The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I was inspired to pick up Franzen’s The Corrections after reading a comment about books and alcohol on the excellent Henry’s World of Booze blog recommending his latest novel, Freedom. Now, I do actually own a copy of Freedom, although I must confess I’ve not read it yet, but could recall enough of this earlier novel to scrape together a post. Here goes...

The book focuses on the Lamberts, a somewhat staid and increasingly dysfunctional family from the Midwest. Patriarch Alfred is succumbing to Parkinson’s Disease, his wife Enid barely coping with his behaviour, which was difficult enough to begin with, and with that of her three children, Gary, Chip and Denise, who have all fled to the East Coast and have all failed to make their parents proud. As the family disintegrates around her, Enid determines that they will have one last family Christmas together.

All three offspring seem partial to a spot to drink, but I particularly remember Gary’s attempts to barbecue the family supper and trim the garden hedge after half a bottle of vodka. A high earning banker, Gary is depressed and paranoid, convinced that his wife and kids are spying on him. Admittedly, knocking out three lethally strong martinis one after another isn’t going to help matters:

He needed to sleep well tonight for at least six hours. To accomplish this, he planned to drink two vodka martinis and hit the sack before ten. He upended the vodka bottle over a shaker of ice and brazenly let it glug and glug, because he, a veep at CenTrust, had nothing to be ashamed of in relaxing after a hard day’s work. He started a mesquite fire and drank the martini down. Like a thrown coin in a wide, teetering orbit of decay, he circled back into the kitchen and managed to get the meat ready, but he felt too tired to cook it. Because Caroline and Caleb had paid no attention to him when he made the first martini, he now made a second, for energy and general bolsterment, and officially considered it his first. Battling the vitreous lensing effects of a vodka buzz, he went out and threw meat on the grill. Again the weariness, again the deficit of every friendly neurofactor overtook him in plain view of his entire family he made a third (officially: a second) martini and drank it down. Through the window he observed that the grill was in flames.

Nothing that can’t be mended with a bucket of water, even it if does render the meat inedible. Trying to masticate scorched but still raw chicken, Gary is needled into action by his wife. He decides that now would be an appropriate time to trim the hedge that he’s been meaning to sort out. It all goes well until he realises that he has to move the ladder to get to the last twelve inches. He leans across instead:

The gentle blow, the almost stingless brush or bump, that he then delivered to the meaty palm part of his right thumb proved, on inspection to have made deep and heavily bleeding hole that in the best of all possible worlds an emergency physician would have looked at. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. He knew he was too drunk to drive himself to Chestnut Hill Hospital, and he couldn’t ask Caroline to drive him there without raising awkward questions regarding his decision to climb a ladder and operate a power tool while intoxicated, which would collaterally entail admitting how much vodka he’d drunk before dinner and in general paint the opposite of the picture of Good Mental Health that he’d intended to create by coming out to trim the hedge.

Pishing blood all over the house, he wraps himself up in toilet paper and towels before going to get something to clean up the mess:

He went to the kitchen for a bucket and a mop, and there, in the kitchen was the liquor cabinet. Well, he opened it. By holding the vodka bottle in his right armpit he was able to unscrew the cap with his left hand. And as he was raising the bottle, as he was tilting his head to make a late small withdrawal from the rather tiny balance that remained, his gaze drifted over the top of the cabinet door and he saw the camera.

His son Caleb has been working on a CCTV project and the house is all wired up. Needless to say, Gary’s impending collapse is duly hastened. Still, things could be worse. His mother might ring the next day to say that his father has just fallen off the side of a cruise ship into the ocean...

Bleeding Heart Square by Andrew Taylor

Alcohol is not just for diversion into anecdote in books, it can serve move the plot as well. One of the author’s greatest fears is (or certainly should be!) the dumping of large amounts of factual content in one go, pages and pages of detail that leaves the reader numb and flicking forward to the beginning of the next chapter. This is where a couple of libations can really come to the rescue...

Take this example from Andrew Taylor’s Bleeding Heart Square. I picked this out of the library because I work a couple of minutes walk away from many of the locations, and because I’d seen a review which mentioned that one of the main characters was a lush, therefore making it ideal blogging material.

In two pages, Taylor demonstrates how to use a bottle of wine to introduce some back story and a bit of characterisation:

At that moment there came a tap at the door.

“Come in,” cried Ingleby-Lewis, and struggled to his feet.

The door opened, revealing Malcolm Fimberry on the threshold with a bottle of wine cradled in his arms.

“I say,” he squeaked. “Sorry to disturb you. I – I thought I might open some wine and I wondered if I could borrow a corkscrew.”

“Wine, eh?” Ingleby-Lewis sprang towards him. “Nothing simpler, old man. Come in and sit down. Lydia, my dear, would you find Mr Fimberry a corkscrew in the kitchen?”

