Ablutions: Notes for a Novel

This short novel was simultaneously sad, cynical, pessimistic and funny. The second person narrative and to a certain extent the subject matter is reminiscent of *Bright Lights, Big City* with a writer's workshop vibe. The narrator is a witty but unsympathetic observer, an alcoholic addict (who has perfected the art of vomiting silently so his wife can't hear him) surrounded by sad alcoholic addicts. He strives for redemption and the ending, naturally, hints at this; but he seems to lack any type of moral structure in his life. He is an ethical egoist - concerned only with actions that would benefit himself. The only reason he wants to quit his addictions is because he knows he's killing himself. Frankly I'm not sure that what he does at the end of the novel will be any sort of helpful ablution. This guy is troubled. In spite of this the characters in the book are likable, the narrative is funny, and the writing is impressive. I will definitely be looking forward to more novels from this writer.

“I will try to be happy, you think, and your heart and chest feel a plummeting, as in the case of the hurtling rollercoaster, and your heart wants to cry and sob, but you, not wanting to cry, hit yourself hard in the center of your chest and it hurts so much but you drive on, your face dry and remaining dry, though it had been a close call, after all.” I picked up Ablutions: Notes for a Novel based largely off of my love for Patrick DeWitt’s second novel, The Sisters Brothers, an offbeat Western written with exquisite craft, a wry sense of humor, and a beautifully realized tone that recalled the great True Grit by Charles Portis. Ablutions is DeWitt’s first novel, and it shows; it lacks the narrative thrust that kept The Sisters Brothers moving, feeling more like a series of character sketches and moments than it ever does a true novel. What it has, though, is DeWitt’s superb writing, keeping you reading for the way he crafts a phrase and considers the emotional heft and impact of every word. In some ways, in fact, the episodic nature of the book only helps the writing to soar all the more. Narrated by a nameless bartender in a seedy bar on the outskirts of Hollywood, Ablutions is a cavalcade of broken souls – alcoholics, junkies, has-beens, never-was’es – and that might include our narrator as well. The book takes the form of fragmentary observations and anecdotes, often introduced with the reminder “Discuss”. But what that fragmentary nature robs of narrative pleasure, it adds in the ability to find the profound moments of everyday life, such as this knockout observation with one patron: “He drinks double vodka tonics from the well and becomes animated when describing a stunt or special effect from the latest Hollywood blockbuster. When he insists you see these movies you tell him you do not like the genre and he asks what other kinds there are and you say there are the slow ones and foreign ones and your personal favorites, the sad ones, and he blinks and says that there are two types of people: Those who want to cry, and those who are crying already and want to stop.” And even when not finding beautifully realized moments, DeWitt’s prose has a way of getting to emotional truths in a haunting way, from the moment of crushing pain I opened this review with to this aftermath of a misbegotten night together between two lost souls: “Now she is crying and you are shivering and it is time to go home and if you had a watch you would snap your wrist to look meaningfully at it but she dabs at her face and says she wants you to come upstairs and share a special-occasion bottle of very old and expensive wine and as there is no way not to do this you follow her through the dusty lobby and into the lurching, diamond-gated elevator and into her cluttered apartment to scrutinize her furnishings and unread or improperly read paperbacks, and you wonder if there is anything more depressing than the habitats of young people, young and rudderless women in particular.” Yes, DeWitt’s prose is beautiful, and more than equal to the offbeat, haunting narration of The Sisters Brothers. But for all of that, Ablutions often feels more like an exercise than a true novel, and a sometimes tedious exercise at that. It’s a portrait of addicts and broken souls, and that’s a story a lot of authors have done, and DeWitt doesn’t bring much new to the table apart from his writing. How much you enjoy Ablutions will, then, entirely hinge on your ability to savor DeWitt’s writing and the way he uses his prose to craft emotions out of the unlikeliest situations. It’s a book for those who love language, in other words, and others may be less likely to appreciate it. If you’re in that camp, I can’t recommend highly enough The Sisters Brothers, which is everything I like about Ablutions and more. But for those who enjoy writing as a way to create sketches that add up to something more, there’s something beautiful about Ablutions that I liked far more than the sum of its parts.

Dewitt is a great writes and it's a pretty funny book. Not an incredible storyline though and it's pretty depressing. Good read overall.

This book came as a complete surprise. I'm not a Bukowski fan and I generally like more upbeat subject matter. But the writing blew me away-- DeWitt has a scary eye for the morbid detail. I found the book compelling and page-turning, although it is written in note form. This guy is the real deal. We all have a lot to look forward to with his next novel.

