The friendship between Irene and Luce, two young women addicted to opiates, is the racing heart of Karen Tucker’s debut novel Bewilderness. Or rather, Irene’s desperate need for Luce’s presence triggers her telling of their life together – as restaurant co-workers, roommates, opiate users, and attendees of sobriety meetings. Towards the end of the narrative, Irene says, “Of the many skills I learned from the old hustle, the ability to figure out what someone wants has been the most valuable. Once you understand that, it’s not so hard to let them have it.” Irene needs an intimate friend – and Karen Tucker, in search of (in need of) someone to ride beside her as she steers her novel, has figured out what that someone wants. There’s a shrewdness here, of the immensely gratifying sort.
Bewilderness doesn’t work itself up into a tragedy (though it incorporates it) and resentment for the Sackler family. In fact, the allure of the story for the reader aligns with Irene’s apparent lack of regret and general good spirits: “What I wouldn’t give to go back and live through every one of those days all over again.” Death occurs early in the telling and continues to loom. At the very outset, Tucker sets up the tension: Irene frets over the impending departure of Luce and her boyfriend Wilky to Florida, but he is found dead from an overdose after staying clean for several months. From that point, the novel pivots between the time before Wilky’s death and the period after it. Irene has dumped her own boyfriend, Manny Nogales, a town cop; she exploits his continuing benevolent attachment to her. Needing cash for pills, the two women carry out small-scale swindles – but they in turn are more critically hurt by rip-offs and predators.
Tucker conjures Irene through tone, pitch and diction more than through ongoing self-revelation. Irene doesn’t grow in the wake of precarity – except in her ability to organize her memories into a sound that is authentic to herself. Tucker isn’t interested in providing a model for those desiring to go clean, but rather the troubled clarity of someone who has done so. This spirited telling emerges by way of Tucker’s fine ear for expression stained by adversity and leavened by a comic vibe in a minor key. Irene may say, “First things first: Don’t do it … Seriously, don’t start.” The gesture is authentic. But things here are more stark: there are adversities and hardships, and there are drugs that make one feel better about them. In fact, when Irene takes a break from her story, just after saying “don’t do it,” she addresses the reader in a way that implicates everyone:
“And if you do start, don’t eat/sniff/smoke/shoot/boof and drive … If you do decide to drive, don’t keep your stash in your glove compartment or your center console., You get pulled over, that’s the first place they’re checking. Even if they don’t have probable all they do is pretend they smell weed and just like that your vehicle is being searched and you’re being felt up by a rubber-gloved deputy sheriff. Do yourself a favor and hide it in your fuse panel. In the overhead light fixture. Depending on your personal situation, you can tuck it in your privates, but believe me when I tell you that the pervert cops will be jamming their fingers in you about two seconds flat.”
She meets Luce in her late teens; the two bond initially through their waitressing jobs. Their family members are elsewhere, detached. In their low-income mountain town of Anklewood, North Carolina, buyers and suppliers turn up everywhere. Tucker creates environment with deft strokes for the sole aim of creating an apt space for action – which comprises a series of tensely drawn interactions with suppliers, connections, bosses, and shady rehab pitch-people. But I can imagine Tucker as a novelist-in-making, collecting an inventory of such compelling stories, and thinking: But a novel isn’t just a chain of events. How do I make this stuff vibrate with the immediacy of perception? I further imagine months and years of revision, shaping and paring the taut language, and refining the parameters of Irene’s grasp of her experiences.
There are “do’s” and there are “don’ts” – “Don’t steal your grandma’s pain pills, it’ll haunt you forever. Don’t steal her fent patches. Don’t volunteer to drive her to her friend’s house for their weekly cribbage tournament, ask if you can use the bathroom, and go through the medicine chest.” And the “do’s”? There’s no such list of proper behaviors here, since the impediments to our well-being and our own limitations and faults are so substantial that just getting-by may look like success. Look for the “do’s” in the exchanges between Irene and Luce – even if each is tempted to steal the other’s pills. The most impressive “do” here is the telling itself: dare to say what is actual and, as Irene suggests, “Don’t fuck people over.”
[Published by Catapult on June 1, 2021, 288 pages, $26.00 hardcover]