Previous Issue: Spring/Summer 2010

The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir by Nick Flynn  
W.W. Norton & Company, 2010 $24.95

Review by Woody Lewis

In the shadow of the Do Long bridge, on his way up the Nung River, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now) encounters an Army outpost surrounded by the enemy. Somewhere beyond the perimeter, a Viet Cong soldier harangues the Americans, ranting over the sound of Hendrix riffs playing on an 8-track. Sulfurous flares illuminate the bridge. Tracer bullets streak overhead like angry fireflies. A black G.I. shuts off the music and calls in Roach the gunner, who listens to the screaming Viet Cong, then fires a grenade launcher into the darkness. We hear a final scream, then silence. Roach's expression never changes. No relief, no remorse, just glazed-over indifference. This is how Nick Flynn wrote The Ticking is the Bomb.

Flynn's latest work extends the theme of his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and his collection of poems, Some Ether. He continues to write about scarred feelings and dysfunctional family life, but his earlier work is different, more elegiac, perhaps more vulnerable. Now he writes in bursts and fragments, embedding social criticism in a barrage of images, memories of his dead mother and his deadbeat father, the faces and bodies of girlfriends who could never breach his emotional perimeter. Flynn's battle with substance abuse arcs over this narrative like tracers illuminating his pain and suffering.

As the 2005 recipient of the PEN/Martha Albrand award for the Art of the Memoir, Flynn watched Sam Harris receive the sister award for nonfiction. Harris' book, The End of Faith, was cited for its intolerance of murder and torture, but Flynn later read the book and found that Harris advocates the use of torture “in certain circumstances.” He was photographed shaking hands with Harris, an image he juxtaposes with the grisly photographs from Abu Ghraib, the prisoners so compelling that he visits Istanbul to meet some of them. When he later reveals that his father, in between protracted bouts of homelessness, spent time in the same federal prisons used to test torture techniques, we can almost feel his heart pounding.

In the tradition of Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford, Flynn offers a laconic narrative, a childhood spent moving from house to house, his mother's succession of boyfriends a grim antidote for her own despair: “Each Christmas, my mother would have a boyfriend — sometimes a new one, sometimes one left over from the year before.” He remains infatuated with the vehicle of her self-destruction, channeling repeated images of the gun she used to kill herself. In the poem “You Ask How,” he writes, “She finds a cop/for her next boyfriend, his hair/greasy, pushed back with his fingers./He lets me play with his service revolver/while they kiss on the couch.”

The hooded prisoners at Abu Gharaib become a proxy for Flynn's hooded emotions. He is terrified at the impending birth of his daughter, his partner having finally emerged from the collage of girlfriends: “My terror with being a father, with having a child, if I can name it, is not the threat of some abstract maniac snatching her — it is that I will look at her and not feel a thing.” To him, parenthood is a remote concept, familiar only in its numbness, and yet he manages to expose his feelings, to communicate passion for life and the life-giving. In Women in Love, another ticking bomb, D.H. Lawrence writes, “There were depths of passion where one became impersonal and indifferent, unemotional.”

Like Roach firing into the darkness.