Dennis Monk, the narrator of Michael Deagler’s debut novel Early Sobrieties, has just quit drinking, and returned to his parents’ house outside Philadelphia. He’s 26 and has no real prospects, “no job, no girlfriend”. When his father was that age, he already had a wife and an apartment (aand wasn’t an alcoholic): “He mentioned these facts with some frequency to accentuate the differences between us.” Monk’s younger brother, Owen, has come home, too: he’s slightly less of a screw-up, if only because he hasn’t had enough time. “There are executives and there are stooges,” their mother tells Owen. “If you’re not on the executive track, you’re a stooge… I’d say you’ve got one year.” What about Dennis, Owen asks. “It’s too late for Dennis,” she says.
Nothing in the novel, which follows Monk through the first year of his sobriety, contradicts her, but the book does show progress of a sort. His parents kick him out and he starts couch-surfing in South Philadelphia, staying with friends or acquaintances, or friends of friends, or acquaintances of acquaintances. But he stays sober – it’s part of the charm of the book that Deagler doesn’t tease the reader with the threat of relapse. Even so, he keeps hanging around people whose lives are still at the dramatic stage of collapse from which he recently emerged. He drives them around, he rescues them from parties, he crashes on their couches. Just because he’s sober doesn’t spare him from his own ongoing foolishness – he takes petty revenge on an ex-girlfriend, sleeps with someone he shouldn’t, makes a pass at a woman his pal has a crush on. None of it gets him anywhere.
I wouldn’t have minded a little more consecutive narrative, if some of the situations and characters had carried him through from one chapter to the next. But that’s also part of the point of the book – Monk is adrift, and the narrative drifts with him, without real sequence or logic. He’s not someone to whom the conventions of the normal life-narrative are available. A friend of his, who works in film production, once explained to him that “if you interned long enough, even for free, eventually something would open up. You would get the life you wanted, the house and car and family. At the time, I thought it was crazy to work for free – a transparent scam the rich had invented to humiliate the rest of us… But I was wrong, as I often was.”
Early Sobrieties is a portrait of people going nowhere, stuck in the gig economy, moving between family home and cheap rented accommodation, resenting the gentrification of their old neighbourhoods, in which they can barely afford to live any more: “Tattoos and plaid. Ciders and wheat beers. Why did I hate [the hipsters]? Demographically, they were my people.” But they’re richer, more successful, less damaged. “I envied them, those confident pseuds, since presenting such a curated persona to the world was surely better than proffering my own flawed, mostly authentic one.” One of Monk’s friends sells overpriced computers: “We basically need to find old people without children, so there’s no one around to warn them what a scam it is.” Monk himself takes on various less-well-paid jobs, working as a delivery driver for a catering company, washing dishes, building furniture for a girl he might want to go out with (but doesn’t) in lieu of rent.
Meanwhile, one friend dies of pancreatitis, others of fentanyl, someone else commits suicide. “There were a growing number of people,” Monk tells us, “whose premature deaths, when held up against my own continued existence, just bewildered the f--k out of me.” And the fun glibness of Deagler’s opening chapters begins to darken into something else. The scenes of mid-twenties aimlessness are broken up by flashbacks from Monk’s drinking days, the fights he got into, the roofs he spent the night on after losing his keys, the friends and girlfriends he drove away. He’s sober now, but the trouble with giving up drinking is that it seems to involve him slowly in a more general renunciation: he finds it harder and harder to keep wanting things from life. This is the point he’s progressing toward, though by the end it’s an open question whether it’s a point worth reaching.
Deagler is very good. His prose is conversational and vivid; his characters talk and act like real people, in constantly surprising and plausible ways; and everything that happens, no matter how low-key or incidental to the plot, has the detailed intricacy of ordinary life. What it all adds up to is a fairly bleak portrait of a generation. Monk’s sobriety, like Jake Barnes’s impotence in The Sun Also Rises, gives him a kind of painful detachment from the people around him; but unlike Hemingway’s ex-pats, his friends don’t get to go to Paris or Pamplona. They’re stuck in South Philadelphia, doing jobs they don’t like, drugs that don’t make them happy, waiting for something to change.
Benjamin Markovits’s novels include The Sidekick. Early Sobrieties is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
