Review by New York Times Review
THINK OF THE opening sections of "The Splendid Things We Planned," Blake Bailey's achingly honest memoir, as a kind of personality test or perhaps an obstacle course. Not every reader is going to pass, but then again, not every reader is entitled to such a fearless, deeply felt and often frightening book. Beginning with an epigraph from "Joe Gould's Secret," by Joseph Mitchell, about how one "can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person," Bailey, the accomplished literary biographer, tells a story from early in his parents' marriage, soon after the birth of his older brother, Scott. Tormented by the infant's incessant wailing, the new mother and father find themselves on the roof of a building, contemplating an unusual dilemma: "The question was whether to throw him or themselves off." Two pages later, the author is considering his mother's anatomy and her postpartum depression, looking ahead to future conversations he will have with her while both are under the influence of alcohol, and describing another incident from Scott's infancy in which, while their father suffers from a bleeding ulcer, their desperate mother tries to stop the child's screams - if not his breathing altogether - by muffling him with a pillow. If this is already too dark for you, so be it; enjoy some lovely parting gifts as you exit. But if you are brave enough to forge forward, or find yourself strangely enticed by these morbidly comic details, what lies ahead is a difficult and often remarkable tale of an unhappy family unlike any other. With subtle but deliberate purpose, Bailey introduces us to his father, Burck, a prosperous Oklahoma lawyer; his mother, Marlies, a German immigrant with a bohemian streak, who parties heartily with Arab exchange students and kisses another man while young Blake furtively observes; and Scott, who is handsome and tall and the author's paradigm for his looming adolescence as well as his personal tormentor, and who, despite being given the keys to his mother's Porsche 914 for his 16th birthday, is pointed out by his own peers as someone Blake should not dare to emulate. The Blake Bailey who will go on to write acclaimed biographies of Richard Yates, John Cheever and Charles Jackson (with a volume on Philip Roth underway), win a Guggenheim fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award and become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize is not much in evidence here. He portrays himself as a grade-school loser who is frustrated by what he perceives as his brother's arrogance, while he clings to his certainty in his own, as-yet-untested, superiority. It is almost unfair to have to spoil some of the events that come next in "The Splendid Things We Planned"; part of what makes the book so enthralling is the quiet way it surrounds you with mundane details and seemingly minor defeats ("Life with my family was becoming a serious bummer," Bailey writes early on), shuttling from relative to relative as you believe you are merely reading a closely observed account of an eccentric clan. Then, once the author springs his trap, you discover you're caught up in it with him. In short order, Scott is revealed to be a heavy-duty pot smoker, he and Blake have a particularly brutal fight, Scott is found straddling the roof of the family garage in the nude, he totals the Porsche after numerous car wrecks, gets arrested, drops out of college after hardly two months and smashes through a glass door while trying to retrieve his belongings from his dormitory. Then, as Marlies and Burck's marriage is collapsing and Blake is having his own problems with drinking and getting into car crashes, Scott drops out of college a second time, suffers another severe automobile accident and destroys all the glass in his apartment. He is arrested again, for disturbing the peace, and, after an incident in which Scott tries to ride a bicycle off the roof into a pool, Blake learns his brother is also taking heroin. There are, if you can believe it, still another 150 pages to come of Scott's descent into loathsome and self-destructive behavior, one that repeatedly finds a new bottom each time you think he's plumbed the furthest reaches of his personal Mariana Trench. But Bailey the author never makes his recounting of these events feel like drudgery, and he never panders for a reader's sympathy. His prose is clean and graceful without being overwrought, and he often finds unexpected places for deft turns of phrase: Succinctly describing how he lost an ill-advised bar fight, he says of his opponent, "Turned out he had a lot of friends." And when he and Burck engage in strained efforts to avoid discussing Scott, it's as if "a kind of gas filled the room until we could barely breathe unless we changed the subject." This is a skill Bailey seems to have inherited from his parents, who are depicted as possessing a sad wisdom about the problem Scott presents: They love their screwed-up son, and they know there is nothing they can do for him. As Burck says, possibly relating an analogy he heard from a psychiatrist who had treated Scott, "When a child is young, you can catch him if he falls." But when he tumbles from a great height as an adult, "then you have to decide: either get out of the way or be crushed." More than once, Blake and his parents find themselves confronting the uncomfortable paradox that the best way for them to help the recidivist Scott might be not to offer him any help at all. "Where will this end?" Blake asks his mother at one point, to which she responds: "I don't know! We can't just let him die!" Bailey writes, "But I detected, or thought I detected, a very faint inquisitive turn at the end of that statement - as in: 'or can we?' - as though she were seeking permission or at least canvassing my viewpoint." Scott presents a bit of a quandary for the reader, too. His accumulated difficulties can become exhausting, as they surely were for his family, but his absences in the book are sorely felt too. When Bailey delves into some of his own postcollegiate misadventures, losing jobs and going on benders and partaking in a bizarre encounter with a pregnant prostitute - offered here, perhaps, by way of apology for all that he has revealed about Scott - a reader almost finds himself missing Scott's anarchic charisma. Bailey says in his acknowledgments that it took him about 11 years to complete the writing of "The Splendid Things We Planned," and it is a testament to his courage that he decided to share this tale at all. It doesn't strive for any false or over-reaching profundity, and