It has eaten all the food, drunk all the booze, wrecked the place, punched Itchy in the head, shat in his mouth and then left in the night.

Speaking of Fitzgerald, I just finished A Moveable Feast by Hemingway and my two favorite chapters are about his friendship with Fitzgerald. One where they travel together and Hemingway has to cope with the effects of alcohol on his friend is both funny and very moving.

See the ebook novella, C2H6O: The Annihilation of the Blossoms, by D. E. Clayton, on Amazon.

The Odd Women by George Gissing. Late Victorian novel. A good case of a "discrete" (for a while) female alcoholic in one of the significant supporting characters. ETA: This is a novel that I don't particularly care for. I think Gissing tends a bit much toward didacticism, but I'm in a minority.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout. The younger brother, Bob, is an "almost alcoholic" (so called). Here's my LT Early Review.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow. A child of alcoholics, although the novel is much more about the girl's biracial identity. One that I've very fond of, and I'm due for a reread. Winner of the 2008 PEN/Bellwether Prize. Heidi Durrow is an LT author and this is her only book so far. (I'm hoping she doesn't turn out to be a one-book wonder.)

Hmmm, nobody's mentioned Doctor Sleep yet. Several of the characters are alcoholics and AA plays a big part.

Speaking of Fitzgerald (again), I'm just finishing Tender is the Night. Plenty of drinking there.

Of course Nick in The Thin Man can down a few, as well.