|
| |
One of the things any good book should do is change
the reader. Ways that it can do this are by giving the reader information she does not
have, or by allowing the reader to experience asituation she will probably never
experience in real life, or by giving the reader insight into the human condition. The
book, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries: 1971, by Jim Carroll does all three
of these things.
As the cover of the novel tells us, this book published in 1987 is a sequel to
Carroll's infamous The Basketball Diaries which depicts a New York street kid's
herion addiction. In Forced Entries, Carroll cleans up that kid. The book starts
with the narrator (who is supposedly Jim Carroll) celebrating his twentieth birthday by
tipping "over to Spanish Hector's place to score" (1). Right away the reader
knows the main character still has a drug problem. On the surface, the rest of the novel
deals with that addiction and the narrator's decision to rid himself of the monkey which
he is unable to do until he leaves New York and moves to California. Beneath this obivious
plot line is another story, the story of a young person's pursuit of happiness, of
wholeness, of faith in a life worth living. The addiction then becomes a metaphor for the
destructiveness of civilization, for the hopelessness of selfishness and
self-centeredness.
|