Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will by David Levinson

I picked up the habit of choosing books by their titles far too long ago for me to shake it now and Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will originally fell into that category, but this remarkable collection of short stories made me wonder if there was some sense in the practice after all.

A parade of perpetually disappointed characters gives plenty of scope for self destruction, and among all the other tribulations Levinson throws at his cast, alcohol pops up enough times for an inclusion here.

In A Perfect Day for Swimming, Kate Burnett travels down from New York to Austin to see her father, now living with his partner Howard and Howard’s two young sons. Kate, fleeing from the wreckage of a relationship that she’s just destroyed, decides that Sun, margaritas, and a heart-shaped swimming pool are just what she needs to recuperate. Sadly, her hard working and harder drinking father promptly derails that.

Thrown out of his home by Howard, Kate’s father eventually reappears after midnight on Christmas Eve, his truck abandoned on the highway where it’s run out of petrol. She finds him swimming naked in the pool, drinking Chivas Regal from the bottle.

He took a swig and passed me the bottle. I took one, too, a healthy gulp. The flavour of it, strong and medicinal, exploded in my mouth.

An expedition to get glue for a broken Christmas decoration gets hijacked as well:

“How about we stop for a teensy-weensy little drink to celebrate my daughter’s brilliance,”... Once inside it became clear my father was a regular.

But it is Christmas, so the barman gives them each a shot of peppermint schnapps:

We lifted our glasses, clinked in succession, and downed the schnapps, which tasted corrosive, like fermented mouthwash. I asked for a glass of water and a beer while my father ordered a scotch, neat...

As her father abandons her at the bar while he dances with a man no older than her, Kate reflects that they made it look so easy. It never is, of course, and Levinson’s controlled prose describes these little tragedies so well...

Jaws by Peter Benchley

The beach read you never want to read on the beach, Jaws is another book which has been eclipsed by the subsequent film, although in the case of Spielberg's first blockbuster, that's no disservice to the original novel. Benchley’s thriller was a bestseller when it was published in 1974 and it still holds up pretty well over thirty years later; remarkable, really, considering that one of the main characters is a fish.

Describing the plot feels a bit unnecessary, but for those readers who have somehow avoided Jaws all these years, here goes: large shark terrorises small town. Police chief Martin Brody tries to catch the shark with marine biologist Matt Hooper and fisherman Quint. Shark almost wins...

I had presumed that the film was a faithful interpretation of the book, but Benchley puts a lot more back story into the novel, including Brody’s wife’s disappointment in her marriage. Born into a rich family who summered on Long Island, she daydreams about what her life could have been if only she hadn’t married the local bobby. The arrival of the wealthy Hooper prompts her to organise a dinner party, a concept alien to her husband.

Uncomfortable having posh guests around, Brody starts hitting the rye and ginger and his wife has already told him to slow down by the time the wine is served. No expert on the grape, he isn’t entirely sure what he’s drinking:

He took the bottle of white out of the refrigerator, and as he uncorked it he tangled his tongue trying to pronounce the name of the wine: Montrachet. He arrived at what seemed to him an acceptable pronunciation, wiped the bottle dry with a dishcloth, and took it into the dining room... “A glass of Mount Rachet,” he said. “Very good year, 1970. I remember it well.”

Worried that the lamb is undercooked, half pickled in whiskey and downing the wine, Brody comes over all peculiar halfway through the main course:

He had started to chew a piece of meat when another wave of nausea hit him. Once again sweat popped out on his forehead. He felt detached, as if his body were controlled by someone else. He sensed panic at the loss of motor control. His fork felt heavy, and for a moment he feared it might slip from his fingers and clatter on to the table. He gripped it with his fist and held on. He was sure his tongue wouldn’t behave if he tried to speak. It was the wine, it had to be the wine.

After the disastrous dinner party, catching the great white shark is a piece of cake...

The Wee Book of Calvin by Bill Duncan

A hilarious exploration of the North-East of Scotland, The Wee Book of Calvin analyses the people of the region through their language and behaviour with particular attention paid to all things dour...


