08/11/08
Text: Scott Indrisek
By now you’ve probably heard of David Carr, the thriving journalist-cum-crackhead who later cleaned up his act, got a gig with the New York Times, and wrote a "reported memoir" about his travails. The book is called The Night of the Gun, and it’s been getting enough critical hand jobs to power all of Manhattan (if the city could use hand jobs as a form of alternative energy, that is—which is, in all likelihood, very possible.)
Here’s the only problem with Carr’s inventive memoir: it’s not that good. Yours Truly wanted to like it—wanted to love it, in fact—but the book’s trajectory falls flat and impotent by the second half. Sadly, it’s more fun hearing what a mess Carr made of his life than watching as he pieces it back together. The Night of the Gun is written as a vague response to the type of truth-challenged memoir-ficton employed by James Frey. Carr lugs a video camera along to interview friends and family members about his own past. The conceit is a novel one, and it plays well for a while, but eventually degenerates into lame reflections on the author’s temperament, charisma, and brutal genius.
Throughout, Carr struggles with a familiar dilemma for anyone writing an autobiography: why should strangers care about this individual life, however rough and tumble it may have been? In the end, he’s unable to provide many concrete reasons. Carr started with a lot of promise, dropped off into the morass of smoking and shooting coke, had twin daughters, and then morphed into a responsible dad and go-to journalist. That’s a great saga, for sure—but The Night of the Gun doesn’t really add anything new to the memoir genre, which is already too bloated for its own good.
