In Soviet Russia, Cocktail Shakes You!

I read "the comic high-water mark of the Brezhnev era"

Sometimes you read two things that chime against one another in ways you didn’t expect. I probably should have expected that Venedikt Erofeev’s 1973 picaresque, Moscow to the End of the Line (tr Tjalsma), would resonate with Jim Thompson’s The Alcoholics. But I always forget why I put books on my reading list, and then I don’t read the back covers before I start them, so I forgot that Moscow is about a drunk on a bender, trying to get to the last stop on his subway line so he can give his angelic little son a bag of nuts.

The Alcoholics is set in a failing (OR IS IT) rehab, with a self-loathing doctor, a frigid sadistic nurse, and wise Black orderlies who speak in dialect. So it was always going to be “uneven” at best, is what I’m saying. It was one of the tWELVE (12) books Thompson churned out in nineteen months. You can’t blame him, he has a compulsion, etc etc. The Grifters is uneven but great. The Alcoholics’ prose is mediocre, and Thompson swerves toward some interesting things, but then skids right back away from them. The novel becomes a sort of pornographically earnest depiction of The Alcoholic, his nature and cure, a book for people who like both “Boy, Doc!” optimism and “I raped her for her own good” spanking scenes. I wanted neither of those things, and I find it hard to imagine the reader who’d want both!

But it doesn’t start out that way. The Alcoholics starts out as a classic institutional satire, set in the perfectly-named El Healtho sanitarium (“a rambling stucco and tile structure, styled in that school of architecture known as Spanish Mediterranean to its adherents and ‘California Gothic’ to its detractors”). Alcoholism is a diagnosis—a triumph of modernity—but alcoholic drinking is scientific modernity’s defeat. And what’s more, the doctor is himself mad! Mad, deceived, obsessed with finances in the Five-Year Plan factory of the sanatorium, where they make only left-hand shoes. Moscow is about what people are like, with the drunk as synecdoche, suffering not from alcoholism but from “world sorrow.” The Alcoholics is explicitly about “the alcoholic” as a special type, a set of symptoms, but all institutional novels more-or-less covertly treat the institution as microcosm of the world.

In a way it’s the prospect of not drinking, of quitting, that creates the “alcoholic.” The prospect of normalcy exposes the degree to which one has become abnormal. And, speaking as a person in recovery and not as a literary uhhh critic or whatever, fwiw I’ll say, Don’t worry, getting sober won’t make you normal. Scientific modernity remains vanquished! You can love people and even wake up in the morning and still be absurd! Anyway, the possibility of quitting never crosses the mind of Venedikt Erofeev’s hero, and nobody puts it to him.

Moscow is a delight, really, a ranting and stumbling ramble, sometimes frustrating but never stopping there for long. This guy’s defeat of scientific modernity is far more effective than Doc Murphy’s. He got kicked out of his factory job for accurately graphing his colleagues’ drinking patterns! There’s a bravura passage in which hiccuping refutes all systems and sciences: “And in this silence [after you’ve finally stopped hiccuping for no apparent reason] your heart says to you: It is indiscernible and we are helpless.” There’s a bit where the drunken train passengers argue about the difference between a postulate and a premise.

There are cocktail recipes, because, “If it is true that we cannot wait to be favored by nature, we must wrest her favors from her, then it goes without saying that we must know the exact recipes.” So you can learn how to mix up e.g. “caprice and an idea and a pathos, and beyond that a hint of the metaphysical,” using things you can find around the house, like furniture polish and insecticide. (“I won’t remind you how to refine furniture polish—any child knows that. For some reason no one in Russia knows why Pushkin died, but how to refine furniture polish—that, everyone knows.”)

It isn’t just the planned economy that Erofeev’s bleary hero exposes as absurd. Platonov, Schiller, Goethe; let’s all tell stories about love, like in Turgenev (the stories are squalid). A journey to the Free World becomes a phantasmagoria of national jokes: France is mostly brothels and gonorrhea clinics, Americans eat five times a day with great dignity, etc. There’s satire of revolution, which imho was a bit less deep, a bit more cliched or easy, than the mockery of statistics and plans. I did enjoy the bit with the “terror campaign” aka drunks pinching one another’s thighs.

The novel’s ethics are explicit, I think: “[I]s there anything on earth higher than that which is inconsolable?” Try to medicate me for world sorrow, you swine!

Everybody gets drunk on something in order to laugh at or weep at the world, but if your tolerance is too high, you can’t even laugh or weep at it. By the end, even sad old Venedikt (oh right, the narrator has the author’s name, very sad) is saying, "but that’s nonsense”—now it’s morning, the hangover, and none of the high-spirited ridiculous stuff, like the kid who only knows one letter but he knows it very well, can be sustained.

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Escape Room Puzzles

Under each portrait of the members of a three-generation family is a drawer. Place in each drawer the Nintendo gaming system for which that person feels nostalgia.

Arrange a shelf of novels of decadence left-to-right from West to East (assuming Castalia is just west of Sicily).

Find the one study that replicates in a stack of social-science papers with policy implications. The surname of the lead researcher is the combination you need to open the lock.

Links Losers Like

I was interviewed for Outreach, Americoa magazine’s LGBTetc portal, about gay Catholic stuff; this is where my head’s at nowadays.

An oldie but a goodie: bar signs. LET US RISE UP OUT OF OUR SOBER SHELLS/WE SHALL SOAR LIKE DRUNKEN EAGLES. I had this laminated and posted on my apartment wall and let me tell you, bad things happened in that apartment.

The Hangover, by Toulouse-Lautrec, via Wikiart. The praise (??) for Erofeev in the subhed is David Remnick’s.