Of course, no book on Scotland can omit its most famous alcoholic export, Whisky. Uisge beath. The water of life:

‘Freedom and whisky gang thegither’, according to Scotland’s national Bard. In the North-East, wild mood swings, gratuitous insult, physical and verbal abuse of strangers, imagined slight, self-injury, false bonhomie, spontaneous singing of Frank Sinatra songs in a broad Dundonian accent, delirium tremens, unwanted sexual attentions, incontinence, unaccompanied public dancing, indecent exposure, memory blackout, insolvency, uncontrollable facial tics, temporary loss of motor functions, social ridicule, divorce, sexual dysfunction, random violence, a face prematurely ravaged by thousands of ruptured blood vessels and whisky gang thegither.

Duncan gives a potted history of distilling in Scotland, before ruminating on some of its more unfortunate side effects, exemplified by some horrifying newspaper headlines gleaned from the local press:

Each instance of fracas, disorder and alcoholic mayhem accompanied by the tired litany: ‘The accused had been drinking heavily... the accused had no recollection of the incident... a history of alcohol-related offences.’

He leaves us with a treatise on the hangover, with its age-old trinity of sin, guilt and self-loathing. The hangover, his uncle once explained to him, is the yin to whisky’s yang:

...as a Calvinist he recognized The Hangover as a necessary moral device, balancing polarized cosmic forces in a zen-like harmony, each moment of pleasure tempered by the certainty of its opposite.

Or to put it more simply:

The hangover – yer payment fur havin a guid time.

Blazing Saddles: The Cruel and Unusual History of the Tour de France by Matt Rendell

Sports writing would not seem to be the obvious place to look for drinking in literature (cricketing biographies aside) but the Tour de France is not a regular sporting event. The world’s most famous bicycle race began in 1903 and in over a century it has seen its fair share of drink, drugs, crashes and other disasters.

Rendell’s book is a glorious compendium of the tour, filled with anecdote and populated by giants of the cycling world. Naturally, sporting prowess is sometimes the door to excess, or at the very least a healthy appetite. Rider Marcel Bidon confessed years later that he would drink a half-bottle of champagne before each stage, and 1960s cycling legend Jacques Anquetil indulged in all number of dietary deviations, especially while on tour:

“To prepare for a race, nothing beats a good pheasant, champagne and a woman.”

That said, Anquetil probably overdid it on the Pyrenees étage of the 1964 tour when during a rest day he accepted an invitation to a ‘méchoui’ in Andorra:

...a traditional meal of lamb roasted whole on a spit. The solid food was accompanied by a drinking competition with his directeur sportif...

The next day, Anquetil started nervously...

Champagne wasn’t to everyone’s taste and most of the cyclists seemed happy to stick to beer. During the 1935 tour in an incident that would never happen these days (and more’s the pity in my mind) a sight for sore eyes appeared halfway through the race:

...on stage seventeen, from Pau to Bordeaux, in overpowering heat, the riders found beer bottles lined up at the side of the road, and declared a truce to sate their thirst. It was a well designed ruse by Julien Moineau, who rode straight past the beer and reached Bordeaux fifteen minutes ahead of the peloton.

Chapeau!

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Back to the beach and the sun lounger this week for the original ‘bonkbuster’, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.

Written on a hot-pink IBM Selectric Typewriter, Susann’s story of three young women and their misadventures in show business was dramatised in 1967 and is famous as one of the most unintentionally camp films of the decade. The adulterated screenplay and the dreadful acting manage to strip the story of all the grit of the original novel, which is a terrific read.

All three women suffer their fair share of woes: tragic Jennifer North commits suicide by overdosing on ‘dolls’ (the various uppers and downers that give the book its title), Anne Welles ends the book sinking into a barbiturate torpor while her philandering husband is fooling around with another woman, again, Neely O’Hara winds up destroyed by drink and drugs. Of the three, Neely is the only one with real talent; talent for singing and acting and dancing, but also for all out self destruction. Susann darkly hints at this right at the start. Neely’s the girl next door, a plucky kid who’s dragged herself up by her bootstraps:

Nothing bad could ever happen to someone like Neely.

