June 3, 2009
Greg Bottoms is well-known for his harrowing and moving memoir, Angelhead: A Brother's Descent into Madness. His novel Fight Scenes, which is more like a collection of related short stories than a novel, draws from his life again but this time the brother is a peripheral character, barely mentioned, and the pivotal personality is the narrator's best friend, Mark.
The two boys are twelve-years old going hell bent towards burnt-out agelessness, smoking pot and drinking and already way beyond the call of the class room or the sports field or the library, much less any kind of religion. The only thing that will save the narrator is his writing but he is ashamed of his facility with words (it's a girl thing) and hides his abilities under idiotic and self-destructive behavior. Mark is his mentor in the knowledge of all things forbidden, from porn to drugs to sex.
Bottoms is able to pull off an amazing feat in these stories, which is to mix an adult perspective in with a pre-adolescent's view of life. He writes with the authority of looking backward and yet also with the piercing vulnerability of kids of that age. The narrator and Mark are still such kids, even as they hurl themselves into adult play-acting, undertaking acts of sex, violence, and self-destruction that they can barely understand. Mark seeks release from his unhappy life; the narrator is more circumspect, more of a spectator yet still both seeking and fearing the thrills that Mark offers.
The novel is entitled Fight Scenes and every chapter -- every story -- is a physical or verbal confrontation, between kids or between adults or between kids and adults. Underlying all these scenes, there is another kind of confrontation, a worse one, the clash between childhood and between adulthood. As children, we experience pleasure and hope that is untainted by anticipation of its loss: everything is of the moment and forever at the same time. Our view of the world is quite literally un-adulterated. Growing up means beginning to understand the connection between joy and loss, pleasure and pain: they are no longer separate.
There are moments of tenderness and possibility (hope) for our narrator but then a very grown-up reality comes crashing in, as when his friend Mark defaces a photo of himself and leaves it on his mother's refrigerator: "if a mother had any idea of what her son's life was like, what his thoughts were like, what he was like, he might kill her by breaking her heart" or when the narrator, having spent a typical afternoon with Mark's father and the father's roommate, smoking and drinking, he struggles to define the "power that made all the adults I knew work and suffer." Harsh truths for a twelve-year old to deal with.
The parents of the boys are either absent or so irresponsibly present, it would have been better if they were absent, along with their drugs, beer, vodka, and porn. As in Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned, the adults have checked out and left the kids to fend for themselves. The results are not good. Most poignantly, this is a story of a kid who still wants to be a kid; his friend Mark, pulled kicking and screaming from childhood by his parents' divorce, will not let his friend stay behind and drags him along too, into a void state that has neither the ignorant bliss of youth nor the seasoned pleasure of maturity but is instead a hell of abuse and fear and loneliness.
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