Update!
So last week at this time I was relaxing at a sparkling pool located underneath thousand + year old boulders in warm Carefree, Arizona. I was pampered, I was happy, and guess what ... I was reading. I had just finished the first book, A Game of Thrones, of the "A Song of Fire and Ice" series by George R.R. Martin, when I dove into a totally different book called Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches.
Let me explain my reading pattern to you. Whenever I read books in a series I tend to get bored after one or two of them (sometimes three), so I break up the series by reading a random book in between. So after finishing A Game of Thrones I dove into a book that gave me a quick respite from the heavy series. Now here's the thing. I absolutely love the HBO show "A Game of Thrones" and I was really excited to read the books, because not only does the show do a very good job of following the book plots (so far anyway), but the books give you the details and the explanations that, I for one, desperately wanted during the show. They're action packed and marvelous, and I finished the first one and reluctantly stuck to my pattern and picked up NOT the second book in the series (which I'm reading now), but a book recommended to me by Scott.
I bought Me and the Devil quite a while ago and before I had a chance to read it Scott found it interesting and asked if he could read it first. Of course I let him. His opinion of the book is that he enjoyed the majority of it, but hated the ending. My reaction was I kind of hated the whole thing, but I was intrigued enough to get through it. Both of us agreed that the author sometimes comes off as incredibly pretentious because his main character "Nick" is basically a somewhat twisted fictional personal version of himself. Is it an autobiography, a memoir? No, it's fiction ... but it definitely takes a lot of real life pages from the real life author of the book, Nick Tosches. In fact, his book is praised heavily by Keith Richards and even Johnny Depp. Do you know why they praise it so much? Well, my guess is because in real life they're friends with Nick Tosches, and both of them are mentioned in the book and are friends with the character "Nick." Are you following me? It's perplexing isn't it? This weird twisted semi-reality dark life of a semi-real fictional person. Uh-huh.
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| This is the real Nick Tosches |
We continue. There's a lot of sex and violence in this book, and it is all from a male's perspective. It's kinky, uncomfortable sex. There's whipping and nylons and stiletto shoes. There's porn and clear plastic raincoats. For those of you who liked the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, this book may not be for you. Unlike the Fifty Shades trilogy, the sex in this book is not meant to turn you on, but rather it's meant to make you queasy, uncomfortable, and put off. The sex in this book makes you flinch. It's not that the sex is overtly strange, it's just the way in which the main character describes it. He's an unhappy man, and sex does not bring him happiness but it does bring him peace. Those are two very different things. The sex in this book is dark and entirely without eroticism. It's blunt and it chafes. He doesn't want to feel good having sex, he wants to dominate to get a release deeper than just ejaculation. He wants sex to change him into something better, newer, and younger.
Let's veer away from the sex for a second. The main character, Nick, is indeed an author who doesn't write much anymore. He's a horrible alcoholic and we hear his views on how Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a waste of his time, as most of the people there (in his opinion) just like to hear themselves talk and in turn they drive him to drink more ... not stop. This Nick is old - I can't remember if we ever find out his exact age - but he's in his 50s or 60s which to him is old. He feels old. He has a vast contempt for all mankind, particularly the new generation of New Yorkers whom he sees as killing his old New York with their modern architecture and snarky ways. He hates Whole Foods (yeah, that's a grocery store). He's a food snob. We hear many descriptions of the food he likes to cook and eat, and he has a disdain for people who actually have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to food, but just pretend to be knowledgeable and picky to be cool. As I've mentioned frequently, this Nick wants to feel young, he wants to regain his youth, and so to do this he has sex with many young women and he bites them and drinks blood from their thighs. This blood lust he has basically turns him crazy, but it also turns him sober, and we are stuck in his inner monologue and we see the world through his disdainful personality.
He drinks blood and doesn't drink booze. He reflects on how alcoholics are good liars, deceivers, and how if he were drinking it would be easier for him to say the things he so desperately wants to say at points throughout his mid-life crisis journey. He at one point feels the need to ask one of his young lovers about a pamphlet he found in her book bag. He reflects that "If I were drinking ... I would have no trouble asking her outright. Drinking did that. It washed away all the halting doubts, all the reservations, all the cowardices that beset and prevented communication. Liquor let the words flow freely." He then continues to state that liquor lets the words flow freely in the time it takes to raise or set down a glass, but all those words are mixes of lies and truth.