By the time Neely has got to Hollywood, she needs uppers to wake up, to lose weight, and downers to sleep at night. And what the hell, they work faster with whisky:

She looked at the clock – midnight. The pills weren’t working. She needed some more Scotch to help them along... It was lucky she had learned booze helped the pills work... The dolls without booze were nothing. Well, she’d just have to go downstairs and get some more.

By the time that Neely is committed to a sanitarium, she’s bleary eyed, carrying around a bottle of Scotch and screaming curses at Hollywood.

Eventually she gets out, sober and clean of drugs, but within a year she’s back to a bottle of Scotch and two hits of Demerol a day.

She’ll make a comeback again – and again and again, as long as her body holds out. It’s like a civil war, with her emotions against her talent and physical strength. One side has to give. Something has to be destroyed.

Valley of the Dolls has recently been reappraised as being years ahead of its time. In that light, the real tragedy in this book is that forty years on in showbiz, nothing has changed at all.

Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard

I had the privilege of reviewing one of Elmore Leonard’s books a while back for the FT, so while leafing around the library looking for inspiration, I decided to pick up something from his extensive back catalogue.

Rum Punch is probably better known through Quentin Tarantino’s film adaptation Jackie Brown, which is a shame, because it’s a tightly written crime thriller that is more than worth investigating in its own right.

Odell Robbie sells guns to criminals, but his operation is under the surveillance of the feds and when they arrest Jackie Burke who ships his money into Miami from the Caribbean he’s under pressure to get her out of the picture, fast.

Unfortunately for Odell, some of his accomplices don’t work to his level of professionalism. Louis Gara, for example; a three time jailbird who knows Odell from Detroit. Louis has lost his edge since he’s been inside:

Four years staring at the walls and drinking shine, the man was burnt out, useless.

You see, in this business, you have to stay sharp:

Louis was thinking he should not drink rum. Or he should find a glass and have another one... He had started this afternoon in the bar at the Ocean Mall, Casey’s, hiding out from Melanie, thinking of her as a female cannibal. Bourbon this afternoon, rum this evening, nothing to eat in between...

So when the final pick up takes place and Louis has to get back to his car, he needs to remember where he’s left it:

Sometimes when he was living in South Beach and drinking a lot he’d forget where he parked and have to roam up and down the streets. He’d had a few pops this afternoon before he’d picked her up.

That kind of sloppiness will get you more than a hangover. Let’s just say, Louis doesn’t get to go to prison a fourth time...

e by Matt Beaumont

A rare example of a zeitgeist book that still stands up ten years after the initial hype, e is an epistolary novel written entirely in e-mails between various employees of dysfunctional advertising agency Miller Shanks.

It’s the first day back of the new year, 2000. Miller Shanks are after a contract with Coca Cola and the London office has two weeks to prove themselves. It’s a cinch - naturally the firm is staffed by professional creatives, not drunken buffoons still hungover from the Millennium jollies:

Our Millenniums in brief. Mine’s a total blank – woke up in a skip in Poplar at five am, 1 Jan, but had a spectacular view of the Dome as I leaned over the edge to puke. Vin was in Berlin and was so depraved he can’t bring himself to tell me what he got up to. On the way back he was gutted that the Y2K bug didn’t kick in and make the Airbus drop from the sky – figures the adrenaline rush would’ve worked wonders for his hangover.

The impending Coke deadline isn’t the only cloud on horizon. Half of the office are off to Mauritius to film an advert for ‘adult’ TV channel, LOVE. The team makes sure that they get to the airport safely:

What happened to you on Friday night? Did you get off with that Bosnian barmaid? Vin was so wasted he nearly didn’t make the flight. Had to put him through crash detox in the Heathrow club lounge.

