Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (review)

When you carry around a book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City you end up having to explain yourself a lot. I found myself apologizing for the unseemly title to the dentist, to strangers on the subway, to my mother. I started to wonder why Nick Flynn, a "successful" poet (though this is something of an oxymoron) who knows the power of words, chose this title for his book.

ABNISC is the story of Flynn's arduous life: his gypsy childhood, his transition from neglected boy to rebellious teenager, his evolution from one who dabbles in drugs to one who dabbles in publishing. I use the acronym because while reading ABNISC, I couldn't help but think of another acronym-worthy coming-of-age memoir, Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. (Eggers proclaimed the book to be fiction, but many read it as a truthful account of his parents' deaths and the years he spent raising his younger brother.) Much like AHWOSG, the real story in Flynn's memoir involves the loss of both of his parents: his mother to suicide and his father to drink, delusion and vagrancy.

Flynn attempts to lessen the melodrama of these events by telling his story in the flat, almost snide tone of a Samuel Beckett play (it's no coincidence that the author chose an epigraph from Beckett's Endgame to start the book). In some ways this works to the story's advantage. The story is broken up into quick scenes—both imagined and recollected—giving the book a dreamy, fragmented feel. This disjointedness pushes the reader from one episode in Flynn's life to the next in much the same way that a poet uses enjambment to move the reader from line to line.

But this narrative and psychic distance keep the reader at arm's length. As is the case with so many current memoirs, we are asked not to listen, observe and understand but to affirm: Isn't this terrible? Flynn's life, for the most part, is terrible. But we would sympathize more if the narrator sounded less like a teenager thumbing his nose at the reader.

The most interesting part of the book is Flynn's father's ardent belief that he's really a writer. He's waiting to hear from Little, Brown and has framed letters from editors at Viking kindly rejecting his novel. Flynn's father denies his situation and refuses to admit that to really be a writer one must, in fact, write. In light of Flynn's own literary ambitions, these are the most heart-wrenching scenes in the book. This alone could have (and, perhaps, should have) been the core of ABNISC, but Flynn chose instead to bring in every event and circumstance so that it reads more like a kitchen-sink autobiography than a distilled retelling of one aspect of a life.

One might also assume that because Flynn is a poet the language would be as important as the story itself. At first Flynn's prose seems fresh. Each sentence has its own off-kilter rhythm: "Until then we rented rooms, we rented houses, we crashed with co-workers, with friends, each a rathole, a sty, each a step down." But the overabundance of fragments and repetitive sentence structure gets tiresome. Flynn reuses the same techniques, such as sentence fragments and the look-how-many-words-I-can-string-together adjectival phrase. Strangely enough, Flynn also takes to sloppy metaphors, such as likening himself to a tree learning to swallow barbed wire, which makes no sense.

Ultimately ABNISC comes off feeling more concocted than divulged. Like the book's title, most of what is told feels as if it's been included not because it has been reflected upon and is worthy of further thought but for shock value; this makes even the most moving passages come off...