The book in question is Chuck Kinder’s new “Honeymooners,” about the West Coast writing scene in the late ’70s. Those days were a last call for the grand (if dismaying) big-drinking, bad-behaving, macho tradition of American fiction. Sure, some writers still like to hoist a drink or three and break up the furniture, but for a bunch of reasons-from modern health science to the disappearance of genteel poverty as a viable lifestyle-the bad old days are pretty much gone. Or at least, partly spent in 28-day inpatient programs, about which one then writes a memoir.
Kinder’s book received considerable attention before publication because it literally piles roman a clef atop roman a clef. For starters, Kinder’s main character, Ralph Crawford, is clearly Raymond Carver, the revered short-story writer. Carver, Kinder and a cast of other well- and lesser-known literary lights-including, occasionally, this reviewer-roamed the San Francisco Bay area and Montana during the ’70s in a more or less nonstop party (interrupted by bouts of writing and teaching). Finally, various calls of age, family, economics and health put an end to the scene. But by then, the lifestyle had provided plenty of natural material for Carver’s unique fiction about desperate people barely hanging onto-and often losing-the trailing edge of middle-class respectability.
After Carver’s early death from lung cancer in 1988 (he had by then been sober for a number of years), word got out that Kinder, a big, amiable West Virginian ensconced at the University of Pittsburgh teaching fiction, was writing a tell-all novel of that era, centrally involving a Carver-like character. Some of Carver’s friends expressed concern about the potential invasion of the deceased author’s privacy-but then the book didn’t appear. Kinder toiled away for nearly two decades on a manuscript that swelled to 3,000 pages, but never reached a publisher.
In the meantime, however, one of Kinder’s students, a young man named Michael Chabon, apparently used his class time to observe his struggling professor. A few years after graduating, Chabon turned the table by writing a roman a clef of his own, a novel called “Wonder Boys,” featuring a somewhat dissipated but still hard-partying writing professor who was toiling endlessly on a 3,000 page manuscript. Kinder, not at all upset, was delighted when Michael Douglas played the professor in the movie version. (And Chabon went on to win the Pulitzer Prize this year for “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.”)
So now “Honeymooners,” the roman a clef that has already appeared in a roman a clef, is finally in print, complete with a don’t-try-this-at-home subtitle: “A Cautionary Tale.” The book, at a fraction of its original 3,000 pages, is a hilarious, archly ironic and thoroughly original tale of the literary lowlife, with all its attendant alcohol, drugs, infidelity, fraud, deceit and related forms of socially unacceptable behavior. And to the relief of those who knew Carver in the old days, “Honeymooners” is a warty but loving portrait of the author before he turned his life around. The classic dissolute author scene has, of course, been chronicled for decades, archetypically by Charles Bukowski in the ’60s and then by numerous imitators. What distinguishes Kinder’s telling is its voice and humor, as well as the fact that he has accurately recorded the hazardous milieu in which some of the most influential short fiction of the late 20th century was written.
There was a special frisson for me in “Honeymooners,” since I’d lived some of those days myself-as a junior associate, one might say, years away from making partner. An undergraduate at the time, I tended to be the one who drove the car when the older members of the crew couldn’t locate the steering wheel. My undergraduate high jinks and romances didn’t even register on the Richter scale of Kinder and Carver’s grand misadventures, so my character didn’t make the cut for the abridged version of “Honeymooners.”
But Kinder warns me that a character much like myself appears in the longer manuscript, which he promises to publish someday in full on the Internet. That, of course, leads me to ponder just what walk-on I might get. My best bet is the evening I took my dream girl, an elegant literature graduate from Smith, along on a night with the gang. Initially thrilled to be in the company of writers who were even then making their mark, her enthusiasm dimmed as the evening wore soddenly on. Near dawn, we found ourselves in a Jacuzzi in some apartment complex in San Jose, naked and surrounded by half-gallon bottles of vodka bobbing in the bubbles. Suddenly, the landlord appeared with the local police and-in what I have come to think of as a classic Carver moment-we were rousted. The apartment dweller was evicted on the spot.
My sweetheart never returned my phone calls after that brush with literature-in-the-making. But who knows? Maybe the story will turn out differently when Kinder publishes his full manuscript. In the meantime, even the abbreviated “Honeymooners” will provide readers plenty of similar material, with neither heartbreak nor hangover in the morning.
