The amount of drinking in the book was truly amazing. Reading
about all the boozing and barhopping got kind of old. I think
it was Curt who mentioned all the AA stuff in A Ticket to the
Boneyard, and said it was tiresome. Well, in my experience,
sober alcoholics in AA can be pretty obsessive about the
whole thing. They replace their obsession with drinking with
their obsession with meetings in church basements, so I think
Block is just being true to Scudder's character when he
includes that stuff in the story. God knows there's a lot of
drinking that goes on in PI novels, but it's often just there
as window dressing to make the story seem hard boiled and the
characters seem tough. I think Block's depiction of Scudder
might be the most realistic depiction of an alcoholic in
crime fiction.
On Nov 12, 2007 9:49 PM, Stephen Burridge <
stephen.burridge@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I just read this one last week myself. It was my
third Scudder novel,
> after "Hope To Die" and "A Dance At The
Slaughterhouse", and I think
> the best of the three. I kind of liked the treatment
of the drinking.
> These guys are heroically hard drinkers, but it
obviously isn't
> sustainable, and they screw up in various large and
small ways. I
> don't know where this story fits into the narrative
of Scudder's
> eventual decision to get sober, but there seem to be
signs that things
> are getting out of control. And I thought the
retrospective
> narration, '70s as recalled from the '80s, was very
well done, and
> interesting to read in 2007. It also allowed quite
naturally for the
> "what happened to the characters afterwards" sort of
coda at the end.
>
> If/when I read another of these novels, it will
probably be one of the
> earlier ones. I think the flawed, drinking Scudder
makes an
> interesting protagonist.
>
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