That quote comes from page 25---the first page of the second chapter of Chandler Brossard's The Bold Saboteurs. Take a look:
Underneath the tattered dust-jacket the design philosophy is found on the binding:
That description is from our first-person narrator and is used to describe his father, a violent alcoholic. It sounds like it could come from any vivid writing from recent times, but judging by the cover--which happens to be a first edition--it turns out to be much older.
Chandler Brossard was a writer from a Mormon family in Idaho, who's father was an alcoholic, and who's mom moved the family to Washington DC, after which Brossard headed to New York City. In DC, as a young writer, he got a job working for the Post. He moved to New York, lived a vagabond lifestyle in Greenwich Village, and was pushed to focus on fiction by the editor of The New Yorker.
That quote, and this book, was first published in 1953. It was Brossard's second novel, and is considered partly autobiographical, as the narrator, calling himself Yogi, is more of a disappointment to his enabling and overbearing mom, who favors his older brother. The father is mostly out of the picture, booted after a huge fight with the older brother, but I'm not all that far into the book.
Brossard, because of the fact he lived in Greenwich Village and wrote with a glaring brutality about petty thievery and a frank sexuality, is sometimes considered a Beat writer, actually, the oldest Beat writer. Ginsburg's Howl ('56), Kerouac's On the Road ('57) and Burrough's Naked Lunch ('59) came out close enough to Brossard's works, and they may have looked up to Chandler, but he personally scoffed at the idea he was a "Beat" writer. He didn't like the label, and felt his work had different aims and different methods.
Mostly because his works were so vivid and subject matter so dark (scary accurate talk about violent alcoholics in the early fifties?), his work wasn't as appreciated in the States as it should have been in its day, and now Brossard's less remembered than actual Beat writers. His works were very appreciated in France and Britain, and the French claimed him as a New Wave writer, a member of their avant-garde artistic movement.
That was a classification he didn't have a problem with. The people who thought he was a Beat writer felt his books were realistically written, but he says that the French knew better, that they recognized that his works were "a nightmare presented as flat documentary."
The first chapter of The Bold Saboteurs follows the 16 year old Yogi as he recounts how he got pinched by the cops for the first--and only--time. He was working a grift with this big dumbass Irish kid who had a fat nurse he wanted to nail. Yogi asks to see her jewelry, telling her he's studying the craft of making it. This is after the big Irish lout and her have done their thing (they sent Yogi out to get smokes--he walked around the block for a fifteen minutes). He spied where she returned the box, and returned the next day, flirting his way back in the apartment with a cleaning lady. The fat nurse would've ridden him that same night right after the Irish guy if he'd simple suggested it. He knew it and it made him sick to his stomach.
Well, after selling the jewelry he lied to the lout about it, telling him it wasn't worth anything and that he'd decided not to go back. He figured the Irish guy had turned him in after the nurse made a stink because he was pissed he'd been left out of the haul.
One cool aspect of the novel is Yogi's schizophrenic breaks with reality, as things go from tough, to gnarly, to bizarre, to a kind of absolute absurdity without warning.
Reading it is like reading The Catcher in the Rye mixed with a late-night lurid HBO castoff mixed with a fever dream.
I thought it was a nice discovery and break before going after Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I finished the fish book also, but my write up on that will be on the dad and Dan site.
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