I found the evolution of Don Gately to be quite compelling in this section of the text. As we are given access to the back story, we learn that Gately held some serious reservations about the efficacy of AA. In fact, “The idea that AA might actually work somehow unnerved him.”
Reluctantly buying in to the program, Gately is barraged with an endless stream of clichés. He listens to personal stories about addiction and recovery on a nightly basis, some humorous (like the 50 year-old immigrant who became sentimental over a bowl movement) and others lurid (e.g. the woman who free-based throughout her pregnancy and carried her dead baby around until it had to be pried from her arms).
What surprises Gately about his eventual recovery is that he has managed to get well in spite of his unwillingness or inability to give himself over to a Higher Power. Perhaps the first “chink” in his armor becomes apparent when Eugenio Martinez reminds him that “your personal will is the web your Disease sits and spins in…” Gately’s fear that he might use substances again comes back to him when Joelle v. Dyne makes him question his sobriety by pointing out the trouble with the phrase “Here But for the Grace of God.”
Still, Gately maintains his daily victuals like an automaton, offering up his “Please and Thank You prayers rather like a hitter that’s on a hitting streak and doesn’t change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he’s on the streak.” In spite of his reluctance to “give himself over,” he is assured by the Boston AAs that he is right where he is supposed to be.
There are several aspects of the Gately scenario that I find note-worthy. In the first place, while recovering addicts are forbidden from laying the blame or citing cause for their disease, Gately is, in effect, doing the same thing by questioning the source of the program’s effectiveness. Also, I find it curious how Gately remains non-committal even after he learns that the DuPlessis case “vanished from any sort of investigative scene” (for apparent political reasons). However, Wallace pointed out earlier in the novel that the more intelligent the addict, the more problematic the recovery. As I am not a trained psychologist, I can only assume this dilemma stem from an unwillingness to accept dogma as creed.
I also enjoyed the Gately back story, and his problems with the ritualistic ways of AA. I find AA to be replacing one vice for another. Instead of characters getting high they are overcome by meetings, catchy slogans (Don’t leave before the miracle happens), and the search for a higher power, which in essence repalces addiction. My problem with AA is it seems “your own best thinking did get you there,” and some realization has to be made that it’s your own thinking that will get you out. I read scam as an undertone to Wallace’s writing in this section, and I’d have to agree.
By: scott on August 10, 2009
at 10:13 pm