Cannonball - Book 16

The Night of the Gun by David Carr

Another memoir.  I know.  I have been going memoir crazy.  This one is no story-of-a-fun-loving-Mormon-girl-trying-to-make-it-on-her-own-in-New-York-City though.  This one has darkness in its heart.  It has intravenous drug use and multiple arrests and domestic violence and and babies in harms way and all kinds of other nightmarish things.  In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, frequently quoted by my father: "Bad craziness".

This is not the kind of thing I would normally pick up, as I am someone who tries to avoid bad craziness in all it's many forms.  But the guy lived to write about it, so I knew it wouldn't end to badly, and when you are reading two books a week for a whole year sometimes you need to branch out a bit.  Life can't be all pop culture criticism and murder mysteries all the time, unfortunately.  And drug addiction kind of fascinates me. 

The Night of the Gun offers a twist on the traditional addiction memoir formula.  Carr did not just write down his memories of being an cocaine addict and alcoholic, in part because, unsurprisingly. he actually remembers very little.   Instead he uses his skills as a reporter (he writes for the New York Times now) to thoroughly investigate and document that time of his life.   He goes through government documents and police reports, newspaper clippings (mostly of his own writing), and conducts interviews on video with anyone he could find who knew him while he was an addict.  It's an interesting premise, with pretty significant strengths and weaknesses. 

I admire Carr's courage.  It would not have been easy to listen to his old friends recount stories of what an destructive asshole he was.  (And he really was one.  He not only does drugs, but deals, and fights, and beats his girlfriends, and neglects his children.  He was scum, basically.)  And he is incredibly honest about all of it, even the stuff that makes him look really bad.  He writes, for the most part, with humour and without sentiment (except when he is talking about his family, at which point he becomes downright sappy) so that the book, even in its most unpleasant moments, is incredibly readable. 

Despite all of that, I am not sure whether I really liked the book or not.  For a while after I finished it I couldn't really figure out what it was that had rubbed me a little bit the wrong way, until I listened to a discussion about the book on Slate's Audio Book Club*.  They made the point that, while Carr does a great job getting the facts of his story straight, the book is pretty lacking in any actual insight about his experiences.  The discusses his addiction like it is just a fact of life, a given, and does provide much information about how he got there in the first place.  The describes, or rather relates his ex-girlfriends' descriptions, of the domestic abuse he committed, but never delves into why he did it, other than the fact that he was drunk or high at the time.  It is a little irritating, to spend so much time reading about Carr and then to realize how little of himself he has actually revealed. 

The second half drags a little bit.  Eventually Carr gets sober, becomes a single parent to his twin daughters, gets back into journalism and becomes very successful, and gets married.  It is touching certainly, but Carr does not write about it as compellingly as he does the coke-fueled trips on private planes and the drug deals nearly-gone-wrong.  It was nice, during the insanity and misery of the book's first half, to know that second half was there though.  I don't know if I could have stuck it out through all the bad craziness without that reassurance.


Page count: 400
Up next: With Love and Squalor edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller



*Slate does some kind of the best podcasting around, by the way.  Top notch.  And there are a ton of them.