The Long Haul
by Amanda Stern.
Soft Skull Press, $12
Reviewed by Felicia C. Sullivan

Amanda Stern isn't pretty and that's exactly why I love The Long Haul. She doesn't cover her narrator's co-dependency, depression, anger, rage (all the fantastic range of emotions) with cheapened exposition, precious images and sing-song prose. Stern pulls away all concept of scene-setting foundation – the narrator and the Alcoholic attend a nameless college in the northeast. And it feels like the late 90’s with the Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam music and the sheer desperation – one can hear Getrude Stein echo, “We are all a lost generation” – but we are never quite sure and this is satisfying. Then the literary camera zooms into the co-dependent narrator who at the novel’s inception, finds herself teetering between possible academic probation (if she cleans up her act and actually fulfills her work-study obligation) and a sudden fascination with a insecure and tortured drifter musician who, akin to Cobain, achieves vertigo onstage. From their tumultuous start and bed-hopping friends, a drunken proposal and nights of burglarizing and mischief, the reader embarks on a frightening six-year ride. We tumble along, sometimes eyes shut, however, every once in a while, we pry them open to catch a glimpse of their emotional spiraling and the unease and un-pretty face of addiction. The Alcoholic, once promised that the narrator is in for the long haul, follows her to New York where they get caught in an ice-storm, kidnap a child, escape the portentous and absent mother, to the near present, where the gleaming ride comes to an end as they both live in a cold, gritty apartment where their depression and co-dependency barely keep them together.

Amanda Stern’s prose is sharp, short and powerful and the dialogue or sometimes the lack thereof between the unnamed narrator and the "Alcoholic" really delivers all the narrative backstory, dreary psychological exposition that would otherwise reduce the urgency of the story, the sense that both characters have nothing, even when they have each other. Engaging, the reader will wince while reading several scenes (the heroin needle in the stomach in the gritty Manhattan bar, the attempted rape scene in another story), however, this is the true gift of the writer...the ability to shake the reader and propel us forward, wanting us to read more. Far from a precious book, this novel sustains, engages and lingers long after the last pages of the slim novel have been turned. An absolute must read.