 Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night In Suck City |
After dropping out of college, Flynn spent the next few years dwelling either on a shaky houseboat or in a warehouse in Boston's then notorious red-light district, known as the Combat Zone. The specter of his absent father, a self-proclaimed poet and con artist, who for stretches of time slept outdoors or in ATMs, hung over him. Supplying "the abridged story" of these events, Flynn writes: "I worked with the homeless from 1984 until 1990. In 1987 my father became homeless, and remained homeless for nearly five years." The instability and uncertainty of this familial history is echoed in Flynn's structurally unconventional tale.
A darkly comedic, nonlinear miscellany of prose mixed with dramatic, epistolary and other literary forms, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (W.W. Norton, 2004) features a cast of eccentrics, their crisscrossed episodes delineated like boxes of a hopscotch court into 81 sections (e.g., "funeral, unattended," "barefoot motorcycle," and "vodka, stamps, flowers"). These discrete units chart emotionally unstable terrain in which fractured players repeatedly step on a crack. Haphazardly raised during the early 1960s with an older brother (Thaddeus) by a young mother (Jody) in Scituate, Massachusetts, Flynn writes: "What I remember is that every six months for the first five years of my life we moved, but all within the same town, like we each had one foot nailed to the sidewalk."
The book's variably connectable sections also cement its two principal storylines. The first traces Nick's hard-knocks maturation from childhood through his career as a caseworker in a Boston homeless shelter. The second narrative speculates about the circumstances that lead to his phantom father, Jonathan Flynn, showing up for a bed at his then 27-year-old son's workplace—only the third time Nick had ever laid eyes on the man. Prior to this, he'd received strange letters from Jonathan, who claimed to have written a novel, The Button Man, based on a job he held while doing time in the Palm Beach County Jail.
"Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost," Flynn ruminates in his memoir, reflecting on the reunion with Jonathan. "But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting."
Gesturing toward my now completed diagram of stickmen and arrows (illustrating "that man" as the son of the riddle's "I"), Nick relates it to Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase favored by Jonathan to describe life on the streets). "The point is to open [the biography] up to further mysteries, not to solve anything," he says. "I worked on the tone of the book by cutting out answers. It seems very limiting to give an answer that's only one of many possible answers." Sleuthing by degrees in varying directions, the memoirist instead raises questions: Did his great-grandfather really invent a patented life raft? Did his father (as Jonathan obsessively insists) ever complete a novel? Why did his mother, Jody, commit suicide? Why does anyone drink? (Once, answering a college survey, Nick unhesitatingly answered, "I drink to get drunk.") Long since sober, and physically fit, the writer now quips, "Swimming is my Prozac."
Addressing matters like sobriety versus drunkenness, Flynn ably elevates the personal to the universal, a talent showcased in the inventive litany "same again," which for five straight pages lists nothing but drinking terms and phrases. "While the book was in progress, I'd share bits of this chapter at readings, and people from the audience would come up after and hand me more words on slips of paper," he explains. This kicky assemblage recommends the book's technique overall.
"There's a lot of genre-blending," Flynn says of this postmodern pastiche. "I also wanted to make the book readable. I didn't want it to be merely experimental for the sake of being experimental." But make no mistake: the author can produce chronologically straightforward narrative, evidenced by "The Button Man," a bricolage of material gleaned from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and reconstituted as a magazine article. "It's a New Yorker piece; they have their own style. It took me about five months," Flynn tells me. In contrast, he devoted nearly a decade to its full-length counterpart.
"I started to write Another Bullshit Night in Suck City 10 years to the day my father walked into the shelter," the author says. The project took shape in the course of videotaped encounters with Jonathan that Nick recorded and transcribed from 1995 to 1997; excerpts which were later broadcast on National Public Radio's "This American Life." Initially, he wrote for an hour or two a day, letting individual pieces "come out" and a narrative arc emerge. "I'm not a novelist; that's not how my memory works," Flynn maintains. "Memories don't come to me as seamless narratives, but as fragments. So the first few years, I gathered vignettes to see what I could remember around my father's homelessness and my childhood. It was to see the arc of his life and my life, and if they ended up in the same place." He was simultaneously writing poetry, echoed in the lyrical cadences of his prose.
Flynn began writing creatively during his 20s, but his literary indoctrination started with childhood trips to a musty bookshop in Scituate with his maternal grandmother, who perused "fat and lurid" romance novels. There Flynn purchased his first book, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, reading it through one night during fifth grade, the same year he memorized Poe's "The Raven."
Cultivating a love of mysteries, he penned one during junior high. Then, like a surprise witness in a murder trial, unexpected encouragement arrived. Writing of the first-ever letter he received, at age 16, from his father, Flynn confesses, "I learned that he called himself a writer, [and] I was already on my way, though perhaps part of me latched on to the chance to outdo him." Case closed.
Nick Flynn eventually completed an undergraduate degree in 1990, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. With work published in venerable journals, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and New England Review, he landed prestigious artist residencies and captured the coveted Discover/The Nation Award for Poetry in 1999. A year later he released the lyrically evocative collection Some Ether (Graywolf Press), which won more awards and fellowships. Next, he delivered Blind Huber (Graywolf Press, 2002), and read from it at the 2003 Woodstock Poetry Festival.
Some Ether revisits the poet's unsettling childhood, including his mother's suicide. Consciously departing from these themes, Blind Huber offers a unified sequence of persona poems based upon Francois Huber, a sightless, 18th-century French beekeeper. "We don't know if the bees really talk or if it's just Huber's imagination," Flynn states of these visually compact poems. But creating Huber's indeterminate ontology within deliberately imposed spatial confines helped unleash the characters (particularly Nick and Jonathan) and stylistic strategies of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.
Nakedly self-aware yet devoid of self-pity, Flynn's spirited coming-of-age chronicle has earned rave reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post and Esquire, and appears destined for big-screen adaptation. As disclosed in the Hollywood Reporter last November, Flynn has sold movie rights to Columbia Pictures, a logical turn of events, given his project's multimedia roots. Flynn also contributed to documentary filmmaker Hubert Sauper's prizewinning feature Darwin's Nightmare, which explores the effects of globalization.
Ever the writer-activist, Flynn offers, "In this country, right now, there's this perception called 'the Other'—Muslim/Christian, Red States/Blue States, homeless/not homeless—which seems divisive and dangerous in some way. I hope the book breaks that down even slightly for people, to complicate this 'Other.'"
Along with work on new poems, Flynn has lined up numerous featured appearances at literary festivals. Last year, he purchased a house in the Hudson Valley's Athens—the first he has ever owned. About this monumental step, the onetime peripatetic, perennially unsettled social worker states simply, "I'm trying to write about what that experience is like."
Presently, Nick continues to see his father, Jonathan, every few months. According to the younger Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City has given the elder a reason to hold himself together. "His picture and name have appeared in the Boston Globe," Nick relates. "Maybe his book will get published now. It needs work. He's of the Ginsberg first-thought, best-thought school. He's a good writer, just not a very diligent one." Luckily for us, the opposite remains true of that man's son.