AN ASSAULT ON RECOVERY

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

In her much hyped new memoir, Drinking: A Love Story, 37-year-old journalist Caroline Knapp unravels her tumultuous past life as a "high-functioning" alcoholic. The term is one she borrows from A.A. parlance, and it refers to the sort of boozer who lives well above the gutter, getting good grades at fine colleges, meeting deadlines, summering on Martha's Vineyard. Like most writers and filmmakers who have chronicled the middle-class drinking life, Knapp writes from the prevailing modern perspective that alcoholism is another challenge to be surmounted, a demon to be confronted, a battle to be won.

John O'Brien, the tormented author of the 1991 novel Leaving Las Vegas, which served as the basis for last year's film, did not live in the world of overachievers, nor did he view alcoholism as something to be overcome. O'Brien wrote fiction, but his tales of the bottle are intensely biographical. Like the washed-up screenwriter Ben in Leaving Las Vegas, he lost jobs because he couldn't stay sober. He too had intended to drink himself to death but in 1994, at age 33, committed suicide more expediently with a gun. For O'Brien and his characters, drinking is a way of life and death, an unextinguishable passion--beyond love and any trace of reason it accords--that must be succumbed to completely, perhaps even embraced.

The success of Leaving Las Vegas has now led to the posthumous publication of O'Brien's fourth novel, The Assault on Tony's (Grove Press; 215 pages; $21; the author's third novel, Stripper Lessons, is due from Grove next year). Here again, O'Brien immerses himself in the world of aggressively nonfunctioning alcoholics who live without meaningful allegiances to work or family.

The Assault on Tony's revolves around a group of men, almost interchangeable characters, who exist only in relation to the bottle. They are white and fairly well-to-do, and for 17 days they are hunkered down in a bar in an unnamed city as the whole country is besieged by vicious race riots. Bullets fly around them, but the group's main worry is that the booze will run dry. O'Brien is at his most eloquent when describing this visceral fear: "For the first time in his life," he writes, "Rudd found himself wishing for death, hoping (praying?) that the walls came down before the liquor ran out, that they were stormed, bombed or shot in some truculent surprise attack, some irresistible force, divine intervention."

An inferior novel to Leaving Las Vegas, which was composed during one of the few sober periods in O'Brien's adult life, The Assault on Tony's can be choppy and dramaless despite a smattering of lyrical passages. Nevertheless, Assault remains the more philosophical of the two books, as it presents a picture of addiction truer to O'Brien's grim vision. There is not the slightest possibility of salvation for Rudd and his comrades--not even a marginally redeeming love story, as in Leaving Las Vegas. Drinking themselves to death is an inevitability these men seem to accept. Behind locked doors and chained to their dwindling fifths of J&B in the midst of chaos, they are defensive warriors trying to stave off a mad, mad world that cruelly demands that the drunk be healed. Like O'Brien, they see no point in bothering.

--By Ginia Bellafante