Reviewed by Brendan Hughes
8.14.07

Sometime in the 1970s the filmmaker John Dullaghan confronted Charles Bukowski about a slanderous newspaper column the poet had published about him. Bukowski replied with equal parts menace and placidity: “Baby, when I write, I’m the hero of my shit.” In his memoir, Little New York Bastard, M. Dylan Raskin is the hero of his shit. He is twenty-two, a self-described “nobody from Queens,” attends Queens College, lives with his mother and is really angry. He’s had it with the “moronic hooligans,” and “walking clichés” of his neighborhood, with his teachers, one of whom he calls, “a filthy Nazi straight out of Auschwitz,” and with all of New York, a “sub-world of excrement.” He says goodbye to all that, traveling to Chicago, where he thinks life will somehow be better.

Little New York Bastard isn’t a conventional story of a young man who hits the road--the narrator has no epiphanies. Instead, he grows more unctuous and withdrawn as he travels. For a while it’s fun to watch Raskin become more livid, each adjective becoming more odious than the last, but when we learn of his father’s death a few short years before, his history of uncontrolled physical rage and a few vague references to a diagnosis of manic depression, it’s not fun, it’s disconcerting. As he bounces from one motel to the next, people and places become indistinct, to the point where, for Raskin, they aren’t even people or places anymore, but metaphors for the rage and pain that have cast a dim shadow over the entire world. The desk attendants at his first hotel are “filthy animals,” and he fantasizes about killing the noisy couple next door—one of many violent fantasies Raskin indulges. He becomes paranoid around strangers, thinking, at one point, that a man standing outside of the motel is trying to kill him. At this point, Little New York Bastard assumes a more anxious feeling, like watching a fuse burn.

The longer Raskin stays in Chicago, the closer he seems to get to a complete breakdown. When he goes to a bookstore to apply for a job, and a store clerk calmly tells him that the position has been filled, Raskin seems determined to self-destruct. “People like that should be removed from this earth permanently,” he says of the clerk. “I gave him the stalker stare and started walking away. But right away it started eating at me that I’d let him get away with making a jerk out of me. So I turned around and went back over to him.” This episode goes on longer than any reasonable person would allow it. Raskin tells off the clerk, refuses to leave the store and eventually turns over a magazine rack before he flees. He leaves Chicago soon after.

As the confused and outraged narrator, M. Dylan Raskin is almost too good to be true. He’s a bundle of impulses, driven by something dark and nameless. It’s tempting to psychoanalyze him—manic depression, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder all seem plausible—but to do so would obscure the memoir’s imaginative and bleak achievement. Raskin has managed to harness his demons and produce a parody of mindless American youth, inundated by movie catchphrases and aphorisms, motivated by wealth and wary of responsibility. The more Raskin is repulsed by others, the more he becomes disgusted with himself. Like Bukowski, he is truly a hero of his shit, which is to say, not a hero at all.

Bukowski and Raskin share not only verve for heroic self-worship coupled with an equal capacity for self-loathing, they also use the same word for the amorphous “it” that they are searching for: “inspiration.” Bukowski often said that alcohol was his, but it may be more accurate to say that it was the hopeless company of the late-afternoon barroom. Alcohol was more of an ancillary benefit. Raskin doesn’t drink—he makes a point of ordering glasses of water to aggravate bartenders; his inspiration is the bile, the histrionic anger and frustration that pours torrentially out of him. The world is a rotten place, he seems to conclude, full of phonies (as Holden Caulfield said) and disappointment. The inspiration after which Raskin and Bukowski are chasing isn’t just a state of mind; it’s a state of grace that they believe will elevate them above the yammering masses.

When Raskin later returns to New York and works in a Queens library, he tells people that he is “a master of adoxography, even though nobody ever knows what the hell I’m talking about.” It’s an arch moment, suggesting that the narrator is growing out of the conventional self-seriousness of his early twenties. One of the great works of adoxography—a rhetorical device of writing seriously on a trivial subject—is Erasmus of Rotterdam’s 1509 essay “The Praise of Folly,” in which Erasmus, a devout Catholic, recounts his travels in Rome, where he encounters church corruption and hypocrisy and returns disgusted to Holland. To be sure, Erasmus is a funnier, cannier writer than Raskin, but both narratives, which depict an innocent crushed by harsh reality, are structurally similar and share a bilious tone broken only by an earnest ending—in Erasmus, it’s a reformed mission statement for the Catholic Church, and in Raskin a nostalgic paean to the simpler days of childhood; a time when he felt safe, before his father died.

Raskin and I are around the same age—in the second half of our twenties, a decade that is not uncommonly characterized by disappointment, frustration and ambivalence toward almost everything. One might hope for something more incisive than a confirmation of twenty-something ennui, but M. Dylan Raskin, defiantly the hero of his shit, doesn’t play for the crowd. Little New York Bastard succeeds by exploiting the clichés of dewy naïveté and the quest for self-knowledge. It stubbornly rejects the whole enterprise, offering us instead a narrator who embodies Erasmus’ own dictum on late youth: a time “to be fond and foolish for a while.”