![]() It’s a far different and more complex impulse than the cruelty that drives Eric Nye. He can’t stop it as along as he is drinking and he engages in it even as he knows he is being cruel, that his cruelty is destroying women he sometimes genuinely cares about, and that his cruelty is destroying him, too. That is what makes this novel so compelling – that viciousness. He is essentially the same person throughout the book – he just stops abusing substances that limit his capacity to control the roiling viciousness that fills his heart. Really, it’s a dank tale of a miserable man who meets a terrible person and even when he sobers up and finds his past behavior upsetting, he’s still the miserable man at at his core. And there is very little in this book that harks back to the cocaine-fueled New York of the 1980s. The woman who wrecks his shit isn’t a slip of a girl who engaged in an adolescent-twisted form of feminine wiles because she was a victim of paternal predation. The narrator isn’t an earnest but mentally unbalanced kid yearning for a world where he fits in. The back blurb of this book makes it sound a lot more lively and derivative than it really is, referencing Holden Caulfield and Lolita ravaging each other in McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. In fact, the entirety of the book is itself an act of revenge against the woman who puts the protagonist in his place, which doesn’t speak to a real transformation. ![]() The unnamed protagonist eventually sobers up and feels some regret at the way he behaved but at the end his transformation isn’t as clear cut to me as others. He accepts a transfer to an American branch in the Midwest and finds himself besotted with a lovely woman who is as much a sociopath as he is. The anti-hero of Diary of an Oxygen Thief is a drunken sociopath who works for a British advertising agency. You can read the entirety of my verbose analysis over on OTC, but for now, here's a snippet: I had a usual "entirely too long for sane readers" discussion about this book, alongside The Deep Whatsis by Peter Mattei over on OTC, which is where there "Eric Nye" in this discussion comes from.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |