You were at a party when your father died – and immediately you were told, a miracle happened. A real miracle. It didn’t last, of course, but was convincing enough for a few moments. An hour later, you took a girl home and tried to make love to her. You held on to her as she pleaded with you: even now her distress is still the nearest you have come to feeling grief at your father’s death. You are thirty-four years old; everything that has ever happened to you is still happening.
The opening paragraph of the novel instantly communicates two important aspects of this novel. The first is that it adopts the most unusual point-of-view of the three major narrative perspective: the second-person. The “you” here is Morris himself. His narration is a case of Morris addressing himself about things himself does. The second important aspect, of course, is character description. Knowing that the narrator is thirty-four instantly creates a familiar scenario that may—or, possibly, may not—play out: this is a book about a mid-life crisis. Of course, it is important to keep in mind some contextuality here as well. When the book was published, the average life expectancy in the major Anglo-speaking countries was around seventy-five. By 2020 it had risen to around eighty and thus, Morris would likely be closer to forty-years-old had the book been written then. In other words, the term “mid-life crisis” should not be taken to the extremes of literal interpretation.
For you, alcohol is not the problem – it’s the solution: dissolving all the separate parts into one.
Notable alcoholic Homer J. Simpson once famously observed of alcohol that it is both “the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.” Of course, only a drunk would make such a stupid claim when the evidence is heavily in favor of alcohol being a cause of problems rather than a solution to anything at all, but it just goes to show that, when distilled down to the essentials, all alcoholics are more or less interchangeable. As much as they would love to convince themselves that drinking is some sort of solution to anything other than the problem of not being drunk…well, it is clearly not. This quote serves up another important element of the novel. It belongs to that category of classification that ranks among the most difficult to figure out of all literary genres. The diary of a drunk that is somehow supposed to teach some sort of lesson or other. Will the well-traveled trek of Mr. Magellan end with the realization that alcohol is a problem rather than a solution and will this realization save the second half of his life from getting sucked into vortex of disappointment which has already put a pretty big dent in the shiny first half? Hint: nobody in Alcoholics Anonymous ever calls themselves a “former” alcoholic.
When you were a child you had a radio with a ‘magic eye’ – a green light that shone brightest when the signal was at its strongest; a little off the station and its brightness faded, as though with disappointment. That evening, with each glass of wine, you sensed your ‘magic eye’ shining brighter and brighter.
This quote seems like a throwaway having something to do with developing the character’s past, but it is actually far more significant. Significance arrives not because of the quote itself, but rather that it is hardly the only example and it is painfully indicative of not just the genre of novels narrated by drunks, but alcoholics in general. At a certain point in the evolution from non-drinker to casual drinker to heavy drinker to full-scale alcoholic, every topic of conversation comes around to drinking. The one aspect of this literary sub-genre that definitely makes it a worthwhile invention is the inevitability of this revelation.
People whose world revolves around the consumption of alcohol always—or almost always, anyway—reach a point at which literally no topic of conversation can be broached which won’t eventually circle back around to how liquor impacts it. Needless to say, the scene in which this connection of a childhood memory and the coming impact of alcoholic consumption plays out differently in the mind of Morris—who cannot help but see the positivity within the connection—than it does to external interests who bear witness to only the negative consequences.
