Word: alcoholisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...turf, aloof, contained. Despite the energy of his grinding movements, no emotion glides over his soft face and glazed eyes. Perhaps he imagines that there is a razor-tin glass wall around his little world that keeps out the fat curls of smoke and perfume and breath thickened with alcohol. Here is no tall, thin, hipless model. The boy is a bit short and very muscular--he resembles classical statues of Greek god. Perhaps he pretends he is centuries away, dancing in some ancient mystic ritual. The glass wall deflects all human contact: he will twitch his butt...
...Younger people and younger men in particular tend to use stiumulant drugs and alcohol instead of tranquilizers," Klerman said...
Friedrich surveys the field of cure from traditional psychoanalysis to vitamin therapy. He treats such ravagers of the mind as alcohol, stress, loneliness and time. But he deliberately avoids the ruts of "quasi-scientific categories." He is more comfortable in the humanities, where the trail of insanity fades into the mysteries of man's relationship with nature and his gods. Friedrich is also up on the inhumanities: for example, the Soviet Union's practice of treating some political dissidents as psychotics...
Unrelieved by engaging dialogue or insight, the book meanders from perversion to perversion, progressing through huge quantities of drugs and alcohol, through impotence and sadism, to a final act of dwarfish fistfucking. Amis is able to extricate himself from this morass only with difficulty, and the ending he chooses has an abrupt, they-all-get-run-over-by-a-truck quality...
Finally, an eminent psychiatrist diagnosed Waugh's problem--what had sapped his creative energies and ruined his private life for nearly a decade--as the effect of the combination of alcohol and barbiturates. Although he partially recovered, Waugh's delusions returned in the months before his death (from a heart attack...