After an imploding breast implant, heatstroke and a waterski accident do for the hired team of glamour models imported for the shoot, they film an advert that could have been made in the office car park back in London. Unfortunately not before the client manages to assault Gloria Hunniford, out in the islands filming a holiday programme. The press are on to them like a shot:

We’ve had the Sun snapper on our verandah taking shots of us through the window. Doesn’t look good – the contents of the mini-bar are scattered on the bed and Vin is comatose on the floor in nothing but a Fat Slags T-shirt.

If that sounds bad, wait until the Creative Director’s taste for ladyboys loses the firm the Coke contract...

Love Remains by Glen Duncan

Another recommend from a few years back, Love Remains is a beautifully written yet exceptionally bleak novel. A love story between two students, Nick and Chloe, is interspersed with scenes of Nick wandering around New York six years later in a near catatonic state.


Something has obviously gone seriously awry in Nick and Chloe’s lives and Duncan slowly builds up to the random and catastrophic event that has caused Nick to flee London for America and Chloe to be left for dead back home. On the run and convinced that the future itself has ended, Nick finds himself in a seedy bar in the Village, Scrimshankers, patronized chiefly by borderline and committed alcoholics. Mickey, the sadistic middle-aged widow Nick falls in with, contemptuously describes it as the sort of place where drunks to go to die.

A pub that most people would cross the road to avoid, Scrimshankers is the domain of Lancelot, another refugee from Britain, who props up the bar there and souses himself with whisky:

Again the drinkers pause... He drained his glass then knocked the empty on the counter. ‘Marty? Oi Marty yew fackin’ khant. Johnnie Red in there please – one cube of ice, mate, all right? Not your usual fucking avalanche.

Finding another ex-pat in the filthy bar, Lancelot starts to confide with Nick:

Lancelot rapped the counter with his solid knuckles and Marty delivered two more clinking tumblers of Scotch. Lifting his glass up to one of the bar’s weak overhead lights, Lancelot inspected its contents, coldly. ‘Doesn’t work now, you see,’ he said. Nicholas looked up at him. ‘Used to shut me up. Booze. Stopped talking.’

Like the boozers in Scrimshankers, there’s something poetic about the self-destruction in Love Remains, although I’d hesitate to pass the book on to anyone holding out hope for a happy ending...

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People by Toby Young

In 1995, journalist and co-founder of The Modern Review Toby Young left London for New York and a job at Vanity Fair. Somehow he lasted two years before his litany of bad behaviour, terrible work and general hopelessness finally got him the push.


How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is an amusing account of Young’s time in New York where he seemed to do his level best to annoy as many people as possible, seeming without trying. Perhaps part of the problem was that his alcohol intake appeared only to be matched by his penchant for cocaine, with disastrous results. I could quote whole chunks of the book verbatim for the purposes of 120 Units, but I’ve picked on one episode in particular when Young is sent back to London to do a photoshoot with New British Artist Damien Hirst.

Hirst turns up, with friends Keith Allen and Alex James in tow:

...at 11am on 7 December I rendezvoused at the Groucho Club with the photographer and we went upstairs in search of ‘The Boulevardiers’, as the three subjects had been dubbed... We found them in the billiard room nursing terrible hangovers. The bar of the Groucho hadn’t opened yet so I was immediately dispatched to buy a bottle of vodka. It was the first of many that they would consume over the course of the day.

After New York, even Young is surprised at the state his subjects are in:

I was quite shocked by just how unkempt ‘The Boulevardiers’ were... Even at 11a.m. they were bleary eyed and unshaven...They smelt as if they’d spent the night on the floor of the Coach and Horses, rolling around in dog ends... A better name for the three of them would have been ‘The Toxic Avengers’.

Needless to say, as the vodka flows and several grams of toot disappear up various nostrils, the shoot descends into chaos. Finally, the trio refuse to sign the release for the photos. Young reads them the riot act which, to his surprise, works. Well it seems that way at first:

In the end, Hirst relented and motioned for me to hand him one of the release forms. He scrawled what I took to be his signature and then handed it back. I thanked him profusely and then read what he’d written: ‘Suck my big dick’.

Words of warning to the rest of us: never work with children, animals or artists...