Yesterday, I reviewed Nick Flynn’s first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. The sequel (just published), The Ticking is the Bomb, lacks the previous book’s power and energy. In a series of reveries, Nick Flynn thinks about old girl friends, failed relationships, torture, The Story of O, his mother, his father, and his new baby (yes, Flynn becomes a father!). Yet, the seeds of destruction are everywhere. Flynn has a baby with Inez, yet he still has “feelings” for Anna. On dating two women at the same time, Flynn opines: “For me, ‘dating’ often felt like reading Tolstoy–exhilarating, but a struggle, at times, to keep the characters straight.” Coming from a guy who’s part of a family of chronic substance abusers, this should come as no surprise. Flynn’s alcoholic father, the “star” of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, is threatened with eviction from his rat-infested, government-subsidized, apartment. Nick Flynn tries to delay the inevitable by removing 60 trash bags of clutter from the apartment, but in the end his father ends up in a nursing home. Flynn needed to go through The Ticking is the Bomb and remove the clutter from this book, too. GRADE: C+
Sadly, all too often that is the case – the second book just can’t live up to the first.
I have the first one on my list to read as soon as we get home from Florida.
There’s a falling off in THE TICKING IS THE BOMB, Jeff. Nick Flynn’s love life just isn’t that interesting.
I’m afraid this book is going to be a “skip” for me. I think I’m tapped out on the doom-and-gloom personal memoir–even though I acknowledge that the people writing them have lived through horrific things that I’m grateful to say I didn’t. And I’m totally turned off by Flynn’s approach to “dating” (a-hem) two women at the same time–especially since he has a child with one of them.
Even when you factor Flynn’s own issues into the equation, Deb, the story in this book is nowhere near as compelling as the story in ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY.
The publishers push writers to get that second book out and this is what happens.
ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY came out in 2004, Patti. It focused on Nick Flynn’s relationship with his alcoholic father and mentally disturbed mother. THE TICKING IS THE BOMB mostly concerns Flynn’s love life which I found tedious.
I agree with the grade. “Bullshit” is so much more powerful, more evocative. Two memoirs is hard to pull off. The same thing happens to Flynn that is happening to Mary Karr: there’s a kind of dilution, from one memoir to the next. “Liar’s Club” is fantastic; “Cherry” is merely titillating; and “Lit” is a wash.
Though the form of “Ticking” seems to rhyme with the disjointed confusion Flynn writes about, and enacts for the reader that same confusion, the “story” here is flat. Is this about Flynn’s love life? His aversion to torture? His trip to Vietnam with Travis? I find most of it tedious, too, and Flynn’s go-to move no longer excites me. He will find some gem of mysticism in a film or text or myth or whatever, and then turn that gem over and over in his hands, remark on all the facets of it, connect it to his own life, and then move on.
Good points, Allyn! Yes, Mary Karr’s books grew increasingly less powerful (and less interesting). Maybe some authors only have one great book in them.