Novelist’s Identity Drowns in Drinking Memoir

Alcoholism is the great leveler. In an AA meeting, wealth or success means nothing when everyone sits on folding chairs, clutching their plastic cups of weak coffee and telling their too-similar tales. Whether you are a novelist or the daughter of one matters little. The way alcohol seeps into a family’s life until it practically controls it is painfully unexceptional. So, another book about alcoholism has to bring something new to the myriad number of memoir books drenched in booze. As Tolstoy shows us in “Anna Karenina,” all unhappy families are not alike.

Novelist Susan Cheever’s “Home Before Dark,” a memoir about her father, the novelist and short story writer John Cheever, was a rich book. Yet she never mentioned in it that she, like her father, was an alcoholic. Instead, “Note Found in a Bottle” is the story of her alcoholism.

As Cheever recounts in her new memoir, in the 1950s and 1960s when she was growing up, alcohol was considered so much a part of the burgeoning suburban lifestyle that it was difficult to distinguish between an evening cocktail and the dangerous disease that alcohol could signal. America was still innocent, with alcohol as its elixir. As the ‘60s began to fall apart so did the notion that cocktails could be merely drinks before dinner. Today, alcoholism is recognized as a disease and is no longer a secret inside families, as Cheever so aptly puts it.

What Cheever does well in this book is to evoke affectionately that once seemingly innocent time. “Every evening at six o’clock, right on schedule--the grown-ups in the suburbs would prepare for what they called their preprandial libation. They twisted open the caps of the clinking, golden bottles and filled the opalescent ice bucket, brought out the silver martini shaker and the heart-shaped strainer and the frosted glasses, and the entire mood would change. . . . I loved the paraphernalia of drinking, the slippery ice trays that I was allowed to refill and the pungent olives . . .”

But the benign paraphernalia turns on the family as her father’s alcoholism tempers everything. “The family cars made lots of trips to the body shop. In the evenings there were terrible fights. Almost any disagreement quickly escalated into a deadly silence or an apocalyptic rage.” Any child of an alcoholic could have written these lines. A literary memoir should be evocative enough so that the particular can be made universal, without lapsing into cliche. “Note Found in a Bottle” falls short, despite its sprinkling of famous literary personalities.

Cheever employs bland writing as she delves into her father’s alcoholism and her own alcoholism, from college until the near present, including several marriages that were marred by alcohol. Too much of the book suffers from her telling what happened without showing it. “I don’t even remember what I drank most of the time. I just drank the way everyone I knew drank. Sometimes I forgot what happened when I drank; so did everyone.”

When, early in Cheever’s first marriage, she sees a psychiatrist who sexually fondles her in his office, she retells it without recounting how she felt at the time or feels now. It’s stunning that when the man whom she calls her “ultimate ally, my secret weapon” in a troubled marriage acts so inappropriately toward her, she never describes what such a betrayal felt like. If perchance, under the guise of alcohol, Cheever didn’t recognize her doctor’s inappropriate and unethical behavior, surely she does now, but we’ll never know.

Cheever describes how her father enabled her drinking--not unusual, because alcoholics need company for their drinking. She surely feels something resembling sadness or betrayal at this father-daughter bond. But her writing doesn’t inform us. “He knew how important it was for someone like me to have a drink waiting. . . . that’s the kind of thing alcoholics understand about other alcoholics, but my father never talked to me about my drinking; not then, not ever. I wonder though how it must have felt for him to order me that drink.”

When Cheever finally hits bottom, her aid in recovery is a newfound belief in God, which she notes is “intensely private and truly beyond my ability to describe.” One wants to respect such a belief, but this declaration offers an extremely unsatisfying ending to a book that never realizes its potential. More dominant than Cheever’s recovery is the subtext of “Note Found in a Bottle”--about being Cheever’s daughter and the wife of three writers, all alcoholics. The frustration is where to find Susan Cheever in all of this.