I came of age in the Vietnam Era, the time of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. Drugs were available, and many of my college friends used them, but then and later I tended to be skittish about using my brain and body as a sensation experiment center.
I’ve never seen a movie that portrayed drug users as anything but dimwitted, especially when they’re high. Watching someone else trip out just isn’t that interesting. It’s different, sometimes, with characters in novels. I’ve just read two novels that portray drug use from the inside out. That is, the reader can understand why the use occurs and vicariously feel some of what’s going on with the user.
Donna Tartt’s magnificent novel, The Goldfinch, portrays Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old cut loose from all familiar moorings by a senseless act of violence that kills his mother. A beautiful woman, she was his only source of love and security. Theo is in love with Pippa, a fellow bombing victim, who is given what Theo calls “morphine lollipops,” the first reference to drugs as pain relievers. Theo’s pain is from loss, however, and left to the desultory care of adults who are indifferent to him, he drifts into drug use with his friend, Boris. Theo uses drugs for adventure and to dull the misery of his existence. It becomes a lifetime habit that he periodically escapes, but only at the price of hellish periods of withdrawal described in detail. He can function as an addict, but not as well as he’d like. Drugs and drug use figure into plot twists and character growth or conversely, a character’s inability to grow.
Theo experiences drug related suicidal thoughts as well. “…a cold, intelligent, self-immolating fury that had—more than once—driven me upstairs in a resolute fog to swallow indiscriminate combos of whatever booze and pills I happened to have on hand…” Theo belongs to a culture that doesn’t ignore drug use, or judge too harshly those who rely on it.
In The Quarry, Iain Baines, then dying himself, wrote about a group of friends gathering in a dilapidated house with a man dying of cancer. The narrator is his autistic son, Kit. The friends arrive for a weekend, mainly to search for a potentially embarrassing video made when they were in college. In the course of the weekend, everybody gets high with pretty insignificant results. For Kit, it’s no big deal. Certainly, he isn’t driven by the need to numb unbearable emotional pain as Theo is. Therefore, it’s casual and not too interesting.
What both novels do show is the general futility of drug use. Theo experiences the consequences of careless acts. Even in a book, where sensation can be almost completely transferred to the reader, there’s something about getting high, that just seems to be an interruption of life; i.e., the plot. Eventually, because they are the protagonists, both characters are capable of growth. If drugs are not altogether banished from their lives, both have more interesting points of focus.