Drug world ghosts hard to interpret
By Floyd Skloot |
April 11, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
BY the time he was 30, the British writer Jon McGregor already had two novels under his belt, both nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
Starting with "If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things" (2002), McGregor's precocious, attention-grabbing early work was characterized by structural devices meant to dislocate a reader's expectations: varied perspectives and voices, shifting time sequences, fractured narratives, misdirection, and disrupted sentences and paragraphs.
McGregor wrote about the intrusion of shock, violence and disorder in the lives of ordinary, often settled, self-absorbed people, so there was symmetry between his fragmented style and vision.
"Even the Dogs," McGregor's third novel, continues his experiments with devices. The book is narrated by a group of urban ghosts, victims of drug overdoses who look on as someone they know, Robert Radcliffe, is found dead in his shabby apartment.
Other friends, family members and acquaintances, most of whom were part of Robert's life, come in and out of focus as they move around the city looking for their next fixes and, along with the police and investigators, respond to Robert's death.
As a novel about the consequences of addiction °?-- particularly heroin addiction -- "Even the Dogs" is harrowing. It details the physical, psychological, social and environmental damage, and portrays the all-consuming nature of the life: "Always working and watching and chasing around for a bag of that. The man-hours that go into living like this. Takes some dedication."
Using ghosts as narrators gives the book a haunting overtone. It lends resonance even to a simple observation like "We see things differently now." And it lets McGregor write with a gritty omniscience. The ghosts move fluidly in time, explaining past events while occupying several places at once in the present.
They know what they are talking about and can wait patiently for incidents to unfold, as McGregor reminds us: "We've got all the time in the world to sit and wait now."
But McGregor's devotion to craft comes at a significant cost to a reader's emotional engagement with his characters and story.
His technique intrudes, becomes showy. One of the novel's five chapters is told, for no apparent narrative reason, entirely in paragraphs that do not end with complete sentences or even punctuation marks: "Two of them laid out together on the narrow bed but it weren't never going to be like that. And where was she now. What would she say when he told her. Would she"
Sometimes he uses present tense to deal with present action and past tense to deal with past action, but other times not. Most of the nearly three dozen people in the story are little more than names, with only six or seven given sufficient character and depth to distinguish them. Three dogs are more sharply drawn than most of the humans.
The result of all the literary pyrotechnics, and the way they call attention to the writing itself, is that scenes that should be unbearably emotional °?-- as when Robert is visited by his teenage daughter for the first time in many years and she sees the squalor of his life -- fall flat, because we have no connection with the characters.
The author has imagined a story filled with vital, gripping material, but he is too busy claiming our attention to let us lose ourselves in it.
Starting with "If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things" (2002), McGregor's precocious, attention-grabbing early work was characterized by structural devices meant to dislocate a reader's expectations: varied perspectives and voices, shifting time sequences, fractured narratives, misdirection, and disrupted sentences and paragraphs.
McGregor wrote about the intrusion of shock, violence and disorder in the lives of ordinary, often settled, self-absorbed people, so there was symmetry between his fragmented style and vision.
"Even the Dogs," McGregor's third novel, continues his experiments with devices. The book is narrated by a group of urban ghosts, victims of drug overdoses who look on as someone they know, Robert Radcliffe, is found dead in his shabby apartment.
Other friends, family members and acquaintances, most of whom were part of Robert's life, come in and out of focus as they move around the city looking for their next fixes and, along with the police and investigators, respond to Robert's death.
As a novel about the consequences of addiction °?-- particularly heroin addiction -- "Even the Dogs" is harrowing. It details the physical, psychological, social and environmental damage, and portrays the all-consuming nature of the life: "Always working and watching and chasing around for a bag of that. The man-hours that go into living like this. Takes some dedication."
Using ghosts as narrators gives the book a haunting overtone. It lends resonance even to a simple observation like "We see things differently now." And it lets McGregor write with a gritty omniscience. The ghosts move fluidly in time, explaining past events while occupying several places at once in the present.
They know what they are talking about and can wait patiently for incidents to unfold, as McGregor reminds us: "We've got all the time in the world to sit and wait now."
But McGregor's devotion to craft comes at a significant cost to a reader's emotional engagement with his characters and story.
His technique intrudes, becomes showy. One of the novel's five chapters is told, for no apparent narrative reason, entirely in paragraphs that do not end with complete sentences or even punctuation marks: "Two of them laid out together on the narrow bed but it weren't never going to be like that. And where was she now. What would she say when he told her. Would she"
Sometimes he uses present tense to deal with present action and past tense to deal with past action, but other times not. Most of the nearly three dozen people in the story are little more than names, with only six or seven given sufficient character and depth to distinguish them. Three dogs are more sharply drawn than most of the humans.
The result of all the literary pyrotechnics, and the way they call attention to the writing itself, is that scenes that should be unbearably emotional °?-- as when Robert is visited by his teenage daughter for the first time in many years and she sees the squalor of his life -- fall flat, because we have no connection with the characters.
The author has imagined a story filled with vital, gripping material, but he is too busy claiming our attention to let us lose ourselves in it.
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