The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll – Sex and Drugs and … Basketball

The Basketball Diaries (1978) by Jim Carroll is one of those interesting little oddities that you stumble on occasionally.
Jim Carroll was a basketball player, a poet, an author, a musician… just an all around talented guy. He was also a heroin addict supporting his habit through theft and prostitution and any other available means. And the thing is, in this diary of his he describes the way he was living his life as a young tough deeply involved in the drug culture of New York. This is not exactly a bildungsroman because it doesn’t focus on the psychological and moral growth of the young protagonist.
At one point Carroll makes an offhand remark about getting things backwards. He was already smoking pot and started using heroin because he thought that was less addictive. That is certainly not something you should get mixed up, but it just goes to show that when it comes to information you should always consider the source.
What strikes me about the whole diary is the unapologetic narrative voice, the complete and total lack of apologetic excuses. Whatever the influences, whatever the choices, there seems to have been no point at which Carroll felt the need to blame society, his mother, his friends. I have to say I like that. As far as accountability goes, Carroll takes his share and seem to be smart enough to know that he has really very little to gain from telling a woeful tale. There’s a lack of sentimentality to all this that makes it interesting. He talks about the other basketball players that have gone astray in similar ways and wound up dead or in prison, but these are just tales of people he knows, people who made their own choices for whatever reasons.
The other thing about this diary that makes it interesting is the literary quality of it. For someone who scans through a lot of text it is obvious that there is real talent here, displayed at a very young age. I’ve read diaries before, some written by authors as a kind of autobiographical reconstruction of their private history and there is always pretense, a sense that much has been revised and edited, or at least cleaned up for consumption. The diary becomes a device that way, a vehicle for the author, something to perpetuate the image they want to project, constructing a persona. Of course there is no such as objective truth in a diary, either, though it is a popular conceit.
The second an author decides to let others into what should theoretically be private musings and starts thinking of a potential audience the basic premise for the text written alters. It may be self-censorship, it may be fear, but it is still a subtle tweaking of the text that can go either way. Carroll manages to sound sincere and doesn’t try to make himself look better than he is. He tells stories of theft and drug dealing, prostitution and deception as ways and means. He talks about how he and other players rob the locker rooms of the basketball teams they play and – amazingly – he writes about playing, and winning, while high on every drug known to man. That part really confounds me. We’re not talking performance enhancing drugs here, but all sorts. And they still manage to win.
It is actually even more interesting to read something like this in this day of blogging. There’s a an awful lot of private musings spread publicly these days and not a lot of it considers that you should try to entertain, if nothing else.
Carroll is interesting, entertaining and deceptively charming in all his callous revelry. That does not mean you would have wanted to live next to the guy, or that he is in any way a model citizen. The Basketball Diaries is also a document of sorts, of a specific time and a specific place, and as such it is well worth reading.

Mule

No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy at his terse best

No Country for Old Men (2005) by Cormac McCarthy stars off in medias res.

When Llwewllyn Moss is out hunting antelope near the Rio Grande he stumbles into the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. There is one man still barely alive who asks Moss for water. Moss does not have any. He searches the vehicles at the scene and finds heroin in one of them and a whole armoury’s worth of weapons. Off on a hill a little way away there is one more man, dead now, sitting there with a case full of money. Moss takes the money and goes back to his wife Carla Jean. During the night he suddenly gets an attack of conscience and thinks of the dying man’s request for water. He goes back to the site of the drug deal. That’s where things start going pear-shaped.

There are three main players in this novel. Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, also a veteran, but from a different war (World War II) and Anton Chigurh, a hitman.

Each of these men represent a different philosophical standpoint and a different set of values. Moss is a practical tactician, a man who has served in Vietnam as a sniper and he is opportunistic enough to take the drug money when he finds it, knowing all the while that it might end up being a very bad decision. Ed Tom, the Sheriff, has the perspective of a man that lived through the second world war and did reprehensible things during combat that still haunt him. He has seen the direction of the development of society and he finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile what he remembers from his youth with the reality he finds himself living in. His saving grace seems to be the undying love between him and his wife, that is where he finds his redemption and balm. Chigurh is a consummate sociopath, which means he has a deeply philosophical streak that does not stop him in the least from deciding a man’s fate (or a woman’s, for that matter) with a coin toss. There is no sense that he has a conscience in a conventional sense, but he has a code of conduct in a manner of speaking. Once he has accepted an assignment, there is nothing he won’t do to finish the job.

There are also levels of language in this triptych that reflect and enhance what goes on in the chain of events. The passages concerning Moss and Chigurh are mostly coolly descriptive and given in the third person. Dialogue is spare and very focused. McCarthy has an ear for the dialect of the Texas-region and shows a blatant disregard for punctuation and typical dialogue format that gives a heightened feeling of immediacy. The way the action is described makes this bare bones approach unrelenting and somehow makes the bloody violence of it worse.

