about Richard Yates’ “Disturbing the Peace”

Richard Yates debuted in 1961 with Revolutionary Road. Critics would say that was his peak, although his short stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and his fourth novel, The Easter Parade (1976), both drew high praise—much of it posthumously.

I first read The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2004), then The Easter Parade, and then Revolutionary Road. I loved it all and thought some of his short stories equaled Revolutionary Road. But I had been wanting more, so I started with Disturbing the Peace, published in 1975.

Disturbing the Peace dramatizes a suburban middle-class man’s breakdown.

John Wilder works in advertising sales for a magazine. He drinks a lot—too much—and early in the novel finds himself locked in a psychiatric ward over the long Labor Day weekend—a traumatizing experience. He tries to resume life after his release while also regularly visiting a psychiatrist and attending AA meetings. But alcohol abuse soon resumes its place in his life, and AA meetings become cover for frequent rendezvous with his mistress and escapes from his wife and son. He continues drinking even while on powerful prescription medication.

Critics did not care for the novel, and I had my doubts in the first quarter of it or so, but I read on and was rewarded. (I read the rest of Yates's works after this.)

My favorite excerpt from Disturbing the Peace comes after Wilder has reestablished his life but starts spending most evenings drinking and sleeping with his mistress across town. After some months, Wilder’s neglected wife forces him to spend an evening with her in a coffee shop, where she breaks the news that the school guidance counselor has singled out their son.

“He said—oh, John, he said Tommy’s emotionally disturbed and he thinks we ought to have him see a psychiatrist. Right away.”

Wilder had learned once, in some elementary science course either at Grace Church or at Yale, that the reason for a retractable scrotum in all male mammals is to protect the reproductory organs in hazardous or distressful situations: sharp blades of jungle grass, say, will brush against a running animal’s thighs, and the testicles will automatically withdraw to the base of the trunk. He wasn’t sure if he had it right—did he have anything right that he’d ever learned in school?—but the basic idea seemed sound, and in any case it was happening to him now: his balls were rising, right there in the coffee shop.

Note: I read a Delta trade paperback reissue I bought on Amazon. It had a couple of minor typos and flaws but was fine.

something about the David Sedaris book “Calypso”

Calypso is one of many David Sedaris books I read last year. The first books I read were assembled essays and maintained a kind of consistency. But Calypso might have been the most thematic collection. The 21 essays trend toward Sedaris’s family and aging. The book was published in May 2018, and Sedaris has now reached his 60s.

The prose, as always, is fresh and funny. Sedaris tells stories (all semi-autobiographical), and he masterfully balances his thorny wit and criticisms with bits of cottony poignancy.

One of my favorite parts is in “The Silent Treatment.” Sedaris is telling a story about how, at some point in his pre-teen years, he supposedly started flushing empty toilet paper rolls just to be a lil' bastard. His dad, not knowing David was the cause, would then have to plunge or, failing that, pull the toilet and unclog the drainpipe by hand. But dad eventually realizes David is the culprit.

“You are going to reach down into this pipe and pick out that cardboard roll,” my father said. “Then you are never going to flush anything but toilet paper down this toilet again.”

As I backed away, he pounced. Then he wrestled me to the floor, grabbed my hand, and forced it deep into what amounted to my family’s asshole.

And there it was been ever since, sorting through our various shit. It’s like I froze in that moment: with the same interests as that eleven-year-old boy, the same maturity level, the same haircut. The same glasses, even.

“Why Aren’t You Laughing” also hits as Sedaris writes about his mother, who died of cancer in her 60s, and her drinking.

Maybe ours wasn’t the house I’d have chosen had I been in charge of things. It wasn’t as clean as I’d have liked. From the outside, it wasn’t remarkable. We had no view, but still it was the place I held in mind, and proudly, when I thought, Home. It had been a living organism, but by the time I hit my late twenties, it was rotting, a dead tooth in a row of seemingly healthy ones. When I was eleven, my father planted a line of olive bushes in front of the house. They were waist-high and formed a kind of fence. By the mid-eighties they were so overgrown that pedestrians had to quit the sidewalk and take to the street instead. People with trash to drop waited until they reached our yard to drop it, figuring the high grass would cover whatever beer can or plastic bag of dog shit they needed to discard. It was like the Adams Family house, which would have been fine had it still been merry, but it wasn’t anymore. Our mother became the living ghost that haunted it, gaunt now and rattling ice cubes instead of chains.

And then Sedaris writes about his dad, a widower, looking back on his wife’s condition.

“Do you think it was my fault that she drank?” my father asked not long ago. It’s the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It’s almost laughable, this insistence on reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children—her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.

I think I was a little stunned by the parts related to his sister Tiffany’s suicide in 2013.

Note: Most of these essays were previously published in magazines.

 

about seeing herself

She stood in front of the mirror, turned the wineglass upside down, and watched the throat muscles work. Her posture and body spoke quiet—her face said trust, her eyes told of a search. But when she sees this reflection, she heard only the thirst.

 

 

something about "A Drinking Life" by Pete Hamill

A Drinking Life is a memoir by Pete Hamill, a New York-based columnist, journalist, and author featured in publications like the New York Post and The New York Daily News. I expected a deep-dive into alcoholism, but Hamill was never your bottoming-out alcoholic. Drinking, it appears, was something he did while killing time socializing in bars; it was not a preoccupation. This memoir, published in 1995, was born 20 years after his last drink. Hamill came to view alcohol as destructive and decided to quit. His sobriety does not sound like much of a struggle, which explains why addiction and destruction do not seem to be central themes in the arguably mis-titled A Drinking Life. Hamill's life, as relayed by the author, sounds mostly fine—so I found this a little dull and want to say only that there are far more interesting and compelling memoirs out there.

something about "I Should Be Dead: My Life Surviving Politics, TV, and Addiction" by Bob Beckel

Bob Beckel's long political career included holding office as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Carter Administration and managing Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. In the years since, he has gained a little more recognizability through his frequent appearances as a political analyst on the news networks. The confessional I Should Be Dead relays some difficult sequences from Beckel's youth and then efficiently details his professional life and recovery. His father's alcoholism is a defining phenomenon, and since childhood Beckel has lived his life as a survivor. Even though it is the book's selling point, Beckel's own debauchery does not occupy a lot of time in the narrative. The man was a functional addict, so you read about campaigns, and now and again Beckel reminds you that this narrator was working with generous amounts of cocaine and alcohol in his bloodstream. It is a painfully personal tale, but Beckel forgoes emotional depth and tells it with a genial directness that makes for an easy read.


Note: I was hoping for more of a political memoir.

"Smashed"

I can't be sober and be with you-