Started well enough, didn’t it? The Alcoholics did indeed have promise. I just picked this from a Goodreads recommendation. Doing that is interesting, because it’s essentially a random dice-roll chance of getting a good book. The Alcoholics isn’t a good book, unfortunately. It’s not horribly written, nor does it start poorly. The book simply has too many sub-plots that go absolutely nowhere and not enough substance to sustain itself. We’ll start at the – start. The beginning of the book sets up the protagonist (Doc Murphy) well enough. Doc Murphy is head of the El Healtho (seriously?) Rehab Clinic for alcoholics and he’s on the beach surrounding the clinic, thinking about his patients and stuff, then thinking about walking into the ocean and drowning himself. After this he goes back to the clinic and his possible suicide (and any chance of a better story) is abandoned for good. We discover Doc doesn’t have much of a character, other than he’s a Doc and he goes around treating patients (because he’s a doc). There’s a flimsy threat that if one of his patients doesn’t continue staying on the whole clinic’ll go under, but the story never focuses on this or makes it seem like a huge deal (big mistake). Unfortunately, the story encompasses Doc going around to his seven or so patients and the author giving each of them some pointless backstory. WHY COULDN’T THE STORY BEEN ABOUT THE DOC’S POSSIBLE SUICIDE!? That was interesting, Jim! I know you can’t hear me because you’re dead but seriously, c’mon! I don’t care that Susan Kenfield is having a baby and she’s an alcoholic. Or that the nurse with the annoying-ass stutter is into sadomasochistic sessions with the patients (ok, that was kind of interesting but, again, not focused on). But no. Instead, this whole book focuses on each of the alcoholics, most of whom are as uninteresting as ants (bad comparison, ants are way more interesting). One alcoholic – Jeff Sloane – is an adman, and I have no idea why he’s in this book. He does absolutely nothing (other than pretend to take an anti-booze pill he was supposed to take, and then drink booze [to the puzzlement of Doc Murphy]). Same with the brothers of a successful literary agency. They’re alcoholics and never let themselves drink while at work. That’s the extent of their characters. Awesome.Fantastic.Goodread..? No. Not really. I just wish the novel focused on something, as opposed to stringing out all these sub-plots. Sub-plot after sub-plot after sub-plot till you’re wondering where the main one ran off to. I wanted to like this. It had some interesting writing, sure, but the book went nowhere. There were no stakes, really. Nothing to care about. The novel just strung me along. I wanted those break-down moments, moments of contemplation, a focus on Doc Murphy’s hectic mind, and maybe more on the whole suicide thing. Instead I got cardboard-cut alcoholics and a Doc who could’ve used a nice big injection of dimension and flaw.
