Ablutions Book Review

Patrick DeWitt’s novel Ablutions will either stop your blacked out ways or it will push you further down the bottomless bottle you can no longer live without. This novel is despicable, crude, ugly, truthful, and shocking. I fucking love it. DeWitt’s words will take you down a suicidal path stumble by stumble, page by page, towards your local, trashy, hole in the wall, Hollywood bar and give you a nice case of delirium tremens along the way.
You ever notice when you are in a bar by yourself trying to drown all of your fucked up sorrows in life, just how incredibly pathetic of a situation you have put yourself in. Then, you take a look around at the miserable people you are surrounded by and take notes on each and every regular that are there right beside you. That is the exact way this novel is written. The protagonist, an unnamed bartender, describes to the reader in a third person voice, all of the red eyed barflies that occupy his bar nightly. The characters he describes are destroying every bit of life in themselves and he, well, he puts them down for it and could not be more cruel to his misfortunate customers.
There are many memorable scenes in his notes that makes this novel addicting. One of my favorite scenes is at a party at the failed actor/coke addicted bar manager’s house, in which it was predicted by a regular that he would die in that very night. Chaos immediately ensues and hookers are brought to the fiesta as well as a mountain of coke. By the end of the night, no one dies and a little black kid is forced to have nightmares for the rest of his life. The book falls deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of alcohol and the person drowning in it is the unnamed bartender. His life eventually becomes beyond ruined and he loses everything, but by the end he comes up with a fool proof plan that will get his life back on track.
Ablustions is a wonderful novel. These depraved adventures almost seem like the author experienced it all first hand. So, this is a perfect read for those who are watching their room spin round and round or for those who driving around on a full tank of whiskey. This novel has my blessing and soon it will have yours. Squares and Jehovah’s Witnesses beware.