In Better by John O’Brien, O’Brien proves beyond a doubt that he knew how to write about alcoholics: his portraits of William and Double Felix are as unflinchingly harsh and heartbreakingly sympathetic as was his searing presentation of  the self-destructing alcoholic In Leaving Las Vegas.  O’Brien created complete characters in his desperate drinkers, with all the nuances, the weakness and denial, the hopelessness, and the humanity. What O’Brien does best of all is expose the apathy behind alcoholism, the giving-up on better solutions to living  — a deterioration of will — and the reliance on inebriation to survive until deterioration becomes complete in death.

Apathy is insidious, and more so when hidden, as in Better, behind a luster of hedonism, clouded by alcohol and sex.  William lives in a Hefner-esque house, guest of Double Felix, with an abundance of alcohol, televisions, and willing women.  But the house becomes a cage, the TVs only show reruns of Love Boat, and the willingness of the women is not matched by the ability of the male members.   There is a lot of sex in the book, but none of it is satisfying or pleasurable: it is relentless, self-absorbed, or incomplete.  This is not a good- times book about sex and drinking, it is a realistic assessment of the emptiness that invades when sex and alcohol are used to medicate oneself into oblivion. Or perhaps William and Double Felix reach for sex as a salvation but the salvation doesn’t come, and neither do the men.

What O’Brien understood and conveyed so strongly, with language and timing and pace that is perfectly suited for the conveyance of this awful truth, is that alcoholism is a drugging of self until the end of self arrives, the final salvation being death.  Perhaps the title of Better refers to the final turn the novel takes, when calamity forces action, apathy is momentarily abandoned, and for at least two of the house residents a better future becomes possible and death is staved off.  I can imagine no other explanation for the title, as there is no other “better” in this book, just a constant worsening.  After all, that is what the life of a drinking  alcoholic is, a worsening until the end.