Having loved Patrick Dewitt's French Exit, (thanks, Viia) I'm continuing with his first novel, Ablutions: Notes For a Novel. Granted, there's been an enormous body of barfly work over the years, and this book joins an illustrious litany of self-destruction: John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas, Malcolm Lowry"s Under The Volcano, Charles Bukowski's Barfly, and my favorite, William T. Vollmann's latest, The Lucky Star. As with all the others, the cast of characters is fascinating, all the more so In Vino Veritas, where no tongue is restrained, no filters on bad behaviour, no depth of depravity too dark & desperate. What makes Ablutions unique is DeWitt's singular method: hearkening back to the subtitle, we are often presented by our barkeep narrator with generalities, as if we are responsible for filling in the 'notes for a novel'. Even more compelling and disturbing is the constant address in the Second Person, as if we are complicit, as if events are not described to us; we are enjoined as accessories in an unescapable fashion: "Discuss Sam, the black cocaine dealer. He dislikes you now. he has his children with him and they do not like you and will not accept your offer of candy or maraschino cherries. Discuss Ignacio, who no longer tells you his impossible-odds penis-adventure stories. Discuss Raymond, who will no longer speak to you and whose rancid coffee breath you have not smelled in several weeks. You have been pushed from their society and you are confused to find yourself hurt in the same way you were hurt in the schoolyard those many years back when the boys took your new ball away and you were forced to play with stones in the dirt and sand." These are the narrator's experiences, but they are meant intrinsically to be ours. For all the conversation within Ablutions, there are very few quotation marks: "You apologize for rambling but she is smiling more nad more now, and she admits she will be waiting for you at six, and she points to the stool she will be sitting on, and you in your happiness reach out to to touch her hand and she takes up yours and her fingers are so soft and warm and your hearts are beating very fast when the barback, a quick, modestly pompadoured Mexican teenager, rushes up and whispers something in her ear and her spine grows stiff and all joy leaves her face and she drops your hand and walks to the far end of the bar to serve the impatient, thirsty cowboys." I've already finished DeWitt's second novel, the pulp Western, The Sisters Brothers. It's quite impressive to see a writer create a whole new format, a whole new language for each of his efforts.

Great book by a great author. Will not dissappoint

I loved this book. I'd read the Sisters Brothers and liked that one so I decided to get Ablutions. I think I prefer Ablutions out of the two, although both are excellent. This book describes a man's slip into addiction, and the loss of everything he held dear. It IS a portrait of alcohol's power but that's not all this is about. Great characters, lots of humour and pathos, a page-turner and an identifiable protagonist make this well worth reading. If you've ever struggled with the drink then it's all the more identifiable. Like Bukowski at his best this is a humorous look at the low-lifes and has-beens, never forgetting that despite their afflictions they are people just like you. great book.

Great

I used to really love boozy, druggy novels when I was a teenager, regularly devouring books by Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Hubert Selby Jnr. and Patrick Hamilton where the protagonists were either alcoholics, drug addicts or both. But that was when I was a teenager and my literary tastes have since changed. So I was surprised to find myself drawn into Patrick deWitt's debut novel "Ablutions" which takes place almost entirely in a dismal Hollywood bar filled with deadbeats and human detritus getting sloshed and snorting powder in the dark. Like most people I came to deWitt after reading his excellent Booker-nominated western "The Sisters Brothers" about a pair of bounty hunters in the old West on the trail of one of their targets. It's an excellent book which I highly recommend and led me to seek out this, his only other published novel (so far). "Ablutions" is a completely different book to "The Sisters Brothers"; where "Sisters" was a fast-paced first person narrative that read like an intelligent thriller, "Ablutions" is without a plot, told in the second person by a consistently drunk narrator, his attention reeling from one character in the bar to another seemingly at random and without any direction. And yet "Ablutions" is still a hypnotic read. Maybe it's the character portraits of the broken lives that litter the bar. There is a drug- addled manager, an alcoholic former child actor, two slutty drunken school teachers, a wannabe artist and a dealer, as well as corrupt bar owners and the despicable narrator. The setup is that the narrator wants to be a novelist who gets work as a bar back because he feels he will meet a number of interesting people with stories he can exploit by putting them in his novel. Combine this with the fact that the author used to work as a dishwasher/bar back and the uneven, scattered approach to writing this novel and you could almost say that the author is the narrator and that his cynical approach worked. Almost. Because the writing is too damn good to dismiss the book as opportunistic and exploitative. The comparisons to Bukowski are only superficial. Yes it takes place in a bar, a setting which Bukowski featured prominently in many of his novels, but his writing style was far more straightforward and raw, focusing more on dialogue than prose. DeWitt includes dialogue but, as the subtitle "Notes for a Novel" suggests, much of the book is written descriptively and the style feels more lyrical. The atmosphere of the bar culture feels very real and the details are convincingly authentic. DeWitt captures life on skid row as ramshackle, scary, deeply unpleasant and ugly while portraying the mind-set of an alcoholic with mesmerising alacrity. We get to see his inner workings, believing his car is "magic" because he drives home drunk each night and never gets pulled over by police, and while at home, he hides stashes of aspirin so his wife doesn't realise his increasing dependence on, and abuse of, substances. He does utilise novelistic tropes that set the book apart from being a simple retelling of scenes from a bar: it's "written" by an alcoholic narrator whose life is falling apart so the lack of cohesion in the broken layout could reflect the narrator's scattered and unsettled mind. Also, the business model of the bar is bizarre: the staff (seemingly all alcoholics) can drink as much of anything in the bar for free while doling out free drinks to regular alcoholics who show up every night? And why is there a doorman for an establishment so low-class whose clientele are practically all homeless derelicts? How does this place make money when it's in the hands of such reckless, irresponsible personalities? Unless a lot of this is made up and/or misremembered by an increasingly unreliable narrator who storyline becomes more unhinged as the book reaches its conclusion. If you're going to read this - and I do recommend it - beware that it is a slow burn. It doesn't take a while to get going because it never really does, it trundles along at an unhurried pace throughout, occasionally giving the reader something more substantial than bar scenes. The solitary road trip to the Grand Canyon was brilliant with the scenes at the rodeo being the best in the novel. But it's slow pacing and detailed telling of the lives of these troubled and troubling people is fantastic and the portrait of the narrator is fascinating. "Ablutions" is a good novel and well worth the time you give it, just don't expect the kind of novel he delivered in "The Sisters Brothers". Cheers!

it was ok, but I sure enjoyed The Sisters Brothers a lot more. Thanks, Claude