February 22, 2006

I’ll Go to Bed at Noon
By Gerard Woodward
Norton, 2005
Paperback, 288 pages, $14.95

By AUSTIN WALTERS
Contributing Writer

The encompassing story in Gerard Woodward’s novel, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon, focuses on the crippling cycle of alcoholism in a large, suburban, British family living in London in the early 1970s. Author Woodward breaks away from the scores of similarly themed tales to explore the deeply disturbing relationship between a mother and a favored son as they attempt to understand their roles in the family’s misery.

The faint glimmers of hope, love, and dark comedy in the book shield the reader from utter despair, while the powerfully honest narrative deftly illuminates the dark and dangerous undercurrents of addiction swirling just below many seemingly calm surfaces.

The Jones family includes Aldous and Colette and their four children: Janus, James, Juliette, and Julian. Julian, the youngest, lives at home and is finishing high school. Janus, the eldest, has moved back in after a failed career as concert pianist and a severe problem with alcohol. The middle children live on the outside as functioning members of society, but everyone is called upon to participate in controlling Janus — whose drunken episodes are increasingly violent and threatening.

The family’s state of terror is peppered with such ridiculous and often humorous capers as Janus bringing his cat to sit with him in the bar or asking an arresting police officer to read him a story before hauling him into the station. Forced to cope with challenging and disastrous situations, the family finds relief in small triumphs and laughs at their own hopelessness. Colette merely giggles when Julian suggests that she would be happier if the entire world were always drunk.

Aldous is so defeated by Janus’s failure in music and his shameful existence as the town drunk that he refuses to acknowledge his son’s presence in the house. At one point, Janus has sawed off the bathroom pipes and sold them as scrap metal to fund one more night of drinking. Rather than address the issue, Aldous simply stops going upstairs and adjusts to bathing without the luxury of a tub. Looking through the holes in this ridiculous show of indifference, it becomes clear that Aldous squandered his own chances as an artist, and cannot bear the cyclical nature of denial and addiction.

Eventually, things get so bad that Colette is compelled to banish Janus from coming within a mile of the house, and peace is temporarily restored. Colette attempts to maintain an upbeat attitude, but an underlying sorrow meddles with all of her thoughts — rendering her useless in her own fight to stay sober. As her world begins the final descent into ruin and death, Colette examines each of her failures in turn, wondering where things went the most wrong, and finds that everything hinges on her love for Janus. Considering her eldest son’s problems, she finally understands some of the dire consequences of her actions as a mother.

In a wrenching scene, Janus explains to Colette that as the eldest child he met her as a girl of 24, “a sweet young woman,” and has since witnessed her fall from grace through not only her “physical decay but [her] psychological disintegration and moral self-neglect.” In watching his mother crack under the pressures of life, he lost his own will to survive. However deflective and cruel the blame, Colette’s failure to defend herself adds another dimension to her insecurities about adequately nurturing and caring for her family.

Gerard Woodward offers his readers a reality that is so uncomfortable at times that one feels compelled to shy away in disbelief and disgust. But these reactions suggest the importance of a novel like I’ll Go to Bed at Noon as a darkly funny dose of the painful truth about addiction and a careful look into the complexities of the love of a troubled family.