You see "Alkies are the most ingenious and expertly devious people in the world. The simple truth is that they never apply these qualities to anything worth a damn, and, worse, can't even tell when these ingrained traits are working independently of them, and against them." I think anyone who's ever known an alcoholic in their lives, or who has ever been one, will find the words of Nick to be painfully honest and truthful and in a way, relieving. It's a relief to hear the words of an alcoholic (even a fictional/semi-fictional one) that explain what makes up an alcoholic. Think about it. How often have you looked at a loved one who drank too much and tried to figure out why they are the way they are? Alcoholics are ingeniously devious and ingenious. And the problem is they can't control it. Bingo. The words in this book do sometimes hit you strongly, and it was this hook that kept me reading through the whole thing.
Here's the problem with the character of Nick. The whole book HAS NO PLOT! There's nothing! There's really no climax, no rising or falling action, NOTHING about good writing that I teach my kids. Nothing. It's just him bumbling through life, and even when disaster strikes ... NOTHING HAPPENS. EVER. The biggest consequence he faces is ending up in the hospital at one point, nothing new to an alcoholic, where he hears the same stupid reprimand that if he keeps drinking he'll probably die. It takes a lot to kill an alcoholic, folks ... they're like cockroaches. To try and stop drinking, to regain a sense of youthfulness that he sought out, he possessed women like one would possess alcohol. He found troubled young girls and he drank their blood, and nothing really happens because the blood is just another form of addiction. Booze traded out for blood. Whoop-dee-do. In the end he realizes this and pushes it all away. Blood wasn't giving him serenity and rebirth, it wasn't giving him anything. "You can lie to yourself, but you can't lie to all of yourself."
Nick says it perfectly. "I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them." He's a despicable man, who doesn't beg sympathy from his readers. He pushes away those close to him before they hurt him, and he's searching for a cure to his misery that doesn't exist. Since he was a young boy he had the seeds of fear of abandonment sown in him, and he has never truly been able to see its dominion over him. This being said, he used booze to soothe his wounds, and he drove away any woman who loved him - it "was" his way. He thought that by consuming youthful blood from beautiful women he was regenerating - becoming younger, getting better sight, having no hunger pains for alcohol. He thought he was rising from the ashes. In the end he realizes his folly. "In driving away love and intimacy - drunkenness and sex took their place - I had inflicted on myself and perpetuated and nourished my own fear. I lived in self-imposed abandonment." He hated people, he hated himself, he hated everything, and all he had to prove he was worth something was a case of books he had written long ago. This book, Me and the Devil, makes me passionate - passionately irritated. But I've always told my students and my classmates and my professors etc. etc. that if a book can make you feel anything at all, then it's worth reading.
I am not always the happiest person in the world, and I sometimes find myself repeating Nick's idea that I'm interested in people, but I don't necessarily like them. This is all my fault. Only I can pull myself out of the self-inflicted anthropophobia (fear of people) that I've inflicted on myself, but it'll be a long road to recovery. I'm stubborn. That being said my personal road to recovery won't involve alcoholism, random scary sex, nor drinking blood. How does this semi-fictional Nick end up in the end? Read the book to find out. It will intrigue you, it will pull you along, but be warned, this book is about 100 pages too long and at times you'll get sick of his weird self-annihilation and overly pretentious and difficult words. His vocabulary is condescending, his views on women are condescending, and whatever "peace" he finds still doesn't interest me, I'd rather have seen him really annihilated in the book for the crap he pulled and got away with - but that's the bitch in me. He shocks you, he's repulses you, he amuses you, but is he a good read ... let me know your opinions.
We'll end with a quote from close to the ending of the book. "People told me that I should be careful, that I should not burn my bridges behind me. I told them all the same thing, which was the truth: I've always loved the smell of gasoline."
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