White Out by Michael W. Clune

"Wishes begin in white. Jesus is white Madonna is white. The queen is white. The moon is white. The white tops are white. A picture starts out as a white space. A white space is a picture of the future. The future poses, the camera snaps, the picture is pure white. In Baltimore that summer the best heroin was sold in little glass vials with white stoppers. White tops."

White Out is a memoir about drug addiction, specifically heroin. In the first chapter, "Memory Disease," Clune describes the strong grip heroin had on him and its deleterious effects. But he does so through conversations, gritty characters, and grim scenes.

Throughout the book, it is rare that Clune's writing is overtly didactic. He chooses rather to rely on the reader to draw conclusions from the stories he presents. That's really what they are: stories. Because while White Out is a memoir, it reads like a novel. At numerous points, I was reminded of scenes from HBO's The Wire, which was also set in Baltimore. The people Clune introduces the reader to seem almost too tragic to be real: Henry who lost an arm after passing out on top of it in a heroin-induced sleep; the people trying to get clean that he meets at various clinics; and Clune himself, perhaps the most tragic.

Clune eventually gets clean. I imagine it would be impossible to write a publishable book while addicted to heroin. He credits his sobriety to "the machine"--to the habits he formed in the early days of his recovery. Habits like meditation, going to NA meetings, and making lists for himself. But besides making to-do lists each night for the following day, Clune says he does not think about the future. The future, in all of it whiteness.

The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

Maybe it wasn't so bad, he thought. He had staked everything, and that was all he had lost. [Then] the thunder of his own guns filled him with stupid wonder.

So I decided to take a break from the Song of Ice and Fire series (because none of the books really ends, they just pause and pick up again in the next one, making it like reading one several thousand page novel, which hasn't gotten tedious yet, but could...) and go back to the Dark Tower. Brent commented that as the series goes along the novels become more Stephen King-esque, and I can already see it in this installment. I enjoyed this book more than The Gunslinger and am looking forward to the third one.

This book was interesting because we got to know a little more about Roland and his relationship to his companions. When he draws Eddie, Eddie is hooked on heroin and struggling to handle himself, not to mention the trek and quest for the Tower. He hates and resents Roland, thinking only of himself. When Roland draws Odetta/Detta, she is still tormented by the split in her personality and is more of a liability and danger than an asset. But by the end Roland has basically saved Odetta/Detta from herself and she emerges as Susannah, capable and strong, but still kind and caring, while Eddie has found strength, love, and someone to take care of, undertaking some serious character building. By the end of the book, Roland acknowledges that he loves them both, though his profession intrigues me. It seems that in the end Eddie and Susannah are only Roland's tools and he'll use them in whatever way helps him get to the Tower. He admits to Eddie that even though he loves them, he won't hesitate to let them die or kill them, as he did the boy in The Gunslinger, but I think it goes further than that. Early in this one, he recognizes Eddie's capacity to love and the way he has let that capacity atrophy in himself in his single-minded pursuit of the Tower. Roland realizes that reaching the tower stripped of his humanity might be worse than not reaching the Tower at all, which makes me think that deep down he is only using Eddie and Susannah as people to love. I'm interested to see how this dynamic evolves over the course of the series.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several thoughts; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise.

One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.

Another was that in the single moment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys. He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his annihilation.

He had lain there -- a funny little fucker -- a little stingless quiver on the earth. That was all there was of him, and all there had ever been... He was the celebrated living dog, preferred over dead lions.

Sorry for the long excerpt, hope you made it through unscathed. I just think that it's a passage of great power and insight, and it encapsulates perfectly what this book is about: the dissolution of life as a moral force, the transformative effects of war, and incorrigible cowardice.

Dog Soldiers opens up on the mid-Seventies, pissing on the era's grave. As the Vietnam War fades into irrelevance, so does the Bohemian ideal that pressed against it, leaving behind a skeleton of impotence and junkieism. John Converse, a journalist languishing in boredom in Vietnam, decides to engineer the transit and sale of three kilos of heroin to the United States, asking his friend Merchant Marine Ray Hicks to courier it to his wife Marge in San Francisco. The deal comes under the eye of a murderous regulatory official who wants the heroin for himself, and sets off a lengthy chase in which Hicks runs off with Marge and the corrupt Feds force Converse to help them pursue the drugs.

I am reminded of the way Odysseus struggles with his return from Troy, having to leave behind the madness of war before he can be permitted to return home to Ithaca. In the same way Stone's America has descended into ruin as the Vietnam War has become irrelevant; Converse notes that things make much less sense in the States than they do in Vietnam. In a desperate attempt to sell off the heroin, Ray and Marge encounter a number of warped hippie sterotypes, like the spiritualist roshi who lives on a distant mountaintop who has long since entropied into being little more than a drug dealer. Even Ray himself, a devotee of Eastern philosophy, is deranged and murderous.

There is a big hole here for me, and that is why exactly the corrupt Feds want the heroin so badly that they spend such effort tracking down Marge and Hicks. I suppose that three kilos of heroin would go for quite a bit, but the effort--and the ruthlessness--seem out of proportion (This Slate article gives a pretty good picture of what it might be worth--$300,000-$525,000 in today's dollars). But then again, Dog Soldiers is about madness, and their pursuit is doggedly fanatical. Stone also has a tendency to write around immediate action and fuzzy up the plot, encouraging confusion in anything but the most careful reader, so I may have missed something.

Still, I must admit great affection for this book. The writing is aggressively brusque, and when it takes a step back from the action can show a lot of wisdom written plainly--like in the excerpt above. It's the kind of book I adore: eventful without being vapid, colorful without being quirky, visceral and suspenseful. Highly recommended.