Exile on Kalamazoo Street - Tapa blanda

Ordinarily, I do not care for stories about alcoholics (they tend to follow the same pattern) or about writers (as I writer myself, I don't find their challenges very interesting), which means I tend to have even less sympathy for stories about alcoholic writers. Exile on Kalamazoo Street by Michael Loyd Gray is an exception.

It is the story of Bryce Carter, a 51-year-old novelist with a drinking problem. He's been successful enough to have published three novels and sell one for a screenplay that brought in enough money he could buy a small house in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He's taught creative writing in college. When he found himself going down for the third time in the Whiskey River, he exiled himself in the house, resolving not to step one foot outside the door until . . . well, maybe never. His sister who lives in town buys his groceries and delivers them and, at his request, captures a black cat that becomes Black Kitty, Bryce's constant companion.

Because he is always home, Bryce is a sitting duck (fish in a barrel?) for visitors. These include a former drinking buddy who does his best to push Bryce off the wagon, a Presbyterian minister who would like to save Bryce's eternal soul, a 23-year-old former student who has an adorable shaved vulva, a former academic colleague, and, eventually, two Hollywood flunkies dispatched to nudge Bryce into writing a screenplay based on his third novel--which is by his account "a self-indulgent mess by a self-indulgent drunk . . . a 500-page leviathan that lurches finally into incoherence about a man searching for his soul." (Exile on Kalamazoo Street is 151 pages and while somewhat self-referential and somewhat self-indulgent, it is neither incoherent nor a mess.)

The novel begins with a chapter of Bryce sliding enthusiastically into Whiskey River in a local bar, but Gray writes without apology or explanation. Good! The rest of the novel covers the months Bryce spends in exile with Black Kitty and his interactions with his visitors. His sister has sicced the minister on him: "But I couldn't be angry with Janis, my younger and only sister, a dutiful mother, freshly divorced, who believed unflinchingly in the magic the church might wield on wounded people as surely as I doubted it. Janis was an onward marching Christian soldier. But she just wanted the best for me."

Bryce is a writer, but he does not write in his exile. For one thing, he is still recovering from his third novel. Speaking about it to the minister, he says, "Many critics said there's no story at all, Reverend. I recall my agent telling me that if it sold, it would because there wasn't another book quite like it. Turns out that's a good reason why no other books are quite like it." Much later, after he's been hired to write the screenplay, "I thought of the irony of being tasked to write a film about a man with the ability to travel the world [he's won the lottery] searching for some eternal truth. I thought of truth as just a word and a good idea, but something that did not really exist. There were actions and reactions, statements and replies, but there was little that could be called truth."

And yet. And yet. I believe Exile on Kalamazoo Street is filled with truths large and small. That, and Gray's dialogue, descriptions, and the opinions he attributes to Bryce make the book delightful. Unlike the typical alcoholic memoir ("How I overcome terrific odds to overcome my drinking"), this novel is a fascinating fictional account of one man's experience of internal exile. I was willing to believe every word of it.
--Wally Wood, Book Pleasures.com, 10/17/2014

http: //www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/articles/7237/1/Exile-on-Kalamazoo-Street-Reviewed-By-Wally-Wood-Of-Bookpleasurescom/Page1.html#.VEFHaBbp86F

"Together, his isolated moments and his human interaction through a variety of encounters--religious, personal, professional and artistic in nature--all offer a perspective on Bryce Carter that reveal the different shades of the protagonist to us. But perhaps Gray's Exile on Kalamazoo Street in truth echoes in literature form the genius of theatre and opera to use a single stage to tell a rich and diverse story at the heart of which is the human character or characters. Exile on Kalamazoo Street is one of those stories that comes along every once in a while. These are stories that have a pleasant feel to them, and yet the feeling of warm satisfaction they provide cannot be expressed in words." --Paul Risker, Pop Matters
http: //www.popmatters.com/review/193313-exile-on-kalamazoo-street/

"Gray is one of only a handful of current writers who share a strong male voice, telling their tales through mouths of men who, despite being flawed, ugly or even unlikeable, never pander to the reader for the sake of a metaphorical group hug.... [This is] fiction seasoned by the musk of men who are comfortable in their skin and have a viewpoint to share. It is fiction written from a man's perspective, illustrating a man's dreams, a man's hopes and a man's fears. Who should read a book like Exile on Kalamazoo Street? Men, of course, who will identify with the characters and story. But also women, who will marvel at the insights into how men think and why they act as they do."
--Ned Randle, author of Baxter's Friends and the poetry collection, Running at Night

Bryce Carter was once a novelist with a following. But unlike James Joyce's Ulysses, which is genius to millions, Bryce's experimental novel Reflections was genius to maybe three people. After walking away from his teaching job, Bryce was headed on a one-way collision course down Whiskey River, with only one path to survival: sobriety. And for him, giving up drinking meant exiling himself from his former life. Now Bryce is holed up in his house on Kalamazoo Street along with his cat, Black Kitty, also a refugee from the cold, snowy world outside. The terms of his self-imposed exile make him dependent on his sister and a sitting duck for anyone who cares to drop by, including an officious minister, an old drinking buddy, an alluring former student, and a pair of Hollywood flunkies who offer Bryce a chance to rescue Reflections from obscurity-if only he can write the screenplay. Unfortunately Bryce's well of creativity has dried up along with his will to drink, and the more time he spends in exile, the less inclined he is to dip a toe into the icy waters of reality.