When I first left home, at nearly twenty-one, I got a job as a waitress in a bar in the Edmonton city center. During happy hour and a little beyond, the bar would be filled with the expected assortment of downtown types – everyone from suits to bums – but once the DJ would arrive at nine o'clock, the quiet regulars would file out and the young crowd would take over; loud and crazy and beautiful, every night of the week. The bar staff were also loud and crazy and beautiful, and like the patrons, we'd be drinking all night, too (my poison was vodka and tonic, frequently and generously free-poured into a beer mug by my best friend Delight; a dishy bartender who made the boys go weak). Most of us who worked there loved the party atmosphere – only the tray in my hand separated me from the laughing and dancing people who weren't being paid to hang out at a bar every night – but there were some staff who had been in the game too long; people who would be stumbling and slurring long before last call; people who were
Ablutions is subtitled “Notes for a Novel”, and as deWitt was apparently a barback in a seedy Hollywood bar as a young man, it's tempting to think of this as a bildungsroman taken straight from his own experience. Because we're meant to see this book as “notes”, new characters are often introduced as follows:
Discuss Merlin. He is seventy years old, with close-cropped white hair, a long white beard, and desperate deep-set gray eyes. He chain-smokes brown More cigarettes; they tremble in his spotted, hairy hands or hang from the corners of his lipless mouth and he speaks from behind a screen of smoke, his fingers interlocking like puzzle pieces, a visual aid to some astrological peculiarity or possibly a dirty joke. His teeth are jagged, yellow, and rodent-like, and when he laughs his neck is all veins and tendons and you force yourself to look for no reason other than it is a difficult thing to do.Or:
Discuss Ginny with her short brown hair, her pug nose, and her plump red hands like spotted meat left to swell in the desert sun. Her eyes are popped and her pores emit a smell of chili dogs and french fries dipped in mayonnaise and you cannot help but wonder what horrors reside in her large intestine.And, oddly, deWitt writes in the second person point-of-view, referring to the main character (a barback who is presumably based on himself), as “you”:
You have bad teeth and your breath is poor. Your tips consequently are also poor and there is clotted blood in your mouth and you lose tooth pieces on soft food like mashed potatoes and rice. You are talking to the bar owner's wife when an entire molar comes dislodged and lies heavily on your tongue. You hope to keep the tooth a secret but you are speaking strangely and her head is cocked in wonder. You have begun to sweat and blush and you pray that she does not ask what the problem is but she is opening her mouth and this is just what she does. You swallow the molar and hold out your palms to show that you are not hiding anything. You are an honest man with a clean, hopeful heart.But despite being deemed “notes”, and despite being under 200 pages long, Ablutions doesn't feel slight or unevolved – there are numerous perfectly wrought vignettes, strung together in a satisfying story arc, and as I hope these excerpts show, the writing is consistently interesting and evocative. Focussing on drug dealers, drug users, and desperate Hollywood wannabees, the characters are all terrible people – including the alcoholic narrator – and while there is little hope for redemption, I was hoping that there would be an opportunity for escape. This is deWitt's first novel, and while I wish I could have read it before his later books made me a fan (if only for a truly unbiased opinion), I'm certain I still would have recognised the truths it holds if I had found it in 2009, as I've also been a witness to these truths. Loved it.
