Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches

Published by Little, Brown and Company on December 4, 2012

Me and the Devil will never be mistaken for Twilight, despite the protagonist's craving for blood. In fact, my impression is that Nick Tosches wrote this as the Twilight antidote. He is (the novel makes clear) anguished that readers prefer fluff to Faulkner, that reading and literacy are dying and that the writing racket is "only a vestigial withering on the much bigger dying racket of conglomerated business itself." Still, writing a transgressive novel that many readers are likely to hate seems an odd way to protest the shelf space that bookstores give to Stephenie Meyer. By creating such an unlikable blood-drinking protagonist (even if it is the author's alter-ego), it is as if Tosches is daring readers not to buy his novel, a protest strategy that seems self-defeating. Of course, Tosches isn't the first writer to express his frustration by howling at the moon, and this is at least an interesting howl.

"We were all monkeys about to die" is the lesson drawn from life by Nick, a writer who has stopped writing, an opium-craving alcoholic who has stopped feeling, haunted by the memories of the dead monkeys he saw while serving in the Korean DMZ. Once consumed by "the combustions of sensuality," he can "no longer bear a human touch without recoiling." Only after he tastes Sandrine's blood is he awakened to the promise of a new life. In this new life, instead of biting women on the neck like a conventional vampire, he bites their thighs. The taste of blood invigorates him, stimulates his appetite for a flavor-filled life. The newly energized Nick meets a much younger woman who is aroused by the biting, even after he severs her femoral artery, and another who prefers to shed blood while being whipped. Nick's sexual encounters are quite graphic, so be warned if you are sensitive to foul language and sexual violence.

Nick believes that his blood consumption is turning him into a god, but "a god most strange." Nick has blackouts and wakes up with blood on his knife and learns that people are dead and wonders whether he killed them, although that plot thread gets lost until the novel nears its conclusion. Eventually Nick meets the devil, a gentleman of refined taste who has a thing for Sea Island cotton, another plot thread that dies a quick death. Or perhaps all of this is in Nick's head, a vehicle for self-exploration. If Nick learns anything from his experiences, it is that denying or seeking escape from his dark nature would be a form of self-betrayal.

Tosches' fine prose seems, oddly enough, too fine to waste on the story of quasi-vampirism that drives much of the novel. The plot comes across as an excuse for Tosches to sharpen his claws by using the world as his scratching post. Tosches writes beautifully about "scurrying submissives" enslaved to the workplace, "the jogging dead" toiling to serve the masters of finance. His (pardon the expression) biting observations of vacuous consumers and their trendy snobbishness reminded me of Brett Easton Ellis with meatier prose. Still, Tosches' meditations on the nature of language and thought and religion and addiction and art and Greek mythology and bookstores and Heraclitus and AA meetings too often seem disconnected from whatever story Tosches is trying to tell. The reader will learn interesting things about the drug baclofen (a potential cure for alcoholism) and word origins and the history of nylon stockings and the novels of Hermann Hesse and Japanese knives, but those informative interludes do nothing to advance the plot. And if it's possible to make kinky sex dull, flowery prose is the way to do it.

When a novelist makes himself the main character (how very modern!) and mentions his friends in the text (Johnny Depp) or even includes them as characters (Keith Richards), there's a self-indulgence at work that I find vexing. I'm also put off by the self-pitying nature of Nick's complaints that writers are tortured by their inability "to say what cannot be said" and are underpaid to boot (this from a character who drops a grand on bottles of champagne he doesn't finish and lives in a million dollar house). In the end, I liked Me and the Devil for its prose and for the jumble of ideas it explores, but the novel is ultimately so bleak and anguished and unbalanced that I don't think I could bring myself to read it twice. "The mind is a lugubrious, malfunctioning instrument of self-torment, fear and ghosts" and "Brilliance and beauty are but the flames of the mind that demolishes itself, the fear of arson in the junkyard" are finely crafted sentences, but they make me want to ask my doctor for an anti-depressant. Nick's eventual realizations that "no one has power over me" and "the day belongs to me" are sunnier (if a bit narcissistic), but they are offset by his conclusion that he is "free but lost." I wouldn't recommend this to readers looking for an upbeat read, but for fans of the transgressive novel, Toshes' often spellbinding prose makes Me and the Devil worthwhile, despite the novel's flaws. 

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