Drugs

June 18, 2012
Helton fails to follow the creative writing 101 admonishment to "show, don't tell" in this part faux-memoir, part social critique. Mundane details of drug acquisition are endlessly recounted with the timbre of a shopping list: "I spent thousands of dollars on this drug which cost then about 100 dollars a gram, or three hundred bucks for an eightball." As a teenager, the narrator and protagonist, Jake, begins with the requisite gateway joints, while avoiding landscaping work and driving around 1980s Texas subdivisions. By chapter 2, he's onto coke; chapter 3, methadone; chapter 11, Oxycontin, and so on down the road for several decades. Girls come and go and the drugs evolve with the times, but Jake's life and Helton's prose remains flat and exhausting. In an entire book dedicated to drug use, one would hope for some urgency, surreal tenderness, compelling danger orâat the very leastâthe cheap thrill of superficial glamour. Unfortunately, readers won't find any of that here; R. Crumb's illustrated cover is the best part.

May 1, 2012
This is your book. This is your book on drugs. Our daily lives, as Aldous Huxley--duly quoted in the epigraph to short story writer and memoirist Helton's newest (Man and Beast, 2001, etc.)--once observed, range from the tortured to the tedious. Either extreme begs to be escaped from, and lo, whence drugs. We take Helton's "Jake" to be an alter ego for the author; if he is not, then this book, categorized as fiction but with matter-of-factness that suggests extensive, em, field research, as well as narrative flatness, is a masterwork of close observation, a new rejoinder to S. E. Hinton's work half a century ago. Helton has been likened to Bukowski, but there was an exuberance to Bukowski; so far as we know, he has not been likened to the Denis Johnson of Jesus' Son, whose characters had some small measure of self-awareness and enough oomph for us to be interested in them. Alas, Helton's tone is as affectless as the Texas plains, where Jake does a little poking about, earning a few bucks in construction here and bumming there, just enough to land a score. He starts off a cipher toking a little boo--"I was extremely curious about drugs as they were so verboten in my own home"--and progresses, via methadone and crystal meth, to the mad-pimp lifestyle and thence collapse without much emotional freight, as if it were all happening to someone else. Perhaps this is intentional; perhaps not. In defense of the narrative, however, the author does serve up a good recipe for how not to live one's life: "two twenty-four canister boxes [of nitrous oxide] at Planet K or restaurant supply stores every day," followed by a little weed and "only three Vicodin and two Flexeril." Kids, don't try it at home. The takeaway: Drugs are boring. Find something interesting to do--and something interesting to read.

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