A Drop of the Hard Stuff
July 7, 2011
By Lawrence Block
Publisher, copyright 2011, 319 pages
Examined, Analyzed and & Reviewed by Marion Aldridge,
Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of South Carolina
Contact at marion@cbfofsc.org or 803-779-1888
A Drop of the Hard Stuff is the first fiction book I have reviewed for BookBytes. I might have chosen some deep literary novel, filled with hidden metaphors and meanings, but A Drop of the Hard Stuff is simply a whodunit. Period. Block writes very good whodunits, but he will never win a Pulitzer or a Nobel Prize. He has been awarded the Edgar Grand Master Award which is the highest literary prize for the whodunit genre, given to such authors as Agatha Christie, John D. MacDonald, Graham Greene, and John le Carre. I read whodunits and make no apology for it. You don’t expect me to read only Old Testament theology and existential ethics, I hope.
Let me get a bit more of my defensiveness out of the way before I say why I recommend that good Christian people read A Drop of the Hard Stuff. Having been a pastor for over twenty-five years, I know how insulated, fragile and naïve some good church people can be. They know their world, the religious domain where people do not cuss, drink alcohol, commit adultery, and where they attend Sunday School and worship and Women’s Mission Society and midweek prayer service. But they do not know other worlds, and they can be easily offended when people do not dress appropriately, or swear, or do not behave according to their beloved church traditions.
I remember when I was growing up in North Augusta, we had a couple of members of Alcoholics Anonymous come to our church one night to present a program, and it was as if a couple of Martians had landed. Now that I think about it, they were probably Yankees who had imported their bad habits from the North. If people in our church were alcoholics, they hid it well.
A theme of my life for the past couple of decades has been to learn more about the worlds outside of my usual experiences, what I have called, “Worlds I know nothing about.” One of the ways I can experience these alternative universes is through reading. Reading Tales of the South Pacific or Zorba the Greek or A Passage to India are opportunities for me to visit other times and places, to expand my awareness. When you read, you discover that everyone does not think like you, talk like you, or act like you. You can experience vicarious pleasure and horror. I know some Christians who do not read fiction because it takes them to places they do not want to go. I understand that. About 100 pages of a novel about vampires are about 98 pages more than I ordinarily care to read. But, vampires are not real, and I have no need to know more about them.
On the other hand, the South Pacific and Greece and India are real places with real people, and hearing stories about those places and people helps me to understand our world.
A Drop of the Hard Stuff is about an alcoholic during his first year of sobriety. Most of us have never had that experience. The language is rough. The protagonists and antagonists are not nice people. There are murders. The reader is introduced to the world of the recovering alcoholic, the challenges, the bright spots, the low points. We hear the insider language, for example, the “geographical solution. Guy moves to California because New York is the problem. Then he moves to Alaska because California’s the problem. But he’s the problem himself, and wherever he goes, there he is.” You don’t need to be an alcoholic to understand that lots of people try out geographical solutions to their problems.
He nails the inner turmoil of some alcoholics (and many of us guilt-ridden Baptists who are not): “I’m just looking for a way for it to be my fault.”
Of course, the person trying to transform his or her life needs all the help available: “One way to avoid a slip is to stay out of slippery places.” That’s helpful.
Lawrence Block, in spite of a potentially depressing subject and main character, manages to keep the tone light: “I decided that the coffee and the Nutter Butter cookies covered enough of the four basic food groups to add up to lunch.” Matthew Scudder is the low-life hero of this particularly dark series (other titles: Eight Million Ways to Die, and A Long Line of Dead Men), but Lawrence Block also writes an almost comic series about a petty burglar who finds himself having to solve crimes to keep himself out of worse mischief.
True to the rather cynical world view of Matt Scudder, the detective in this novel, the story does not wrap us as nicely as an Agatha Christie mystery. But, neither does real life always resolve itself with a happy ending tied tightly with a big bright bow.
Read fiction. It will make you a smarter, if not a better, person.
My goal is to engage, comment on, interact with, reflect on, provide quotations from, and helpful insight regarding books of relevance to contemporary Christians. Disclaimer: As a service to pastors, Sunday school teachers and others within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Marion Aldridge produces these book “reviews.” His attempt to pay attention to the culture in which we live does not mean that Aldridge or CBF endorses every sentence of every book or even every sentence quoted in the review. Quotations from the book are in italics.
