Garlanded with praise from Percival Everett (‘the real deal’), Michael Deagler’s debut novel Early Sobrieties arrives with a fully formed literary voice best described as hysterical understatement. ‘Like all histories,’ Deagler’s twentysomething ex-alcoholic protagonist Dennis Monk tells us early on, ‘my family’s seemed composed of a series of recurring mistakes that, while theoretically avoidable, tended nevertheless to repeat themselves.’ Back living with his folks in suburban south Philadelphia after seven years of solid boozing, Monk is at leisure to repent his former life – a narrative of ‘utter shock and tragedy, a knee-capped bildungsroman’. The hysteria, while always close to the restrained surface of the prose, never quite breaks through.
This episodic novel has no plot as such: all we have is Monk’s peripatetic wanderings and the pleasure of his voice, which is consistently funny and wise. Realising that self-awareness was ‘recent, revelatory and bleak’, Monk sets about making amends for his drunken misdemeanours, though with little success. He spends much time reconnecting with old buddies in bars, ‘jealous of everybody for everything’, unable to interact socially, downing glasses of water while they get happily hammered: ‘With every round he ordered me a water… though I hardly needed so many. The accumulation of half-empty cups made it look like I was preparing a glass-harp performance.’
Unable to find work other than as a delivery driver (‘I’d been misinformed regarding the centrality of F. Scott Fitzgerald to the American job market’), Monk leaves his parents’ house and drifts from couch to couch, staying with college friends, also witnessing drunken altercations whose violence is described in prurient, albeit drily comic, terms.
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