Honeymooners: Denouement

Finished Honeymooners today. As I may have guessed, it continued to devolve and crash and burn, and then it was done. One of my favorite parts was when Alice Ann poured ketchup all over her virginal white “second honeymoon” dress.

I can’t really decide if I liked it. I imagine it would have been really good, but while I was plodding down the back stretch I kept getting the feeling that the writing was a little stale. This is the novel it took Kinder upwards of twenty years to write, and I think it shows. The kind of life he writes about in this book, and sometimes he does it very well, is fast-paced but directionless, just like the novel itself. It somehow seems incongruous that a writer should slave away at that kind of book for so long. I know it’s a bit hackneyed, but this kind of writing fades real quick, like a posed smile.

Speaking of hackneyed, I thought the ketchup v. wedding dress scene was a little much, and maybe so was the conversation about the Old Goat in the moon. But this type of thing is easy to pick out from  such a novel and poke at, and I don’t think it’s that interesting.

In other news, I wrote a piece of flash fiction yesterday to submit to Weave Magazine. Today I napped.

Honeymooners: The Real Fucked Up Shit Begins

The Honeymooners are, 150 pages later, still assholes.

I read pretty heavily yesterday and the day before, so I’m about three-quarters through Kinder’s book. Although I probably should have seen this coming, it’s been interesting to see the characters of Kinder and Carver continue to spiral inexorably into a deeper and deeper pile of shit for the last three hundred pages. At first, I thought their infidelities and drunkenness would be their major flaws, mined slowly but surely throughout the book for material. It turns out that by a little more than halfway through the book Kinder and his characters are all sick of judging one another for drinking too much and fucking any vaguely warm flesh, and it becomes like white noise in the background.

At the beginning of the book there was a couple mentions that Ralph and Jim were desirous of fame, of huge and towering success, but at the time they were so far from the possibility that I ignored it. I’d forgotten that Kinder had twenty years to work with. Eventually Ralph, the Carver character, gets his first book of stories published, and so precipitates a chain of anger and malice that makes for very good reading.

The extent of Jim’s jealously of Ralph is astonishing, and for him the solution is the needle, lie to, and abuse Ralph in every way he can. This of course is after he married Ralph’s former mistress. Ralph falls apart big time not to long after this. He loses everything and is drinking vodka 24/7 in a seedy motel room; eventually he calls Jim for help. He’s at the end of his rope. Jim responds that he’ll throw a party for Ralph’s birthday, and that he should come stay with him. Jim has recently published a book, so I figured this was a good sign.

Jim turns the party into a coming out fest for his book. He makes Ralph a cake with a file buried inside, so that he can break out of jail when they catch up with his debts, but assures him he won’t have time to get out before at least one “buggery.” He even arranges to have Ralph’s estranged wife show up and let him know he has a court date in the morning.

That’s some real fucked-up shit.

Honeymooners: The Drunks

On Friday I bought Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale from the Pitt Book Center. I didn’t have a piece of mail to verify my address to the Carnegie Library, and I don’t think I’m allowed to rent from Hillman anymore, and I had been lamentably without a book for almost a week.

Honeymooners was written by Chuck Kinder, former director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Creative Writing department, until he had a triple by-pass a few years ago and stepped aside, or took a medical leave, or something. Published in 2001, he’d worked on it for something like 20 years. The book, and Kinder, were the basis for Grady Tripp and his novel in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. The main characters, apparently, are based on Kinder and his Stanford-era buddy Raymond Carver.

I’m about a hundred pages in, and as it is now it seems to be a novel about a couple of dirtbag writers going about getting drunk and tearing their lives apart. In honor of this topic and the author, I read a good forty pages yesterday ripped out of my gourd. This morning, when I first cracked the book, I remembered that where I’d left off, Ralph Crawford/Raymond Carver was drying out at an upscale clinic. Which I thought was kind of funny.

While the plot itself hasn’t really gotten me by the balls, there’s definitely some stuff that piques my interest. First off, Kinder cares very little about making his dialogue stand out for easy reading. The occasional em dash and consistent changes of narrative perspective are his biggest clues, and he expects the reader to be able to follow conversations with minimal direction from him.

I’ve gotten complaints about my dialogue before, and I’ve even more structured than he is, so it was nice to see. But I do like to put dialogue in the middle of sentences and I hate “he said” “she said” and the like — they make me uncomfortable.

He also includes in the dialogue these incredibly irritating and repetitious verbal tics, like constant references by characters to the other as “Jim old dog” or “Ralph old dog.” This isn’t beautiful writing in the least but it could very well be accurate. There’s a section I recently wrote — I’ve been writing entirely in monologue and dialogue this summer, for some reason — in which my character obsessively begins sentences with the word “but.” I happen to find it somewhat ugly to read, but it’s “accurate” to this character.

If Alice reads this, she will be familiar with my Gabriel Garcia Marquez paradox, which is applicable here I believe. In Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Garcia Marquez writes about some incredibly depraved things, most notably that the narrator is purchasing himself a virgin prostitute for himself on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. And yet it is still an incredibly beautiful novella. The ability to write about horrendous things and make the reader feel ok with those things simply by the beauty with which they’re described, that’s a feat. And I think I want to be there, as a writer, I think that’s a very fruitful area if it can be done right.