Caine Blog

Just finished John Darnielle’s new book Master of Reality, and wow - what a potent little volume.  It’s certainly the most formally adventurous of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series; most of the authors in the series go about profiling their given album by way of Behind The Music-style rockumenting, with plenty of first-person pontification thrown in the mix for good measure.  “Tension was running high in the studio, and the band was fracturing at the seams…” etc.  It’s a pleasure to see Darnielle choose a different vessel - the diary of a troubled adolescent - in order to tell his story, and it’s an even greater joy to find out that, damn, Darnielle can write.  But you probably already knew that.

The plot of the book - what there is of a plot, anyway - centers around the experience of Roger, a sixteen year old suicide attemptee, as he attempts to retrieve his copy of Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality from the nurse’s station at a psychiatric hospital.  Roger is one of those kids with a lot of “potential,” the kind of delinquent who scores high on standardized tests but draws pentagrams across his notebooks, and his journal is propelled forward by his earnestness; he is brutally self-aware, not only of his own dim fortune but also of his own latent intelligence, and his introspection (and desperation) only grows as he stares into a years-long hell of wards and pills and hospital gowns.

The book ends unhappily and with minimal resolution, which is as it should be.  But the writing is what sticks, because Darnielle has captured perfectly the experience of being sixteen.  The put-upon weariness, the Stockholm Syndrome-like desire to please even those you hate - it’s all there, captured magnificently.  Roger’s diary entries are epistolary and meant to be read daily by the hospital’s psychologist, and in every entry there is both dismissal - “FUCK YOU” - and appeasement - “Thank you for telling the PM staff to let me journal in the library…I will staple the pages into my journal for you so it will not be a big mess.”

When the diary entries skip ahead ten years and the reader is introduced to a 26 year old Roger, still smart but resigned to a mediocre fate, one no longer perceives an eagerness to please - rather there’s a dull anger, a dissatisfaction that’ll never go away.  It’s the injustice of a stolen adolescence, made stark by the lack of youthful (blind?) optimism.