Pick-Up

"I found this novel on a shelf in a library in Italy a couple of summers ago, and read it because I saw that it takes place in San Francisco, where I’m from. The story is about an alcoholic who works various throwaway jobs as a fry cook at greasy diners downtown, on Market Street, an area I know very, very well. He meets a miserable alcoholic lady who sort of reminds me of the tragic dame in that movie The Hustler , with Paul Newman. The woman who scrawls her suicide note to Newman on a mirror, with lipstick. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Anyhow these two drunks live, barely, drinking and fighting, and then at the end, Willeford reveals a shocking detail that recasts the entire narrative in a new light. It’s not a brilliant ending but it is a very compelling, weird little book, hidden inside the genre of the dimestore novel. I loved The Sellout by Paul Beatty for its wicked humor. Every joke in it smelled like the truth to me, in the way the joke produced shock: not in order to shock, but in order to refuse to comfort and appease. I’m reading Lost Illusions . Balzac does cruelty really, really, really well. The cruelty of the father exploiting his own son for his retirement is pretty breathtaking. Balzac did not believe in capitalism, clearly … I’m reading the following books that have to do with a specific interest: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , Julian Jaynes Luminous Debris , Gustaf Sobin Juniper Fuse , Clayton Eshleman The Neanderthal Legacy , Paul Mellars Sapiens , Yuval Noah Harari Who We Are and How We Got Here , David Reich The Mayor of Casterbridge , Thomas Hardy"