“If you would like to join me in a glass,” Fimberry suggested, “I’d be more than pleased.”

“How very kind.” Ingleby-Lewis patted him on the shoulder and removed the bottle from his grasp. “Three glasses as well then, please, Lydia. Ah, a Beaujolais, I see. How very wise. You’re quite right of course – solitary drinking is not something one should encourage. Besides, life holds few finer pleasures than a glass of wine with friends.”

When Lydia returned with three unmatched glasses and a corkscrew, she found her father and Mr Fimberry sitting on either side of the fireplace and smoking Mr Fimberry’s cigarettes. Her father took the corkscrew and removed the cork with a skill born of long experience. He poured a stream of wine into the nearest glass.

“None for me, thank you,” Lydia said.

“Nonsense,” Ingleby-Lewis said. “Just a sip. Do you good. Warm you up.” He turned to Fimberry. “My daughter feels the cold, you know. Especially at night.” He measured a thimbleful into he smallest of the glasses and handed it ceremoniously to Lydia. He gave another glass to Fimberry and the largest one to himself. He raised his own glass to the light. “A fine colour. Your good health.” He swallowed a third of the contents.

“I hear you have a position at Shires and Trimble in Rosington Place, Mrs Langstone,” Fimberry said, leaning towards her. “That must be interesting. Working for a solicitor, I mean.”

“It’s early days yet,” Lydia said grimly.

“You’re just opposite the chapel, of course. In fact, as far as I can work out from an eighteenth-century plan of the palace, the house where Shires and Trimble are must be built over part of the Almoner’s lodging. Remarkable to think of the people who must have walked about here in their time. Good Queen Bess, Sir Thomas More, Richard the Third, John of Gaunt, all those splendid prelates of the Church. Why, we walk on history in this part of London. And that’s why we Mr Howlett to guard our gates and keep order. In legal terms, Rosington Place, Bleeding Heart Square and their environs form the Rosington Liberty, and hence in many respects they still fall under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rosington.”

“Very true,” Ingleby-Lewis said. “A spot more? No?” He refilled his own glass. “You must know the place like the back of your hand.”

Mr Fimberry simpered, his eyes huge behind his pince-nez. “Oh, there are some fascinating stories associated with it, no doubt about that. After the Reformation, the Catholic dead were sometimes secretly interred beneath the chapel, in the days when the palace was rented to the Spanish ambassador. It is said that the bodies were brought here to Bleeding Heart Square, and then transferred to the chapel in Rosington Place. They were secretly buried at midnight, to the accompaniment of solemn masses, beneath the undercroft floor.

“Extraordinary yarn,” Ingleby-Lewis said, his eyes straying again towards the bottle.

In just under 600 words the reader now knows that Ingleby-Lewis is a soak, the gloriously Dickensian Mr Fimberry is a funny sort who buys a bottle of wine when he doesn’t own a corkscrew and bothers his neighbours using it as an excuse for a chat and the chapel on Rosington Place, which features later on in the story, is introduced, along with its history, without boring the reader to tears. Simple, when it’s done well...

Stirred But Not Shaken by Keith Floyd

Somewhere in our flat there is a copy of the brilliant Floyd on Hangovers, a potted history of drink, boozy escapades and spurious cures for over indulgence. Unfortunately, I can’t find it anywhere, so until then, here is Floyd’s autobiography, Stirred But Not Shaken.

Floyd sets the scene at the start of the book with an evening of Bacchanalian excess; there is bare knuckle boxing, glorious roasts, and lakes of whisky and port. At the end of the night, after staggering to his room, he finds himself lying flat on a hard mattress, wired up to tubes and a ventilator. When he can eventually speak, he asks the people milling around his bed about the party:

I said to them, “How did you enjoy the dinner and boxing?” Silence. I said, “Well surely you were there. It was a great night. I mean, there was betting, there was the port, there was the whole baron of lamb, and then there was the dawn. How do you manage to have such a place in what appears to me to be a hospital?” It was a hospital.

After an alcoholic collapse, Floyd had been suffering hallucinations in intensive care brought on by the drugs keeping him alive and a nasty attack of the DTs. As the doctor kindly pointed out:

“...Drink again as you have before and you will die.”

Floyd started off his professional life as a cook after leaving the army. After several briefly successful ventures in the West Country that all ended in financial disaster, he found himself doing a one off cooking slot on a regional television broadcast at the beginning of the 1980s. It snowballed from there.

