Couples by John Updike

I’ve enjoyed Updike in the past, but for some reason struggled with this one, his 1968 novel about the adulterous affairs between a set of ten families living in a small Massachusetts town in the mid 1960s. Apparently, it’s frank depictions of the sexual act and the post-pill paradise garnered it some notoriety; maybe I’m jaded, but I found it overwritten and below the author’s usual standard.


Anyway, this is a booze blog, not a sex blog, so on to the drinking. Here’s a passage from the beginning of the book, which describes the far too long a cocktail time before lunch. Foxy Whitman is a newcomer to the town of Tarbox, having just arrived there from Cambridge with her husband Ken:

To put herself at ease she had drunk too much. Under the mechanical urging of her inflexibly frowning host she had accepted two martinis and then, with such stupid false girlishness, a third; feeling a squirm of nausea, she had gone to the kitchen seeking a dilution of vermouth and had whispered her secret to her hostess, a drunken girlish thing to do that would have outraged Ken, yet the kind of thing she felt was desired of her in this company.

Ah, diluted vermouth. Perfect for morning sickness... All manner of social convention can be observed when alcohol is produced:

Frank Appleby was given two bottles to uncork, local-liquor-store Bordeaux, and went around the table twice, pouring once for the ladies, and then for the men. In Cambridge the Chianti was passed from hand to hand without ceremony.

Well, we’re not in Cambridge anymore...

A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

I was first introduced to Doyle’s work on stage, in Dublin with my father back in 1994 when we saw his fantastic play Brown Bread. A Star Called Henry similarly uses comedy to take on big themes, and there’s little bigger than the birth of his country and the Easter Rising which forms the main part of the first half of the novel.


Henry is a fourteen year old youth, six foot two, handy with his fists, and already a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army. His father was a doorman at a brothel, a one legged bruiser who would swing his wooden prosthetic with skull-cracking dexterity, the bane of rozzers and drunken punters.

Henry Senior’s first meeting with Henry’s mother is hardly auspicous. Twenty two, one legged and dead drunk, he stumbles straight in front of the lovely Melody Nash as she walks back from early mass on Sunday:

She walked right into my father. Melody Nash met Henry Smart. She walked right into him, and he fell. She was half his weight, half his height, six years younger but he fell straight over like a cut tree. Love at first sight? Felled by her beauty? No. He was maggoty drunk and missing his leg.

At first, she not unreasonably concludes that he’s dead. She checks for life and gets little more than monosyllables:

The man groaned again. He drew his arms in and braced himself. Then he crawled one kneed off the road, over the gutter. Melody picked up the shovel. He groaned again and vomited. A day and half’s drinking poured out of him like black pump water.

And yet Henry Senior is also an absolute charmer and whisks young Melody off her feet. Soon enough they’re getting hitched, and the wedding is in full swing. Melody is getting ‘the talk’ about babies from all the older women in the room. Fortunately, there’s a distraction and she can escape:

She was saved by the fight that broke out when a couple of moochers that nobody knew were caught helping themselves to the bottles of stout. – Yer dirty lousers! Granny Nash jumped onto one of them and bit him on the cheek... The man was trying to save his face but his arms were stiffened by all the bottles and sandwiches stuffed up his sleeves.

For some reason, Melody thinks that this is unsuitable conduct for her wedding:

Melody had had enough. – You’re ruining my day! she screamed. Granda Nash dropped the leg. – Sure Jaysis, love, he said. –The day would’ve been ruined altogether if they’d got away with the rest of the bottles.

And so on to Henry Junior, who abandoned to the streets at the age of nine, finds himself manning the barricades at the GPO in Easter 1916...

Mr Toppit by Charles Elton

"He had filched from me my good name and left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son," said Christopher Robin Milne of his father, author of Winnie the Pooh, which is a good point of reference for the poisonous legacy of the Hayseed Chronicles featuring Mr Toppit, the book within a book in Charles Elton’s debut.

Arthur Hayman has published five books in the Chronicles but is killed (run over by a cement truck in Soho) just as the sinister presence in the books, Mr Toppit – a sort of diabolical counterpart to Enid Blyton’s Mr Pink Whistle – emerges from the Darkwood in their final paragraph.

