'The Alcoholic' is a scabby and subversive masterpiece
The Sunday Review: "The Alcoholic"
by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel (Vertigo Comics, hardcover, $19.99)
On Sale Sept. 24.
It was a grim weekend here in Los Angeles. There was a horrific train wreck on Friday afternoon and that same night the brilliant novelist David Foster Wallace was found dead at his home in Claremont with a noose around his neck. The self-inflicted death of any gifted writer starts your mind searching; the natural impulse is to scrutinize their body of work, which trailed behind their lives like the tail of a kite. All of this was circling in my brain this morning when I picked up “The Alcoholic,” the wrenching (and, frequently, the retching) graphic novel written by novelist Jonathan Ames, whose own besotted life inspired the contours of this tale. The book is brilliantly executed with a boldly scabby story that is both demoralizing and relevatory and, amazingly, deeply funny at times. "The Alcoholic" gives us a tortured soul who is bottled up in more ways than one, but that humor and a truly wicked honesty keep the pages turning.
The artwork here is by Dean Haspiel, who put pictures to the words of Harvey Pekar in the “The Quitter,” a similarly paced (and titled) comic-as-confession that was put together with an outsider spirit and a bitterly adept eye for human examination. “The Quitter” was good, but “The Alcoholic” is sublime because it is hilarious and bawdy and deeply distressing. Ames is a member of the walking wounded of this addiction age and every bar is next battlefield; “The Alcoholic” is so scary and so funny because it’s written with the detached voice of a war correspondent who is so busy taking vivid notes that he doesn’t have the sense to run for his life.
