Early Sobrieties
This is the problem Deagler poses: How to turn the act of staying sober — which has no arc, no urgent movement toward anything but its own continuation — into a narrative worth reading? ... At times, the book reads less like a novel than a series of disjointed episodes... with new settings and characters. But somehow it works. The novel adds up to more than just a chronicle of near misses ... Early Sobrieties builds into a moving, comic meditation on the impossibility of imposing narrative structure on our lives.
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This idea—sobriety as an arrested plot, the recovering alcoholic’s journey as “a knee-capped bildungsroman”—poses a narrative challenge, one Deagler solves by proposing the couch surfing novel as a version of the road novel.
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The witty, fiercely intelligent story of a young alcoholic in the fragile early days of sobriety ... Wry, sharp, charming, resistant to neat closures and easy turns—a debut of enormous promise.
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