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The Dealer Is Guilty, Too

Like the crime novel, the addiction story has certain predictable sign posts. Hitting rock bottom, making amends, struggling with relapse, forming new bonds, reentering the world.

There happens to be one Master of the Addiction Novel, and it's Michelle Huneven. Her work hasn't entered Pulitzer territory, and I think that's likely just because it's too smart and real and beautiful. In the absence of a flashy gimmick--commentary on Syria, for example, or the use of a narrator with autism--Huneven has not become a household name. She should be a household name.

Huneven's masterwork is "Blame," which is dazzling from start to finish. A bright academic with a drinking problem finds herself assaulting the ear of a child; she is going to perform an at-home piercing, and the procedure goes awry. Shortly thereafter, the protagonist wakes up behind the steering wheel of her car, and she infers that she has mowed down and murdered two pedestrians (or: has she?). Welcome to Rock Bottom.

Huneven is unsparing in her tour-of-the-bases. Amends-making doesn't go well; one former colleague basically says, "Never write to me again." An old friend wonders aloud, Why can't you have just one glass of wine with me? That same friend rather briskly and thoughtlessly writes the protagonist out of her wedding.

Like perky raccoons in a Disney cartoon, eccentric new allies appear. One, a tiny gay adolescent who lives in a neighboring flat, requires the protagonist to greet people in the supermarket, and offers frequent, unsolicited sartorial advice. Another, an older man, seems to be the Casanova of Alcoholics Anonymous; he attracts crowds of admirers in church basements; he seduces the protagonist by peeling off just one leg of her jeans and humping her in the woods.

Addiction doesn't just take the form of drugs and alcohol, and Huneven is brilliant in showing how a person can look for "surrogate substances." The protagonist in "Blame" finds herself "emotionally cheating" with a colleague; the dangerous, high-stakes, extramarital encounters between these two characters resemble a quicksand pit, and they feel just as perilous as the protagonist's dalliances with alcohol. (Emotional cheating is a theme Huneven picked up once again in her most recent novel, another masterwork, "Off Course.")

I love Huneven because she doesn't give us heroic protagonists; her people are flawed and even occasionally detestable, and yet we understand why they do what they do. I think reading Huneven--reading the work closely--can make you more compassionate, if only for an hour. Huneven has a way of reminding us, without preaching, of "the muck we all swim in."

For all these reasons, Huneven calls to mind the work of Anne Lamott, who has famously quoted a friend: "If you feel any kind of disappointment in yourself, at least have the good sense to shut yourself off from the world." (The quote is sarcastic, of course; we have to interact with the world *in spite* of our weakness and frailty and foolishness. It's the drama of those imperfect interactions that inspires Huneven and pushes her career along.)

I have other favorite addiction stories: "Dry," "Cost," "Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," "The Midnight Line," the Amy Winehouse documentary, various Whitney documentaries, "Lost Weekend" (novel), Helen Mirren's "Prime Suspect" series, "Darkness Visible" (not about drugs, but still...), certain Jesse segments of "Breaking Bad," "Incredible Now," "Smashed." It also seems to me that "Dear Evan Hansen" can be understood as an addiction story; even though Evan doesn't ingest any substances, he is addicted to a certain anxious way of being, and his plot can be read as a struggle against non-living, against a false, delusional approach to the world.

And, listening to various crime podcasts, I get the sense that drugs don't always get their narrative "due." Lawson, Shaffer, Laspisa: These disappearances maybe have more to do with mood-altering items than some people think.

Food for thought. Read Huneven! More later.

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