The Night of the Gun

Customer Reviews

• David Carr turns the gun on himself -- and lives to tell the harrowing tale  Jul 27, 2008 (89 of 101 found this helpful)

  "Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a guy threw himself under a crosstown bus and lived to tell the tale," David Carr writes. "Is that a book you'd like to read?"
  
  Good question. Indeed, it's the question that prospective readers of "The Night of the Gun", Carr's warts-and-all memoir, will have to consider --- because this is that book.
  
  Consider:
  
  A talented kid without much direction graduates from high school pot smoking to cocaine at college.
  
  He starts a career in journalism that has him reporting on police and government officials by day --- and freebasing cocaine at night.
  
  He hooks up with a woman who deals dope. Driving to see her, he's so wrecked he almost crashes into a station wagon filled with kids. He skids into a ditch, has to spend the night in jail, misses his girlfriend's birthday. When he finally shows up, he gives her what can't be bought in any store: a black eye and a broken rib.
  
  He introduces his girlfriend to crack. She gets pregnant. They become so thoroughly addicted that, just as her water is breaking, he's handing her a crack pipe. Their twin daughters are crack babies.
  
  He splits with his girlfriend, and, because he has a nice job, keeps the girls with him. This does not stop him from locking them in the car while he runs into a dealer's house to score.
  
  The gun: As he recalls it, he was so out of control that his best friend not only has to call the cops but wave a gun at him. His best friend remembers it another way --- as David's gun.
  
  In detox, his arms are so nasty that the staffers have him reach into a tub of detergent so they don't have to touch him. It takes a full month for the drug psychosis to wear off. And he does rehab four times before he finally gets clean.
  
  There are 300+ pages like that in "The Night of the Gun" --- it is a long downward spiral. Reading it, I thought of the Emmylou Harris lines: "One thing they don't tell you about the blues/When you got 'em/You keep on falling cause there ain't no bottom/There ain't no end..."
  
  So, you may ask, what kept me reading?
  
  In part, because David Carr emerges from the darkness into a kind of radiance: a new wife, intact family, great job. And because, at the center of his redemption, is a reason a lot of guys can relate to: "Everything good and true about my life started on the day the twins became mine."
  
  And, in part, because I know David Carr. Like him a lot. Knew nothing about his past. And so was gobsmacked by every page. For those who do not traffic in New York media circles or read the paper of record, David Carr is the media columnist and sometime culture reporter for The New York Times. He's witty and gutsy and almost always fun to read --- when he's in the Times, I open it with actual enthusiasm.
  
  There's another, better reason I kept reading. I have known a number of people who became addicts. I don't know any now --- some died, some got clean, and those who didn't drifted far from my ambitious, middle-class circle. As a result, I sometimes find my sympathies for addicts to be more abstract than real.
  
  But at least I can still see addicts as victims of a terrible disease. A great many people in our country can't --- which is one reason we spend many times more money on a "war on drugs" and on jails that don't rehabilitate than we do on treatment centers. "The Night of the Gun" is a stark reminder that nice people from good families can sink just as low as the hard case from the projects --- and that drug addiction can, with luck and skill and love and patience, be cured.
  
  David Carr was lucky. His sickness struck him when he lived in Minnesota, an enlightened state with many treatment facilities. He was lucky to have a friend like Dave, who showed up every Sunday to babysit the girls so Carr could go to meetings. (I dare y

• A looooonnnnng night  Aug 21, 2008 (34 of 40 found this helpful)

  The concept behind David Carr's memoir is intriguing. Stoned and drunk for much of his early life, the fact that he couldn't trust his own memories was brought home to him when he was shown that he completely misremembered an incident with a gun (hence the book's title). So, reporter that he is, he set out to interview people who knew him back in the day. He became an investigative reporter tracking down the young David Carr. Along the way, he discovered lots of things he said and did, but of which he has either no or distorted recollections.
  
  So the angle that Night of the Gun takes is attractive. That's the good news. The bad news is that Carr can't quite deliver. For starters, the book is way too long and so the episodes Carr recounts (often with cinematic speed and compactness) tend to become repetitious. So there's a lot of words but not a lot of depth. Moreover, the lack of depth is reflected in the tough guy, Mickey Spillane style Carr chooses to write in, a style that comes across as inauthentic and, within just a few pages, incredibly annoying. Perhaps the point of the style is to create a living-on-the-edge ambience. But it doesn't work very well.
  
  Ultimately, and most seriously, it's difficult to see what the point of Carr's book is. Is it to draw attention to the mysterious ways in which our memories deceive us? But if so, there's precious little real reflection on the issue, and most of it consists of unenlightening one-liners. (What a lost opportunity.) Is it to impress upon us the terrible things that drug and alcohol addictions do? But surely this has been done a bazillion times already in other memoirs as well as in films and novels (read anything by Hubert Selby, Jr., for example). Is the book intended to be a sort of celebrity confessional? But if so, it falls short of the mark because Mr. Carr simply isn't a celebrity.
  
