Vladmir Nabokov once described the project of fiction as “what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”
Accessing those “other states of being” is, of course, one reason we turn to books—and in Sean Madigan Hoen’s debut memoir exist several lives worth and variations of Nabokov’s “aesthetic bliss.”
Hoen’s nonfictional world is incredibly violent and tender—his memories of growing up in Dearborn, Michigan, just outside of Detroit; his father “muscling up the ranks” at Ford Motor Company; his mom working as a speech therapist in public schools; his younger sister, Caitlin, in high school and how she is already “earning more than I did, once you counted her tips”; the ripples of betrayal felt by the family upon learning of their father’s crack addiction; a parents’ divorce. It all comes while an 18-year-old Hoen attempts to escape this incomprehensibility with his punk rock band, Thoughts of Ionesco, which had “gored their way onto the scene.”
The three band members didn’t fit the punk rock protocol, Hoen admits. “Me, barefoot with my home-cut locks. Ethan in cock-printed shorts and a five dollar Ceasar he’d commissioned from an Ohio barber. Repa was sallow and jowled, a dark horse ready for any apocalypse that might rain down.” Whatever they felt lacking in punk rock appearance, they “played as if the sunrise depended on it.”
In the opening scene of Songs, Hoen stalks through his neighborhood in the middle of the night, “possessed by a harsh internal music,” wielding a baseball bat and looking for confrontation, perhaps a sight of his father, whose crack addiction is fresh news to Hoen.
“One night he’s chiding me for having slacked on college in order to keep my band going; the next, he’s a confessed addict. Twenty-one days in detox was supposed to do the trick, and I’d honestly thought it would, had not believed we were in a major situation until he hijacked Caitlin’s Escort and shot to hell the chances of anything ever being the same.”
Within hours of being released from the Brighton Center for Recovery, Hoen’s father disappears, presumably to smoke crack. Hoen swings at postboxes, “chopping in rhythm with my tune in the making, certain it would dissolve before I’d ever pluck it on my guitar. In the distance, a sprinkler system began clacking away, giving me a beat to work with—the rat-tat of it.” Here is a writer with a musician’s awareness, the deep breath in before a long scream, the cocked bat, that “harsh internal music” building as one of Songs strongest themes tries to comprehend the incomprehensible: how the author’s father, “an early-rising warhorse of a man,” was not what he appeared to be.
Hoen’s life inside Thoughts of Ionesco, the group’s all-night binge rehearsals, self-mutilating performances, a tour across the country in a van dubbed “The Orgasmatron,” all explores a dark, supernatural world of intimacy, where “the phobias and honorary customs were the ligaments that held together our traveling creep show.” Many of the book’s most euphoric scenes happen on stage. In Denton, Texas, Ionesco sets up in an old ranch-style house with a “lawn of dirt.” After they played everything they knew, “only a few stood before us, naked and sweating, pleading for another.” They kept playing, as if pulling from some inhuman energy source.
“We improvised a five-chord pattern, six-eight time. A leg breaker—never to be re-created, scalded once and for all into the plaster of that Denton bedroom. If only for a moment, we’d taken the reins of a sound we’d been chasing.”
Before another show, the writer accidentally takes a hit from a joint laced with crack—Hoen remembers the moment well. “That’s if I was to trust a guy named Jason Heck, who’d coughed and said, ‘Don’t mind the rough spots, it’s just a little crack.’” Later, “when the band hit the stage I threw the microphone into the crowd and screamed at the floor, and no one there seemed to mind.”
No one there seemed to mind. There is an honest indifference at work in the writing here, a recalling of an intense scene that would normally, by its ecstatic nature, not be remembered. But Hoen’s project, it seems, is to go into into these paradoxical scenes (he hates his father for smoking crack), and by acknowledging these incredibly euphoric and destructive moments, hope they might add up to something that can be released. Something. Who knows exactly what? Guilt, confusion, grief, passivity to the past?