I'm in the process of writing up discussion questions for the presentation/discussion tomorrow of Another Bullshit Night... (I've taken to calling it Another Bullshit Presentation, which I thought was just so funny and clever--but it's most likely not as entertaining as it was to me last night at 1:00am).
Much of what we will be discussing is structure, and in what ways the structure of the book mirrors the story itself. This is my second time through the book and once again when I came to page 295, I was startled when Flynn glibly mentions that at this point in his story he's moved to Brooklyn to begin graduate school, "To study poetry."
This study of poetry seems to come out of nowhere. As far as I can tell, he hasn't done much writing. I can imagine that the decision to gloss over this portion of his life was intentional but I don't know that I would have made the same choice. The book is about fathers and sons and Flynn completely glosses over the significance of his choice to become a writer, a poet even, what his father has always claimed to be. ("I was declared--over ten years ago--in Federal Court in Boston as being one thing-a poet!—And that I am—always was and always will be!” (father, p. 321).
Flynn barely delves into his maturation post-Pine Street. He has chosen not to include the reader in his own process of redemption, which I think is unfortunate. I am often bothered by this at the end of memoirs, when the author quickly mentions that after all of the pain expressed in the memoir, they got better. But this is worse in that the book continues after Flynn's redemption. The story continues, he continues to visit his father. This new, redeemed Flynn is present in the end of the book but the reader has no idea how he came to this point.
During this second read I did finally look up Flynn's bio. He is 49, which helps me make some sense of the book. (I suspect that the photo on the cover is an outdated press pic...that or he has aged extremely well, which we can all ask Amy H., my presentation partner, because she met him at AWP last week). Without this biographical information I was confused by the end. Flynn is young and lost and works at a homeless shelter and then, all of a sudden, he is a successful writer with at least one book of poetry to his credit!
I just ordered Flynn's first book of poetry, Some Ether, and am hoping that when it arrives it will help me to fill in some of the blanks.
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4 comments:
i loved so much about the book, but i must agree with your comment about his suddenly going to grad school to study poetry. (I wrote: "1st we hear about this???" in the margin).
it must be difficult to render a story of personal disaster because the very fact we're reading his book tells us there is some sort of recovery, or success, by the end.
Yea, I hadn't really thought about it much until I read this blog, but his whole "redemption/recovery" is kind of just ignored. Maybe it is intentional, as that might be another memoir in itself, or he didn't have the strength to write about it. But we do become so involved in who he is that his transformation would be very crucial to his becoming...
That's a good point, Libba. I also got the impression that he just didn't have the strength to write more about his own redemption, that the book had already grown too large but if that's the case it feels a little lazy.
Even if he had to step back from the book for awhile, I wish he would have gone back and figured out where the focus of the book really is. He spends so much time on his time working at Pine Street that the leap to post-Pine Street seems so jarring against the seamless nature of the rest of the book.
I also get a little tripped up by the fact that throughout the book I got the impression that he was a little bit macho.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, he becomes a poet. A not particularly masculine (sounding at least) profession. The Flynn I know from the first 2/3rds of this book would struggle with this identity. I have trouble reconciling this.
Also when he attends the Zen retreat. He seems hard-nosed and cynical throughout the book and then all of a sudden he is in a Zen tent which just seems a little too fruity for the Flynn I know.
Again, I think that he was probably just overwhelmed and tired of writing by the end of the book but the anecdotes he shares toward the end just don't seem in keeping with the mafia-employed man who rides his motorcycle too fast and without shoes.
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