Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming (Sensitive Skin Books, 2012) by Carl Watson
Reviewed by Kevin Riordan
This is the mid-seventies the way I remember them: oblivious to trashy fashions and music and up to its elbows in survival, physical and mental, with a chorus of the sanctimoniously stoned explaining everything in revolutionary jargon. In Robert Stone’s 2006 memoir Prime Green, the eminent novelist feelingly recollects the cultural landscape in transition from beats to freaks from his ringside perch. Carl Watson’s new book showcases the shift a decade or so later, from idealistic anarchists to acid casualty barflies in the blink of a jaundiced eye. Scores of vividly rugged individuals bully, cadge, threaten and beguile us as hyper-literate Frank ‘Luc’ Payne and his just freed singing jailbird partner Tanya ride their temperamental motorcycle, a 1969 BSA Lightning, up the West Coast to Portland, battling angst and spouting bitter truths: cynicism is a modern kind of Buddhism; the bedroom is the most dangerous room on earth, reality is a negotiation. There is scarcely a page that doesn’t seethe with splenetic observations. The fact that so many are both funny and resonant makes them a worthwhile substitute for the more conventional stuffing of a novel. Payne is a gin mill Jean-Paul Sartre who has failed to improve himself by any of his literary aspirations. A precise grasp of the mechanics of getting wasted by any means available puts you right there in one sordid scene after another. Just as vivid are the hangovers and the aches caused through motoring and migrant fruit picking, one of the few jobs Luc is able to land.
The road takes them to the winds of Chicago, where “that old hawk whittled away like a knife at the sunny sanity of the newly arrived.” The city, drawn with skill, offers various jobs to those looking, and they are able to keep on functioning, if miserably, in a new locale whose best days are behind it. You could say that the best days were past for every single character and location. Watson could be the Ken Burns of the stumblebum and he excels at portraiture of the lost souls of Skid Row, whatever their age or defining vice, those who have entered into “a contract with depravity.” Frank rounds out his travels by bus, solo, revisiting New Orleans and points west, exorcizing nostalgia at every stop, suspecting that he himself, like each city he hits, suffers from ‘Old Town Syndrome.’
The arc of this novel belongs to a song, Janis Joplin’s Piece of My Heart, from the obscure roots of Big Brother and the Holding Company to the Muzak methadone version that accompanies the grind of progress. Just when you are ready to shake this book in the hope of making something narrative happen, a pivotal, foreshadowed figure berates Frank for confusing life with a story. “In life, everything matters, the details get overwhelming… you can’t make a plot by stringing together a bunch of aphorisms and non-sequiturs.”And so it miraculously becomes a novel after all, with loose threads tied up in a way that I won’t reveal other than to say the incongruous name dropping of Ross MacDonald was a clue. It is an elegant, hollow love story for the post-love generation, closer to self-destruct than self-help. Like a barroom stranger who can read your darkest secrets, Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming is infested with uncanny insight into our tragic and curious lot.
Kevin Riordan is a native Chicagoan who was born in 1950. He attended UIC, SAIC, and Columbia College. He is on their staff as a graphic artist and is an adjunct professor in the Interactive Arts and Media department; moreover he is an inveterate bookworm and visual artist, whose artists books appear in a few choice collections.