I’ll give an example. This is the description of Moss trying to outrun pursuers in the desert.

“It was a long trek and he was still some two hundred yards from the river when he heard the truck. A raw gray light was breaking over the hills. When he looked back he could see the dust against the new skyline. Still the better part of a mile away. In the dawn quiet the sound of it no more sinister than a boat on a lake. Then he heard it downshift. He pulled the .45 from his belt so that he wouldn’t lose it and set out at a dead run. When he looked back again it had closed a good part of the distance.” (McCarthy, p. 31).

Chigurh brings all those horror movie Terminator machine killers to mind in his focus. He just keeps coming, no matter how his victims plead or fight back.

Sheriff Bell is given a reflective, almost poetic first person voice that talks calmly to the reader about his experiences and impressions.
This is what Bell’s voice sounds like;

“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how an tell the truth. He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not having to decide who you were. And if you done something wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Dont haul stuff around with you. I guess that all sounds pretty simple today. Even to me. All the more reason to think about it. He didn’t say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say.” (McCarthy, p. 249).

These literary techniques are dovetailed into each other seamlessly and with spare grace.

I reflected on quality of relentlessness in McCarthy’s novels The Road and Blood Meridian as well, the way lean, descriptive prose creates a forward momentum within the text itself as well as for me as a reader. It is probably a matter of me being unusually susceptible to this particular style, but for some reason the very sparseness makes the violence more gruesome for me personally, letting me use my imagination to fill in all that has not been said. I can look at what McCarthy does and take a step back and wonder how it is even possible that the effect can be as devastating as it is. It is a clear case of less being more.

The title for this novel is borrowed from William Butler Yeats poem ”Sailing to Byzanthium”, and there is some kind of weird gegenshein effect between the poem in lines like old men being like “a tattered coat upon a stick” in relation to the description of the old man Sheriff Bell visits and tells of his exploits in WWII.

Lean and terse though the prose might be, that does not mean it is in any way simple, or simplistic. There is no real nostalgia, no moral high ground, no easy solutions. I like the fact that something this terse can pack such a considerable punch and it really does something spectacular for those of us who can stand it.

Mule

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) is a comedy about death, if you can believe that sort of thing. The main character who gives voice to the action is a college professor by the name Jack Gladney who has made a name for himself in the academic world in the very unusual field of Hitler studies. Jack has a few failed marriages behind him, and four children: Heinrich, Denise, Steffie and Wilder. His current wife Babette is described as suffering from some vague medical condition, that puts you in mind of Alzheimer’s.

In the beginning of the novel the whole family has to evacuate their house due to an “airborne toxic event”, a non descript cloud of foulness that suddenly takes everyone out of their humdrum routine existence and turns the citizens into refugees in their own country, an experience that is described as surreal, harrowing and kind of funny.

Once the toxic event is under control and people return to their homes, Jack begins to worry more about Babette and he manages to find out that she is taking an experimental drug called Dylar. Much of the action of the second part of the novel rests on this drug, what it is supposed to cure and what Babette has had to do to be accepted in the study that provides the drug. I’m not going to give it away here, but let’s just say it has some far reaching and absurd ramifications.

This is one of those novel’s that have gained the dubious soubriquet post-modern fiction. And if you have read any Paul Auster you know what that means. A meandering tale, vague and a bit pointless, like life itself, that isn’t afraid of the lacunae and leaving you hanging without answers. At the same time it is sharp in its observation of detail. It is rich in witty dialogue and has lots of mad ideas. The structure is more a triptych than a straight forwards novel with beginning, middle and end. It is not a morality tale.

Sometimes with postmodern fiction it is easier defining what it is not… But it is enjoyable, witty, dark and has a deep underpinning of humanism in its true sense. DeLillo pokes fun at consumerism, false intellectualism and the family unit. Several of Jack’s ex-wives have worked in intelligence, making a career of lies and deceit. DeLillo makes fun of conspiracy theories and he makes fun of fear.

But at the same time he is caustic and observant when it comes to human behaviour. Like some other postmodern authors you get the sense that in observing the minutiae, the tiniest details of human behaviour, we stand a better chance of making sense of things than if we try to look at the bigger picture. “Il n’y a pas de hors texte” as Derrida put it. There is nothing outside the text. Stop trying to act like this is reality… Or something like that.

Here’s a little sample of the dry humour:

“I’d like to lose interest in myself, I told Murray. ‘Is there any chance of that happening?’

None. Better men have tried.” (DeLillo, p. 152)

That pretty much says it all as far as postmodernism and the subject of the self goes.

I enjoy DeLillo in that somewhat disjointed way you enjoy postmodern fiction. Trying to explain what it is about and why you like it is always a little tricky because it has to do with a general reshuffling of categories. But if you don’t mind not getting all the answers and find the mind set appealing this is one of the good ones.

Mule.