For better or for worse, Floyd, and his director David Pritchard, invented the modern TV chef. Before Floyd, everything was a bit staid and formal; Floyd took food out of the studio and into the great outdoors, chatted to the film crew, and most famously, had a constant prop of a glass of wine. Despite his reputation as a rogueish guzzler, he claimed never to have drunk once while filming his series, and the glass of wine was to give him something to do between the action:

I had a bottle of wine on the prep table intended for cooking. But in the absence of any direction from Pritchard, when I ran out of inspiration and words, I said, “I think I’ll have a quick slurp,” to buy valuable seconds to recompense my thoughts.

Despite his insistence that he was never sozzled while on the show, he was shifting a lot of whiskey in between filming:

Increasingly, however, I found myself staying up all night, unable to sleep because I was worrying about how it would go the next day. Slowly and, it seems, inevitably a bottle of whisky was becoming my crutch: a companion that would help me through the hours from midnight to dawn.

This seeped into his home life, and by the time his TV career was over and his fourth marriage was collapsing, he was drinking like a pissed fish:

As far as booze is concerned, I thought I could knock it on the head quite easily. But on the other hand, I felt under pressure with Tess and I couldn’t help myself... Our relationship was deteriorating rapidly, and our life was one long round of screaming matches interspersed with my complete alcoholic blackouts, and romance had long gone. The fairy tale we’d once lived turned into the grim reality that I can now talk about, but it pains me to do so. The fact is I kept a bottle of Scotch in my bedside table. In the mornings, when I awoke I had to have – I didn’t have to but felt that I did – a few large glasses of whisky before I could get downstairs.

The near death experience (his third admission to hospital suffering from the effects of drink and malnutrition – sadly for Floyd, he had come to hate eating) seemed to make him turn things around and late in life he found love again with an old friend and was ready to go back onto the television. A programme was produced for Channel 4 and at the time the book was published he had several new opportunities lined up. He died of a heart attack the night the show was broadcast.

Floyd was a culinary inspiration to millions of viewers who, like me, regard him with great affection. This rambling memoir sounds like a long afternoon at the bar with the man himself and I could hear his distinctive voice rattling off the anecdotes as I read it. I feel it would be appropriate (raises glass) to leave the last word to him:

Sometimes I worry about what I’ve left out. And sometimes I worry about what I’ve put in. but for now, as this book fades to black, I’ll have another pastis. Thank you and au revoir.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

The ultimate hard-boiled detective novel, The Maltese Falcon and its subsequent screen versions (most famously with Humphry Bogart) brought the tough, morally ambiguous, chain smoking and hard-drinking PI into the public consciousness.

Sam Spade is a small time private investigator in San Fancisco who is asked by the beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy to track down her errant sister. He sends his partner Miles out on the job, but that night the other man is shot dead and it quickly transpires that their commission wasn’t what it seemed. Called out by the police when they find Miles’s body, it’s well into the small hours when he gets back to his apartment:

Spade’s tinny alarm-lock said three-forty when he turned on the light in the suspended bowl again. He dropped his hat and overcoat on the bed and went into his kitchen, returning to the bedroom with a wine-glass and a tall bottle of Bacardi. He poured a drink and drank it standing. He put bottle and glass on the table, sat on the side of the bed facing them, and rolled a cigarette. He had drunk his third glass of Bacardi and was lighting his fifth cigarette when the street-door-bell rang. The hands of the alarm clock registered four-thirty.

The visitors are the police again, this time trying to insinuate that Spade has something to do with Miles’s murder. The next day, he’s visited by a sinister Levantine by the name of Joel Cairo who asks him if he knows the whereabouts of a black metal figurine in the form of a falcon, then pulls a gun on him... A drink is required after this sort of intrusion:

For half an hour after Joel Cairo had gone Spade sat alone, still and frowning, at his desk. The he said aloud in tone of one dismissing a problem, “Well, they’re paying me for it,” and took a bottle of Manhattan cocktail and a paper drinking-cup from the desk-drawer. He filled the cup two-thirds full, drank, returned the bottle to the drawer, tossed the cup into the wastebasket, put on his hat and overcoat, turned off the lights, and went down to the night-lit street.

Spade finally gets to see the man behind the mystery, the obese Mr. Gutman who tells him the story of the Maltese Falcon, a fabulously valuable jeweled statuette that has been painted black to hide its value. Not before pouring him a Johnny Walker and soda, of course:

Spade sat in the green chair. The fat man began to fill two glasses from bottle and siphon. The boy had disappeared. Doors set in three of the room’s walls were shut. The fourth wall, behind Spade, was pierced by two windows looking out over Geary Street. “We start well, sir,” the fat man purred, turning with a proffered glass in his hand. “I distrust a man that says when. If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.”

Sage advice. That said, none of the people Spade has met are to be trusted at all, drink or no drink. What follows is a masterpiece of suspense and two-fisted action and one of the best crime novels ever written.