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Summary
Summary
"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up." Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled, was living alternately in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. In bold, dazzling prose, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other.
Author Notes
Nick Flynn is the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and The Ticking Is the Bomb. He divides his time between Houston and Brooklyn.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Flynn's wayward father, a self-styled writer and ex-con, describes his life on Boston's streets as "another bullshit night in Suck City": he hangs out in ATM lobbies, stuffs his coat with newspaper and is often "still drunk from the night before." This biting memoir describes the years poet Flynn (Some Ether; Blind Huber) spent, in his late 20s, working at one of the city's homeless shelters, where his path crisscrossed with his down-and-out father's. In examining their troublesome relationship, Flynn admits to feeling lost, as he turned to alcohol and came close to being on the other side of the shelter admissions booth himself. Punchy language and short chapters make what could otherwise be excessively painful more palatable (e.g., "Fact: In 1839 Dostoyevsky witnessed a mob of peasants attacking his father.... they poured vodka down his throat until he died. Fact: I can watch my father pouring vodka down his own throat any day of the week. My role is to play the son, though I often feel like a mob of peasants"). Although it's depressing, the book never seems hopeless, because readers know the author has succeeded at doing what his father only pretended to do: write, and write well. Agent, Bill Clegg. (Sept.) Forecast: Norton has high hopes for this memoir; they promoted it heavily at BEA and have planned an author tour. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
A homeless man's assessment of life on the streets provides the unforgettable title for this mordant memoir from the author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections, Some Ether (2000) and Blind Huber (2002). Boston-born Flynn was a mere infant when his mother took him and his brother away from their father, Jonathan, a hard-drinking con man who dreams of writing the Great American Novel. Nearly 30 years later, Jonathan, who is homeless after serving time in federal prison for bank robbery, comes into the Pine Street Inn shelter, where son Nick is a caseworker. A promising poet with drug and alcohol problems of his own, Nick is haunted by the vision of his shivering, drunken father adrift on Boston's streets. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. Readers of memoirists Frank Conroy and Tobias Wolff will relish Flynn's pungent account of two rudderless souls who navigate their way back into each other's lives. --Allison Block Copyright 2004 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A noir family history told in small ladlings--perhaps all the reader may want to absorb at one time, or all the talented Flynn (Some Ether, 2000) can pour at a sitting. His mother left her husband when the author was four years old. In a snapshot taken in the early 1960s, "I crawl toward my father's face as we lay on the grass. . . . The father as ship, as vessel, holding the child afloat. But there was a parallel father as well--the drunk, the con, the paranoid. The father as ship, but taking on water, going down." Flynn didn't see his father again for 24 years. In the interval, his mother committed suicide after hovering "in the realm of vapor and shade," though not before her son had embarked on his drinking career: "By the time Saigon falls I'm drinking whatever liquor I can get my hands on." He's 15. When Dad finally gives him a call, they are both wrecks: the elder an alcoholic ex-con living flop to flop, rifling garbage cans, still making stabs at writing, but more concerned with how to stay dry on a rainy night; the younger a doper, part-time drug-runner, working in a homeless shelter, adrift on a "sea of forgetfulness." While the author ever so slowly, with lots of swings, gathers himself, his father takes to driving a taxi, more for scoping out sleeping venues than collecting fares. Flynn drives the homeless shelter van at night, each bundle a push-pull chance to encounter his father. The voice here is boiled just right: tough, articulate, mindful, without self-pity. There will be little bonding, and any knitting up of the ragged sleeve will have to wait for another time and plane. This is "the book that somehow fell to me, the son, to write," states the author, describing himself as "my father's uncredited, non-compliant ghostwriter." So give credit now, where it is well due. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
If this award winner's poetry is any indication, his account of reconciling with the homeless father he saw for the third time at age 27 will be lacerating. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
