A Drinking Companion: Alcohol and The Lives Of Writers by Kelly Boler. Union Square Publishing, 2004. $13.95 — 176 pp.

The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting by Christie Mellor. Chronicle Books, 2004. $12.95 — 144 pp.

The combination of Mardi Gras, which for parts of the country has become an occasion for a collective, monumental drunk, and of Lent, a penitential season of fasting, prayer, and alms for many Christians, make for an ideal time to reflect on the nature of sin and on alcoholic indulgence. Sin is not some quality that exists apart from the good; it is the good twisted out of its proper design. A Big Mac and fries eaten once in a while is a pleasure, which is to say, a good; a supersized Big Mac and fries eaten daily has become a vice. A glass of wine or two every night is a good — it may even be healthy for us — but a bottle of wine or two or three every night is a good twisted out of all proportion to its benefits.

In A Drinking Companion: Alcohol & The Lives Of Writers, Kelly Boler tells the stories of 15 writers and their own twisted time spent with the bottle. Though many of these stories have been told before — Donald Newlove’s Those Drinking Days remains a classic on the relationship between writers and their booze — Boler’s book does include the histories of five female writers and their love affair with the bottle. The drinking lives of Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys, and Jean Stafford in particular may be new to those readers who keep up with this sort of thing.

Boler also has a talent for encapsulating the life of a particular writer into a single chapter while at the same time bringing their drinking and wild exploits alive on the page. Many readers may revisit familiar territory when reading about Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London or Tennessee Williams, but may also find themselves introduced to writers whose work and lives are not as familiar: Malcom Lowry, the genius of Under The Volcano; Dashiell Hammett, the father of the hard-boiled detective story; Kingsley Amis, the author not only of the classic Lucky Jim, but of three books on drinking as well.

Where A Drinking Companion falls apart is in the writing itself. At times as incoherent as Dylan Thomas after a week of boozing, this book contains so many displays of bad syntax, bad grammar, and bad writing that a reader may literally open the book to any page, begin reading, and run into jarring prose before taking a second sip of wine. On page 38 Boler describes John Berryman after he experienced a renewed prayer life in this way: “In May 1972 he was alone and sober in a hotel room with Jesus.” Really? On page 186 we read that “At forty years old, Jack London was worn out, and worn very, very thin.” Which was it? Worn out or worn very, very thin? On page 291, in regard to Kingsley Amis’ affairs, Boler tells us that Hilly, his wife, “... continued to find out. She was beautiful, lonely, and hurt, which led her to have moments of her own.” We all have moments; does Boler mean affairs? On page 105 Boler introduces us to Anne Sexton by writing “Nice people didn’t talk about things like masturabtion in the 1950s, especially if the masturbator was a woman.” Does anyone today, nice or not, walk around talking about masturbating? Try talking about masturbating the next time you’re standing in a grocery store line and see if it gets you more than a free phone call to your attorney.

Boler also has grave difficulty connecting one thought to another, leading to passages that inadvertently contain high humor (please pardon the pun). On page 72, she tells us that John Cheever’s “relationship with the teenage Fred grew stronger,” but that Fred, Cheever’s son, “also had to care for his father, and would sometimes hit him when he had been drunk for too long.” What sort of care is that? Boler writes that Jean Stafford “kept two typewriters loaded with paper, one for journalism and one for fiction.” Has Boler ever used a typewriter? How do you keep a typewriter “loaded” with paper except for a single sheet? On page 27, we discover that John Berryman’s mother “tyrannized her son with endless monologues, one-sided talks that would go on for hours. After three weeks, Berryman discovered that he could make her stop by fainting. So he did.” Did what? Faint? Stop her? What?

Occasionally, Boler is simply wrong in some of her assumptions, particularly in regard to the nature of the alcoholic. Writing of these drunken authors in the introduction, for example, Boler contends that “Beyond words and booze, there are actually few common links. It is interesting, however, that there are some traits and that they are shared, like perpetual drunkenness, that would stand little chance of being tolerated today.” Once we’re past the bad, near-nonsenical writing of these lines, we might ask Boler if such abuse is not tolereated in current rock stars, sports figures, and film stars.

In her acknowledgements section to her book, Boler mentions that her editor, Alexandra Gould, brought a “light but perfect touch with the pencil.” The touch was far too light, the pencil nowhere near perfect.

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If all this talk of drinking increased your thirst, read Christie Mellor’s The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting (ISBN 0-8118-4054-9, $12.95). Written in prose as wickedly crisp as a martini itself, Mellor’s book advises parents to stop making their children the center of the universe, to right the balance between parents and children, and to enjoy their own lives rather than be dominated by their children. If you know parents who have exalted their children to the rank of angels or who spend hours obsessing about how to arrange Junior’s fourth birthday party, here’s a little bombshell of a book that you might want to let them read.

Cheers!

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com.)