WINSLOW IN LOVE
By Kevin Canty. Doubleday. 254 pp. $23.95
With apologies to Laurence Sterne, of all the cants that are canted in this canting world, the cant that drinking spurs creativity is among the worst. No doubt Faulkner was entirely serious when he claimed that "civilization begins with distillation." Still, for almost everyone else, alcoholism for art's sake has at best ended in despair.
Kevin Canty has delved into this mythology before, anatomizing the drinker's self-pity and selfishness, but usually through the lens of an innocent. In two of his earlier books, motherless boys longing for safety -- or escape -- end up saddled with dissolute fathers. And in a 1997 essay called "Alcohol," he discussed his own relationship with liquor. An exploration of compulsion and control, remorse and responsibility, this confessional made for melancholy reading, and the author didn't attempt a rousing conclusion. It was, one sensed, simply too difficult a task.
With Winslow in Love, Canty has set himself a tougher one: making an unreasonable, drunken hero sufficiently intriguing and self-aware to keep his audience caring -- even as the man stumbles toward disaster. Following an unlikely, and under-sketched, success some years earlier, the consistently marinated Richard Winslow has little left but his cherished Lincoln Town Car. At 55, living off Scotch, cigarettes and a second wife who's set to escape, he functions as a kind of cut-rate Charles Bukowski.
Perched atop a stool in Kelly's Olympian, a rackety Portland bar, Winslow inwardly vents his disdain for all the unconscious go-getters who are ridding America of authenticity. They're "rushing toward their own deaths, Winslow thought, and none of them knew it." Furthermore, they're to blame for the disappearance of places like Kelly's that reek of beer, smoke and worse, dives where degraded "old girls" get into aimless, dangerous brawls. It doesn't seem to occur to him that these barflies, too, are racing toward extinction.
A summons from Athens (a college in Montana, not the city in Greece) to teach poetry for a term would seem cause for celebration. Not for Winslow. He sneers at the whole scene -- apparently his new colleagues don't realize, or care, that they're inhabiting another "fake environment." This relentless hostility takes its toll on the narrative: As much as we want to empathize with Winslow, there are too many solitary scenes in which he bounces between self-loathing and scorn for everyone else.
On the other hand, Canty's prose zings whenever Winslow bumps up against another faculty member. One example: Jack Walrath, the functionary who hired him, is introduced as "a short dapper man with a goatee who looked slightly like the Devil. Maybe he was the Devil. Like every person in academic life that Winslow had ever met, Walrath seemed anxious to get his side of the story out first."
Winslow views his class with no less contempt. On the first day, having added Rilke to the syllabus, he is aggravatingly unable to make sense of The Duino Elegies. Tossing the translation down, he exclaims: "You're going to have to help me out with this. I don't understand a goddamned word of it." Needless to say, his wild surmises about Rilke and other modernists are marvelously off-base: "You want a nice fat generous line, go to a fat man," he opines, in a slapdash distinction that may have more to do with his own heft than the poets under discussion.
He isn't, it should be clear, one of those sardonic professors who act as a paradoxical source of inspiration. Winslow is intrigued, however, by one student. Erika Jones, a brittle bundle of attitude, piercings and tattoos in a giant sweater, shares his distaste for the status quo. And, as he discovers, her rich-girl demons may trump his own woes. Soon he is taken with her first poem, the unpromisingly titled "Dear Daddy." Unfortunately, the line Canty invents for her -- "you walked into the room with your wrecking ball swaying" -- is bad enough to raise eyebrows. Our poet-hero may be a disaster as a person, but shouldn't we be able to trust his taste in verse?
When Winslow gets outside himself, however, a stern lyricism emerges. The fly-fishing passages are spellbinding. At one point, his optimism as ever on the wane, the poet watches a fish probe his lure. The trout "slowly circled toward it and examined it more closely and decided there was something he didn't like about it and gently, like a leaf falling, slipped back into the quiet depths of his hole."
But for every shaft of perception, there are stretches of bathos and mawkishness. After yet another dodgy night with Erika, Winslow sits, "sorry for himself and fat, unlovely. As in many other mornings, he had the feeling that he didn't fit his life. That there was some other life somewhere that he ought to be leading and not this one. This longing." Though the critic and novelist Stacey D'Erasmo has stylishly claimed that "Canty writes like a girl -- which is my highest compliment," readers of either sex could live without that last fragment.
Kevin Canty may yet create a sublime drunk who will match the energetically spent creations of Malcolm Lowry and William Kennedy. He is a tremendously gifted writer, as he demonstrated in his strong first novel, Into the Great Wide Open, and his two story collections; and he understands how to mine failure and dejection for comic nuggets: "It was not fair," his hero reflects early on, "that so many of his best ideas were someone else's." But Canty hasn't done the job here. This time around, his protagonist's self-regarding despair is his novel's undoing. •
Kerry Fried is an editor and writer living in New York.
