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A review by literarycrushes
Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler
emotional
funny
hopeful
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler tells the story of 26-year-old Dennis Monk. After eight years of ceaseless boozing, he is now seven months sober and re-learning what it means to be a “normal” human. The novel is broken up into a series of interconnected vignettes tied to his various living situations as he coasts around Philadelphia, crashing with friends and people he vaguely knew while he was drinking.
The novel is not delicate about the struggles of staying sober, though in Monk’s case, it’s less about curbing his desire to drink (though he still feels this) than the difficulty of filling the expansiveness of time he now has. His friends and family are frustratingly suspicious of his sobriety (of his mother, he says: “My sobriety was not something she was obliged to foster like the orchid of some out-of-town neighbor.”) and he spends a large portion of time at bars or somehow involved in their madcap nocturnal adventures.
His sobriety gives him license to feel superior to anyone who still drinks, “regardless of the other factors of their lives or mine,” and casts Monk is a slightly pretentious light, though it’s clear this is more of a defense mechanism to protect himself than a genuine dislike of everyone he comes into contact with. Overall, it was an insightful recorvery narrative” “Sometimes I lay in bed and stared at the blankness of the ceiling, wondering what the rest of my life would entail. Sometimes it seemed wide open – obscenely so, like I was standing on a rooftop of the city spread before me, to horizon line low, the sky as big as people were always insisting that it was. But other times the future seemed so 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. I didn’t know if those two lives looked so different from each other in practice. A big life. A small life.”
The novel is not delicate about the struggles of staying sober, though in Monk’s case, it’s less about curbing his desire to drink (though he still feels this) than the difficulty of filling the expansiveness of time he now has. His friends and family are frustratingly suspicious of his sobriety (of his mother, he says: “My sobriety was not something she was obliged to foster like the orchid of some out-of-town neighbor.”) and he spends a large portion of time at bars or somehow involved in their madcap nocturnal adventures.
His sobriety gives him license to feel superior to anyone who still drinks, “regardless of the other factors of their lives or mine,” and casts Monk is a slightly pretentious light, though it’s clear this is more of a defense mechanism to protect himself than a genuine dislike of everyone he comes into contact with. Overall, it was an insightful recorvery narrative” “Sometimes I lay in bed and stared at the blankness of the ceiling, wondering what the rest of my life would entail. Sometimes it seemed wide open – obscenely so, like I was standing on a rooftop of the city spread before me, to horizon line low, the sky as big as people were always insisting that it was. But other times the future seemed so 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. I didn’t know if those two lives looked so different from each other in practice. A big life. A small life.”