His son, Luke, immortalised as Luke Hayseed both in print and the ridiculous illustrations by the family German teacher, Lila, narrates most of the book with an icy detachment, his way of coping with the sudden fame incurred by the books becoming a posthumous publishing phenomenon thanks to Laurie Clow, a DJ on a hospital radio station in California.

Five years after his father’s death, Luke is at a party the night before he goes to America to visit Laurie, now a chat show host in LA. The books have bought the family great wealth, but it’s a tainted legacy. His sister Rachel, who invites him round, is drug addled and neurotic. Still, the rest of the guests are an entertaining mix of foreigners, actors and a priest:

Although it was summer and still light outside, the curtains were drawn and the room was lit by candles. There was a peculiar smell that Claude said was church incense. “The best, the very best,” he said. “I nicked it from All Saints, Margaret Street.” The priest laughed so much that he knocked over the jug that contained the special cocktail Claude had made with vodka and blue Curaçao.

Rachel flees the party and Luke finds her downstairs:

She handed me a bottle of clear liquid. “What is it?” “Grappa. It’s made from all the grape crap left behind after they’ve done the wine. Claude loves it. It’s Italian. Don’t’ drink it all.” The grappa seemed to avoid my stomach and go straight to my head so when Rachel came back I was feeling a bit dizzy.

The party carries on into street and finishes with a police caution for all involved. Still, it’s a fairly abstemious evening compared to a night out in California when Luke ends up visiting Travis, one of Laurie’s staff, late at night. He’s with Merry, the daughter of Laurie’s friends. She’s also cutting up lines of coke and knocking back the tequila:

She showed me how they had been drinking the tequila. You put some salt on the back of your hand, licked it off, took a big swig, then sucked a lime quarter. Its sharpness made me shiver as the tequila went down.

And then the toot kicks in:

I was trying to concentrate. Of course, nothing happened instantly. I’d had quite a lot of wine at dinner and then there had been the tequila so I knew I was a bit drunk, but the odd thing was that gradually my head cleared. When you’re drunk you get a bit sluggish but suddenly the blood was moving round my body more efficiently. In a while I could feel every pulse inside me working in unison, like those oilfields you see with the pumps going up and down like crazy. The next time we combined it with tequila. Slug of drink, lick of salt, suck lime, snort line.

Needless to say, all this hellraising is going to come to bad end and Luke finds himself compromised, to say the least. But then again, the misfortune is spread around equally. As the Chronicles themselves say:

And out of the Darkwood Mr Toppit comes, and he comes not for you, or for me, but for all of us.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

A satire not exactly endowed with subtlety, American Psycho is Ellis’s take on the late-eighties, early-nineties super rich, the gilded youth working in the top banks in New York. Among them is Patrick Bateman, twenty six, sophisticated, suave, handsome and psychotic.

Of course, take a step back from Bateman and it’s quickly apparent that the high living circle that he works and parties with is effectively sociopathic in its unrelenting pursuit of an ideal: the best restaurants, the best clothes, the best sexual partner. Bateman is the satirically logical extension of this in that he has taken his sociopathic nature to the point of killing people in increasingly gruesome ways.

Alcohol plays its part, but brand names only. There’s a running gag (one of many) in the book that Bateman’s friend Price can never get hold of Finlandia vodka:

“I told you to keep Finlandia in this place,” Tim mutters, looking through the bottles – most of them magnums – at the bar. “She never has Finlandia,” he says to no one, to all of us. “Oh god, Timothy. Can’t handle Absolut?” Evelyn asks...

In fact faux-pas with beverages are two-a-plenty. On their way out to a soirée, Price whines to Bateman about the choice of dinner guests:

“Maybe one of Evelyn’s ‘artiste’ friends from ohmygod the ‘East’ Village. You know the type – the ones who ask Evelyn if she has a nice dry white chardonnay – ”

Bateman finishes the evening, concentrating on:

...the Absolut and cranberry I’m holding and it looks like a glassful of thin watery blood with ice and a lemon wedge in it.

