Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Nick Flynn Faber & Faber, 347pp, £7.99
ISBN 0571214088
Nick Flynn's father used to boast that he was writing the great American novel. It was a work of genius, a ground-breaking masterpiece that - once the small matter of finishing it had been seen to - would position its author alongside Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac in the literary hall of fame. Alas, history will never judge Jonathan Flynn the novelist, for that small matter of finishing always eluded him. However, he has been responsible - albeit indirectly - for the publication of a remarkable memoir.
Jonathan Flynn is a fantasist, a fraud and a chronic alcoholic. His son Nick, the author of the memoir, is a poet. The two did not meet until Nick was 27 - although, over the years, his father had written to him the sporadic, grandiose letters of a self-deluding drunk. The letters sometimes mortified Nick, and sometimes maddened him, but they always haunted his imagination. Jonathan Flynn was a work of fiction, both the father's and the son's.
Then, one day, Jonathan walked into his son's life. Nick was working at a Boston shelter for the homeless. Jonathan arrived as a client: another homeless drunk, just like all the rest, only this one was his father. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is the son's story of their estranged and entangled lives, on the one hand painfully different, on the other disturbingly alike.
Jonathan was a chancer right from the start. The charm he used to seduce Nick's young mother soon wore thin, and she took their two sons and patched together a single-parent family, taking on multiple part-time jobs and flawed boyfriends. When Nick was 11, she announced she was getting married. "That's a mistake, I say. She nods that she knows but says she'll marry him just the same, and she does, and they're happy, for a while. He's fun to have around, in a frenzied sort of way."
This is how the son tells his own life story - in spare but vivid prose. The more shocking the detail, the more deadpan the delivery, nicely capturing a child's sense of the random craziness of life. Nick grows up in the disjointed world of a family that expects life, like the weather, to keep happening to it. And it frequently does.
At college he meets a girl called Emily. After six months they drift apart, but some time later, at a party, he overhears her telling amusing stories about an old friend of her parents - a drunk, something of an embarrassment, a character. He recognises the description. "After a few minutes I tap Emily's shoulder. That guy you were talking about, I say; that's my father."
Later that month, Nick leaves a notebook lying around in his mother's house. It contains the beginnings of a story he has written about a woman who holds down two jobs and tries to fit them around seeing her children. His mother finds it, writes a note to her son saying how perceptive he is - then swallows a handful of painkillers and shoots herself. The incident, like all the other dramas in this book, is left hanging on the page, abandoned as abruptly as it arrived.
Flynn's poignant vignettes have a shocking economy, but their cumulative effect is less involving than it should be. However beautiful or truthful the writing, it keeps us at a distance. The man we truly come to know - the one who lives and breathes off the page, in all his awful technicolour tragedy - is Nick's father.
Excruciating, grotesque, touching, Jonathan Flynn takes shape through one heartbreaking cameo after another. There is the summer when he is paid to paint somebody's house but, when autumn arrives, finds to his surprise that he has nothing to show but empty bottles. There is the pitiful attempt at bank fraud which lands him in prison, but which he then endlessly presents as a heroic heist. Constructed almost entirely out of lies, Jonathan is, none the less, vividly real. By the time the two men's lives collide at the shelter, the father is almost the protagonist, his son an absent enigma.
Although Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a formidably graceful book, the author's poetic instincts can be frustrating. This is a big book for so much economy, and Nick's allusions to the psychological parallels between him and his father cry out to be explored explicitly. Both men have a problem with alcohol; both consider themselves writers; both have, to different degrees, drifted through life. But Nick engages with this only to the extent that he engages with his father in real life: he is brave enough not to look away, but too disturbed by what he sees to get very close.
Flynn has resisted the memoirist's temptation to indulge himself in the role of his own therapist. That part is left open to the reader, and it is hard not to infer from his icy-cool prose a passionate reaction against his father. Jonathan Flynn boasts compulsively about the brilliance of a book that does not exist. His son can scarcely bear to acknowledge the depth of the one that now does.
Decca Aitkenhead writes for the Observer
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