  I'm glad that Carr has straightened out his life. But I'm afraid his book rates no more than two and a half stars. For more authentic and better written recent memoirs of the addicted life, I recommend Lee Stringer's Grand Central Winter, David Sheff's Beautiful Boy, or James Salant's Leaving Dirty Jersey.

• Great story obscured by self-centered detail  Oct 6, 2008 (6 of 6 found this helpful)

  "The Night of the Gun" has an intriguing premise: unnerved by a loss of confidence in the integrity of his memory, recovering crackhead and crack reporter David Carr decides to turn the tools of his trade on himself and investigate his own past. Unfortunately, this gimmick isn't enough to sustain what is ultimately a pretty typical tale of addiction and recovery.
  
  The book is strongest when Carr is reporting on his harrowing descent into a drug-induced psychosis. Let's face it, this is a side of humanity most of us will never experience for ourselves, and hearing someone tell how he left twin baby girls inside a car on a winter night to go do some coke, or had to soak his arms scabbed from needles in a basin of detergent because the people at the detox center were afraid to touch him, delivers a frisson of horror at the spectacle and relief that we'll never tread down that path.
  
  There are also some brief but intriguing side forays into the ephemeral nature of memory and the implications on the narratives we write about ourselves.
  
  The weakest part of the book comes in its last third, when Carr is well on the path to recovery (a brief detour into alcohol abuse adds a bit of drama later on) and is rebuilding his journalistic career. Carr is obviously a hard-driving reporter and editor, but a long stretch of the book ends up being a self-congratulatory look at his professional credentials. While he acknowledges shortcomings, much of it comes off feeling more like he's answering the job-interview question, "What is your biggest weakness?" with hoary responses like "I push people to excel too much".
  
  Carr's obviously a sharp guy and writes about his past with a pretty dispassionate and critical eye. He doesn't shy away about owning up to mistakes, but also doesn't attempt to take the blame for every bad thing that transpired, if the finger of evidence points elsewhere.
  
  Carr does indicate that he understands the potential pitfalls of his project. One editor tells him before starting that the recovery parts of junkie stories are "soooo boring". He also briefly meditates on his apparently widely-known narcissistic tendencies. It's a shame he didn't take those reflections a little more seriously and chop about 100 pages from the book.
  
  There is a great story in here, and one can only marvel Carr's improbable turnaround and come away wishing him a clean and healthy future. It's just too bad that it is often obscured by Carr's need to air lots of detail that isn't really that compelling to people who are not David Carr.

• Jekyll and Hyde?  Oct 23, 2008 (11 of 14 found this helpful)

  While I like the premise of the book (using investigative techniques to confirm author's memories), I have to say that I don't care for the book itself very much. Part of that is due to the fact that the author doesn't come off as a likeable character, and I think that for an autobiography to really work, that's critical. While he's honest about his (mis)treatment of women during the time he was using drugs, I find it hard to believe that he doesn't still have an issue with them when he's sober. (I do not subscribe to the theory that alcohol and/or drugs turn you into Mr. Hyde, capable of things the sober Dr. Jekyll would never consider.) I find it interesting that there's really not much from his family on his drug abuse and eventual recovery, and there's nothing from his wife, and only from one of his daughters. Did they all value their privacy, or was there another reason why he didn't include conversations with them? I would not recommend this book.

• If only...  Mar 25, 2009 (6 of 7 found this helpful)

  I really wanted to like this book, and because of that I forced myself to read the final 200 pages, even though every instinct in my body told me to stop halfway through. I should have followed my gut. This book lacks any sort of actual depth. You don't get a good sense of what he went through, and I'll have to take his word that it was awful (it clearly was, but only because I know what his experiences were like, but he doesn't present the emotions in any way that you can connect to). Furthermore, I found the vast majority of it to be self-indulgent, almost as if he wanted to shout "These terrible things happened to me, and I did terrible things to others, but I'm actually a great, smart, funny, good looking guy!! I swear!!" A perfect example of this is as the end of the book he finally gets around to talking about the interviews he did with his daughters. An excellent opportunity to demonstrate how his behavior took him from being a God in their eyes to showing how he low he could fall. Instead what does he do? In a 3 page chapter covering both daughters he has about a paragraph from each of them, and in each paragraph they both say how intelligent he was. He doesn't conduct any interviews with the people who don't think he's great. For example, he talks about meeting his wife and how people told her to stay away from him. Why didn't he talk to any of them about what he did that made them hate him so much? Instead of interviewing some of his former employees who hated his guts he talks to the ones who say he was the best boss they ever had. I'm not saying he's a jerk, but everyone has people that dislike them, and in order to truly understand the awful things he did and how they affected people he should have talked to some of them. Instead, as his daughter says, this book feels like an attempt at catharsis whereby he can say he's looked at the horrors of his past and dealt with them without ever having to really sit down and deal with those issues. Having said that, I don't want this to sound like I'm attacking what he did, because I respect him for doing it, and I truly hope it did him a great deal of good in his personal life. All I'm saying is that reading the book gives these impressions, and leaves one bored, frustrated, and wishing for more.