Review

Dead Broke in the Yonder Void is one you likely missed. Debut novel (2024) by Michael J. O’Connor, first person chronicle of a young man’s descent into San Francisco’s Tenderloin, as gritty as Bukowksi and John O’Brian (Leaving Las Vegas), but somehow more authentic. Maybe it’s the prose, plain spoken, a little clumsy at times, but also lyric—or the details of the descent. There is both humor and hopelessness in the opening scene. That drew me, though about fifty pages in, I have to admit, I wondered was I going to be able to stick with this character—too dark even for me—but it held me anyway. The character is someone I found myself rooting for, one alcoholic fuck-up after another, partly because the desperation O ‘Connor evokes, living on the margins, the edge of oblivion, has a particular seductive quality of the sort one feels walking past an open bar room door on that other side of town, catching a shadow in the stair of a transient hotel: a sudden desire (and fear): an urge to lose oneself forever, to associate closely and intimately with the lost and forsaken. The character is an aspiring musician, playing a toy guitar for spare change—and O’Connor writes well about the dark joy of music, without any romantic nether goth pretense, just his character locked in a horrible carpeted room in a hallucinatory haze, beating out accompaniment rhythms to a music that may or may not exist. The other thing that I particularly liked about this book is that it avoids the tripe common to such autobiographical fictions about addiction--and stayed away from back story regarding how the character got addicted. No slobbering about the past, adult child of alcoholic, no family loser story. None of that. It’s just the present moment, the narrator in the Tenderloin, the people who inhabit that world with him, some young, like the main character, others not so young. There is more I could say, but I’ll leave it there.

DS

#Under_The_Radar