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AMBERVILLE by the maybe Swedish, definitely pseudonymous Tim Davys

Review of Patrick deWitt's Ablutions

This debut novel from ex-bartender and ex-Angeleno Patrick deWitt appears as a series of “notes for a novel”. The narrator is a bright, young, whiskey-guzzling bartender who catalogues (in the second person) the miseries and misdeeds of a ragtag bunch of regulars at a faded Hollywood lounge:

Discuss the regulars. They sit in a line like ugly, huddled birds, eyes wet with alcohol. They whisper into their cups and seem to be gloating about something—you will never know what.

Here are tattooed teachers, charming crack addicts, mute transvestites, psychotic surfers, and a bloated former child star. He knows they lie to him and to each other. He knows, too, that his own future sits just across the bar from where he stands.

Newcomer deWitt revives a tired theme—addiction begets despair—with razor-sharp prose and a startling twist: the never-named narrator (a version of the author, it would seem) is neither self-pitying nor self-loathing to the point of extinction. He acknowledges his downward spiral with an uncommon clarity, and never reports his circumstance as though it just happened upon him. Thus, even the most debauched behavior of the regulars is related coolly, dispassionately. The narrator is reluctant to condemn them because he recognizes himself in their unconscionable actions. For this reason among others, Ablutions is more than a book about a bar and its resident aliens.

Part travelogue (Grand Canyon, inner psyche), part documentary (destruction and despair in Hollywood), deWitt’s novel defies easy classification. Undoubtedly, though, the formal elements of the author’s style are pitch-perfect. Whether delivering news on the bar’s ghost-in-residence, a tragicomic gangbang, or the dissolution of his marriage, the narrator remains distant but deeply involved:

You stagger closer to the old horse, thinking of him standing in the alley by himself with nothing in his mind but gray sound and all of a sudden you are so sorry for hitting him like that, and you cannot understand why you would do such a thing and it seems to be the worst thing you have ever done in your life.

Though he is always attuned to the real pain of his regulars, he rarely steps this close to his own. While basic sentiments—sadness, or anger—are revealed as a matter of course, the narrator’s (and the novel’s) emotional nucleus is avoided at all costs. This is deWitt’s greatest risk and a probable source of his readers’ frustrations. The narrator, replete with acute insights and a quick wit, certainly has a brain. But where is his heart?

Emotional evasion aside, Ablutions resonates because it does not forgive the indiscretions and toxic opportunism of its characters. The novel’s narrator offers, for all of them, the only apology he can muster: this will have to do for now. At every pulsing turn, deWitt emphasizes the thread of loss and regret that holds his ‘notes’ together. Here, the hilarious and pathetic escapades of the narrator and his barflies are less evidence of moral turpitude than of searing loneliness. They are greedy because they have nothing, selfish because they have no one. Only the narrator is hopeful, remotely and occasionally so, and in a way that tugs at the edges of a reader’s restraint. Even as the narrator destroys himself, we root for him to win. In these, its best and most unsettling moments, Ablutions aches with honesty.

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2009)