Of course, in a world that’s only interested in status, booze can be used as a slight. In an evening out at ‘Pastels’, a fellow trader sends over a complimentary bottle of champagne. Leaving it untouched, Bateman and his friends depart for a nightclub:

“Van Patten,” I say. “Did you see the comp bottle of champagne Montgomery sent over?” “Really?” Van Patten asks, leaning over McDermott. “Let me guess. Perrier-Jouët?” “Bingo,” Price says. “Nonvintage.” “Fucking weasel,” Van Patten says.

There was a temptation in the mid nineties to say that this was an eighties infatuation and that the madness had passed: books like American Psycho and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities could be seen as historical texts. The recent financial crash and the subsequent resurgence of an unapologetic, all devouring, super wealthy class of bankers prove that this was not the case. There is still a section of society that is just as psychotically money crazed as it always was and Ellis’s novel is as pertinent today as it was when it came out two decades ago.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Another contribution from one of Scotland’s finest living authors, The Wasp Factory is Banks’ explosive debut, a genuinely shocking book that has not only developed a bit of a cult over the years but is apparently now being taught on the A-level syllabus...

The Wasp Factory revolves around Frank, who cheerfully admits that before he was sixteen he had murdered three people. He lives on an island off the North Sea coast of Scotland with his grumpy father, the pair of them only connected to the mainland and reality by a bridge.

Franks’ pastimes involve acts of war against the local rabbit population using pipe bombs and catapults, consulting the eponymous 'factory' to predict the future and inspecting a set of skull adorned totem poles he has installed around his island, as well more traditional teenage behaviour such as wandering off into the town nearby on a Saturday night in order to get drunk with his friend Jamie and watch a gig.

Saturday night at the Cauldhame Arms and there I stood as usual at the back of the packed, smoke-filled room at the rear of the hotel, a plastic pint glass in my hand full of lager, my legs braced slightly on the floor in front of me, my back against a wallpapered pillar, and Jamie the dwarf sitting on my shoulders, resting his pint of Heavy on my head now and again and engaging me in conversation.

Appropriately enough, the band on that night are called The Vomits. By the end of the gig, Frankie’s had a wee bit too much. Jamie, however, has got his eye on a lady:

Unfortunately, Jamie ended up talking to some woman, but I was too busy trying to breathe deeply and keep the far wall steady really to care.

Jamie’s now hitting it off with a punk lass from Glasgow and talking about motorbikes while Frank is getting closer to anti-peristalsis:

Christ, I was about to do the Technicolor Yawn all over this girl’s jacket, through the tears and rusting her zips and filling her pockets, and probably send Jamie flying across the room into the beer-crates under the speaker stacks with first awful heave, and here were these two trading absurd biker fantasies.

Salvation seems moments away as they leave into the cool of the night, but Frank is possibly a little too far gone for that:

I was starting to get triple vision and wondering how you did that with only two eyes. I wasn’t sure if they were talking to me or not. I said, ‘Aye’, just in case they were, then felt myself being led out into the fresh air through the fire exit. I needed to go to the toilet, and with every step I took there seemed to be more convulsions from my guts. I had this horrible vision of my body being made up almost completely of two equal-sized compartments, one holding piss and the other undigested beer, whisky, crisps, dry-roasted peanuts, spit, snot, bile and one or two bits of fish and potatoes.

Desperate for the toilet, Frank makes a run for it and pisses all over the petrol pumps at the petrol garage. Just as Jamie arrives, he is also spectacularly sick:

‘Saw–’ I started to say ‘Sorry’, then the word turned into a heave. That anti-social part of my brain suddenly thought about the greasy eggs and bacon again and my stomach geysered. I doubled up, retching and heaving, feeling my guts contract like a balling fist inside me; involuntary, alive, like a woman must feel with a kicking child. My throat was rasped by the force of the jet.

The effect is chastening, up to a point:

I spent most of the Sunday in bed. After my binge of the previous night, I wanted rest, lots of liquid, little food, and my hangover to go away. I felt like deciding then and there never to get drunk again, but being so young I decided that this was probably a little unrealistic, so I determined not to get that drunk again.

As Frank’s insane brother Eric is now on the run from an asylum and closing in on their island, he probably has more pressing things to worry about anyway...