yet it arrives at a certain undeniable truth about how we are capable of feeling love for people we would never choose to be around. It is a lesson neatly summed up by his mother, Marlies, who, in her despair at Scott's latest disappointment, exclaims, "Families are the devil's work! The parents love their screwed-up son, and they know there is nothing they can do for him. DAVE ITZKOFF is a culture reporter for The Times. His books include "Cocaine's Son: A Memoir" and, most recently, "Mad as Hell: The Making of 'Network' and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 9, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Bailey, author of acclaimed biographies of Richard Yates (A Tragic Honesty, 2003), John Cheever (Cheever: A Life, 2009), and Charles Jackson (Farther and Wilder, 2013), once remarked that his aim in writing such books was to reconcile the paradox of a highly compartmentalized personality. This memoir suggests that Bailey's fascination with compartmentalized and addicted people, and his considerable gift for explicating the simultaneous bleakness and beauty of their lives, may stem from personal experience. Goofy and affectionate but deeply self-destructive, Bailey's older brother, Scott, careened from one disaster to the next, bewildering and disappointing everyone around him. Though Scott has functional moments, including a stint in the marines, during which he became a master sharpshooter, such moments become footnotes to a larger pattern of wrecked cars, jail time, and intoxicated self-pity. Their father, an upright Oklahoma attorney, tries to wash his hands of his son, but Scott becomes increasingly unhinged and unignorable. As his own life begins to blossom, Bailey remains an ambivalent participant in this sad family saga, torn by his antipathy for his brother yet aware of all that they share. The result is a haunting portrait of more than one tortured soul and a heartfelt probing of the limits of brotherly love. As the memoir's epigraph achingly reminds us, You can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person. --Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
It seems fitting that biographer Bailey tells the story of his own life by chronicling his brother Scott's alcoholism and drug addiction, which causes him to descend into violence and madness. Told in chronological order, starting with the marriage of his straight-laced lawyer father to his bohemian, German-immigrant mother, Bailey's story captures the contradictions and tensions that simmer just below the surface of the family, as they try to live a normal suburban life in Oklahoma. But as Scott goes from being a self-absorbed teen to a pothead, college dropout, and junkie, the family dynamic unravels, breaking up the marriage as the author himself heads toward alcoholism, debauchery, and ennui-though not to his brother's depths. But this is Scott's story, and Bailey tells it wonderfully, in a tragicomic tone that slowly reveals the true depths to which his older brother has sunk. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The Bailey family-Burck, a New York University-trained lawyer who's named "Citizen of the Year" in Vinita, OK; his wife, Marlies, a young German immigrant drawn to the bright lights and energy of New York in the early 1960s; and two sons, Scott and Blake-live the American dream, observes former Guggenheim Fellow, -National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Bailey (Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor, creative writing; Old Dominion Univ.; A Tragic Honesty; Cheever). Or so it seems. But Scott-handsome, impetuous, and selfish-allows his demons to take over. Physically and psychologically diminished, the ex-marine returns home for one last attempt at salvaging the remains of his chaotic and sometimes felonious life. The younger Bailey recalls those dark days, shortly before his brother's last stint in prison and his suicide in 2003 at age 43. Bailey's memoir is a more genteel, though no less accomplished, update of Harry Crews's A Childhood, with details layered in an unflinching fusillade until a poignant, maddening portrait of Scott-and the rest of the Baileys, seen through the lens of Scott's descent-takes shape. The effect of the writing and Bailey's own wrestling with time, memory, and loss lingers after the final passages. VERDICT For readers of memoir and literary nonfiction, this should make end-of-the-year lists.--Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge Coll., GA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An award-winning biographer reveals his troubled past. National Book Critics Circle Award winner Bailey (Creative Writing/Old Dominion Univ.; Farther Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, 2013, etc.) justifies his attraction to alcoholic subjects (John Cheever, Richard Yates, Charles Jackson) in this bleak, repetitious memoir. Bailey's father was Oklahoma's assistant attorney general, his mother, a hard drinker trying to revive, in the Midwest, her bohemian Greenwich Village youth. Bailey and his older brother, Scott, became heavy drinkers in high school, even before their parents divorced, an event that disrupted an already strained family. Scott's problems, though, went beyond drunkenness: At one point, a psychiatrist diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis that Bailey rejects--though he offers no other explanation for his brother's erratic behavior, grandiose riffs, addictions, violence and ultimate suicide. Bailey chronicles Scott's descent, but also notes that he, too, was an alcoholic. Scott, however, supplemented alcohol with various other drugs, including heroin. Their frustrated parents sometimes lashed out angrily, sometimes coddled their troubled sons. "Scott's not as bad as you think. It's not all black and white," his mother told Bailey after Scott threatened to kill her. "There's a little gray!" Some of Scott's escapades seem like plots from a Cheever story: Scott "liked being in other people's houses," sneaking in during the night and staying for hours; in summer, he would "skulk around the suburbs," bolting into family barbecues, stabbing meat and running off with it. The title of this memoir comes from a song Scott liked, Roy Clark's 1969 "Yesterday When I was Young": "The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned/ I always built to last on weak and shifting sand." Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother's splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious self-absorption.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
