The Brooklyn Rail

“Like all Irish Catholic families, mine was suspicious of admitted alcoholics,” says Dennis Monk, the narrator of Michael Deagler’s Early Sobrieties. This is a problem, because Dennis Monk is newly sober and staying with his parents in the Pennsylvania suburbs. “An admission of alcoholism meant that a frank conversation was about to be had, and an Irish Catholic family abhors nothing so much as a frank conversation.” Instead of risking such a conversation, his mother kicks him out of the house.

This sets Monk—he goes by his last name, both fitting and ironic for a recovering alcoholic—off on a journey through South Philadelphia as he navigates his first summer of sobriety. He moves from row house to apartment to row house; each chapter is a new place to crash, a nearly standalone episode with its own cast of characters in a gentrifying city. “For an addict,” Monk says, “survival is inaction.” This idea—sobriety as an arrested plot, the recovering alcoholic’s journey as “a knee-capped bildungsroman”—poses a narrative challenge, one Deagler solves by proposing the couch surfing novel as a version of the road novel, traveling in circles.

Monk is on “the wrong side of 25.” Having spent the last ten years doing nothing much other than drinking, he now has nothing much going on other than his sobriety. He has a recovering addict’s sense of the near-religious profundity of the day-to-day, the wry humor of a sober man among drunks, and a newly clear-eyed view of familiar people and places (or nearly familiar: the blackouts of his drinking days, their unknowability, haunt Monk’s newfound sober ones). Each new person he meets shows him other possible lives: he envies friends and acquaintances, the young and waywardly-mobile, who don’t, themselves, quite know what they’re doing. He briefly adopts the code of ethics of a new roommate. He imagines himself running off with a married neighbor. He imagines himself getting an office job and buying an engraved cigarette holder. He imagines himself becoming a carpenter. He imagines himself moving to Pensacola, California, Mobile, New Orleans. Instead, he stays in Philadelphia without any plan at all, other than staying sober.

The essential questions, for Monk, are what one does with a life, and what to make of it. The problem is how to grow up, which is essentially a problem of whether it is possible to take responsibility for oneself. Different characters have different theories. Monk’s family is of the belief that “if something could be categorized as our collective failing, then it couldn’t very well be blamed on us as individuals.” A friend, on the other hand, suggests that “some people have to make themselves the guilty party. They can’t deal with a universe governed by something other than their own bullshit.”

These questions feel urgent to Monk because of the blankness that spills out over his memories, over hours, days, years. Stories about drunken violence accrue—newspaper stories about alcohol-fueled hate crimes in the city, a friend who got drunk and beat up someone on the bus, Monk’s prickly feeling that he may have thrown the first punch at a party one night (“And that was a night I almost remembered. There were so many more, later ones, worse ones, that I didn’t remember at all.”). The specter of unremembered and poorly understood violence lurks in the back of Monk’s mind and under the surface of the novel. “Something buzzed inside my skull,” he says of waking up after that fight. “An extra, unplaceable pang of guilt that hit me with the morning’s hangover, mixed in with the headache and the dehydration and the bruised ribs and the taste of metal in my mouth.” While the chapters could be read independently, this thread comes to something like a climax in a chapter towards the end, with the revelation, retrieved from the nearly blanked-out basement level of Monk’s inebriated memory, of a drunken night and a knife.

Sobriety, in the novel, is not quite a clean slate or a fresh start. Instead, it’s an accumulation of days, during which you have to live with the past—with what you can and can’t remember of it. “That’s the hard part,” Monk says to a friend. “’The part when we’re not in control of ourselves. And so is the part afterward, when we’re back in control, but we don’t understand why we lost control. Or where we went, or why we went there. It’s like, why can’t we just always be ourselves?’” “We are always ourselves,” his friend responds. “I think that’s the hard part.”

When the novel ends, Monk is renting a room, still wondering what it might mean to make something of a life. Of the future, he says:

Sometimes it seemed wide open—obscenely so, like I was standing on a rooftop with the city spread before me, the horizon line low, the sky as big as people were always insisting that it was. But other times the future seemed compact, condensed to fit within the four walls around me, as though my entire life would be improvised solely from the objects in my room. I didn’t know which vision to believe.

But he is growing comfortable with the accumulation of days that constitutes sobriety. “I didn’t know,” he thinks, “if those two lives looked so different from each other, in practice. A big life. A small life.”