There’s no way to put it nicely. The Night of the Gun is the
memoir of a recovering cokehead/alcoholic who through sheer, almost
ugly, force of will, gets sole custody of his twin daughters and
becomes a reporter for the New York Times. Having first learned
of David Carr through his video blogging for the Times over
several Oscar campaigns—he has rotten taste but managed to
correctly pick Crash over Brokeback Mountain—I
always assumed he was a skinny homosexual. Apparently, he’s more of a
serial girlfriend beater. The only reason he isn’t 300 pounds is a bout
with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The Night of the Gun should have been unbearable. But Carr
tempers self-recrimination with humility, including a quiet respect for
the religion of his ancestors and a wry tolerance for corny
support-group slogans. He also counters the untidy shame of the junkie
genre with the no-nonsense tactics of the journalist. At first, Carr’s
obsession with reinterviewing former acquaintances, excavating
stomach-turning medical records and police reports, and fact-checking
his clearest memories seems like showing off. Soon, though, it becomes
clear that this rigor is a signal for the anxiety with which he
approaches his mortifying past. His meticulousness is indeed a form of
posturing, but it adds another layer to the book.
There are irritating things about this memoir, including rampant
name-dropping (Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rene Descartes,
Oliver Sacks, John Cheever, Ivan Pavlov, William Shakespeare, and
Charles Dickens all make appearances in the first 30 pages; close
personal buddies Tom Arnold and Jayson Blair sneak in by the end) and a
number of too-short, throwaway chapters. Still, it’s unsparing and
smart. I don’t want to meet Carr, necessarily, but I’m happy to have
made the acquaintance of his book.
