Going to the good
Alexander Masters
ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY by Nick Flynn Faber, £7.99, pp. 347, ISBN 0571214088 Jonathan Flynn is a lying, cheating, incompetent, sanctimonious, selfobsessed, tedious, foul-mouthed, smelly pain in the behind. His son Nick is the first to tell you so. For six years, between 1984 and 1990, Nick Flynn worked at the Pine Street Inn, the largest homeless shelter in Boston; one evening, two decades after Jonathan walked out on his family, this vodka-sodden louse turns up at the door, begging for a bed.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a remarkable memoir: uneasy, evocative, sometimes funny (and in a few parts fictionalised), it is Nick Flynn’s attempt to make sense of his deluded and blasted father, and, if not to escape, then at least to quarantine the fear that his father’s verminous character might also be his own. Intrigued by blood connection, Flynn is nervous about genetic inheritance. But he clearly quite enjoys the dysfunction cred he gets either way.
Various threads make up the story: the history of the father, Jonathan, in so far as Flynn can piece it together from his own childhood memories and his father’s alcoholic swaggering; an account of Flynn’s own messy young days, and — some of the best of many excellent descriptive sections, these — accounts of what happens in the homeless hostels and bedsits of Boston. The unsavoury title is Jonathan’s epithet for street life in the city, but a good half of the bullshit is provided by Jonathan himself: he has a $4 million book deal with Little, Brown, he is the Next Great American Poet, he owns a Jackson Pollock painting (although Pollock appears to have misspelled his name in the signature). A pathetic character in his weakness, Jonathan is strangely endearing in his arrogance. Suck City is as much Boston as the fantastical world that Jonathan has created for himself and in which he is unable to live without disappointment or retreat from selfannihilation.
If Jonathan were my father, I can imagine several things I might do: go mad; emigrate to Australia; quietly stab the old bore in a park. Flynn, however, adopts a more settled approach, which at first I found hard to understand: he is supportive of the man — sometimes — but never shows much love; he is either vaguely sentimental about or amused by his father’s excesses, but frequently disapproves of their consequences. Even the poignancy of Flynn having published prize-winning poems excites only a murmur of concern and not a whiff of Oedipal pleasure.
Finally, I think I put my finger on the explanation: Nick Flynn, son of a scoundrel, is essentially good. He tries: in the autobiographical section of Suck City Flynn drives his motorbike without his shoes on, tells his suicidal mother he wants to lead a life of crime, ‘totals’ two cars before he’s 17, announces to his school teachers that he ‘drinks to get drunk’. But this is still a fellow who once found himself beside a cash register in an empty bookshop and did not knock off the lot because ‘I knew how hard it was to go back once you crossed a line’. A boy with a father such as Jonathan has got to go to the good somehow.
The author’s blurb at the back of this moving, emotionally hesitant book says that Flynn teaches for one semester a year, and spends the rest of his time ‘elsewhere’. What could he be up to? Boozing? Whoring? Doing over banks? I suspect helping old ladies.
Alexander Masters’ Stuart: A Life Backwards, A Biography of a Chaotic Thief, is published next month by Fourth Estate.
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