From its opening, one of the narrators in Nick Rees Gardner’s Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts (Madrona Books, 2024) sets the tone of needfulness that comes to define its pages: “Stoneman said that in any good story, your characters have to want something. Once they have it, that story is over.” Appropriately, this wisdom is dispensed in a creative writing workshop. While the truth to that arc may be undeniable, Gardner has given us a collection without the tidiness of resolve. Filled instead with the numb despair of wanting, Gardner has created a stark but compelling world truthful in its representation of addiction’s disquieting normalcy.
Set in the fictional town of Westinghouse, Ohio— a small Midwest college town familiar to readers, with microbreweries, dive bars, and the old diner converted to a sleek coffee shop with pour overs—Delinquents is a collection of linked stories primarily focused on people struggling with addiction. Westinghouse is populated by former students who stayed and built a community, by hangers-on and people who dwell on peripheries while finding ways to make themselves believe their own hype. These struggling, often stagnant artists coexist with true locals, and they make their lives beside the born and raised, retirees, and the former employees of closed local business in a Rust Belt community fortunate enough to have an academic institution that draws new people.
One of Gardner’s strengths comes from his grasp of that compulsion of need that drives us all; there isn’t a single inhabitant of his stories who isn’t seeking something. But Gardner’s refusal to obey the command of his invented professor is what gives his characters staying power.
In the author’s biography, we learn that in addition to being a writer and teacher, Gardner works as a beer and wine monger. It comes as no surprise to hear that a writer has a day job; similarly, hospitality jobs make tremendous sense for creatives. It’s an easy industry for writers to wind up in, in no small part due to the mythology connecting substance abuse and art. I myself spent over a decade waiting tables, convinced it was the truest path to being a writer—endless material, devoid a suffocating nine-to-five schedule. During those years, I built community with exceptional people, many of whom arrived at the same assumption regarding the overlap between creating and working service jobs. And while this can be true, far more frequent is the intersection of the artist and the addict in these spaces.
It’s no surprise, then, that several of Gardner’s characters support themselves by working in various Westinghouse establishments. The story “Lifers, Locals, Hangers-on” focuses on Lissa, a blocked novelist and the co-curator of the Literati House, an art space and gallery whose “first-year party was a rite of passage for the creatives of Westinghouse Institute.” In addition to not finishing her novel, Lissa tends bar at G&T Bar, a local dive. The recurring character, Dunk, appears first behind the bar of Scusi Cellars and later returns as the now-in-recovery main character of “Captain Failure.”
Then there are those bellying up to the bar rather than working behind it. In “Digging,” one of the strongest in the collection, an unhappy adjunct named Neil meets a drifter named Tucker whom he becomes infatuated with at the Tequila Saloon, his regular weekend spot for “too many shots.” In “Sever the Head,” Dunk’s colleague at Scusi Cellars struggles to maintain his relationship with his partner, who disapproves of his drinking and his reliance on alcohol to function.
While alcohol may be a less insidious culprit than heroin, the consuming nature of addiction defines these lives too. Drunks are a bit more boilerplate than opioid users, the drug more familiar, the descent less fantastic. Yet these lives grind on with a trenchant banality echoing the users looking to score harder drugs in other stories. Regardless of their escape mechanism, the residents of Westinghouse never quite get away from their issues.
Gardner uses language capturing the fragmented nature of substance-addled thinking. He plays with time in a manner reflecting the nature of impairment without relying overmuch on lengthy scenes of using or scoring. Beautifully capturing the monotony of addiction, Gardner’s nameless narrator of the first story “Delinquents” makes repeated trips to out-of-state clinics to procure drugs at the behest of Rust, the owner of a local junkyard Rusts Recks. The interchangeable destinations and indeterminate companions present a clear-eyed view of the addict’s endless quest:
“I oscillated from full to empty, never lingering in between. . . . Then all the dope boys became interchangeable. I’d be driving to Florida with S. and W. and then, looking in the rearview I’d find them replaced by R. and L., or Kilo and Litany. . . . Even the color and the shape of the pills would change. The only constant was that we needed more than we could ever achieve.”
The sameness in these trips reflects the grind of being an addict, the repetitive nature of the cycle of acquisition, of the high, of the renewed search for the high. Those who’ve struggled with addiction or dealt with an addict understand the indistinguishable lulls within that life. While the repetitions can be punctured by drama, time is the same, and it’s the drone between the need. A clever manipulator of time, Gardner doesn’t rely on the convenience of thirst to move his characters through the page. It’s the hollowness and the sameness of their actions and their lives that allow the reader a buy-in.
Some of Gardner’s most effective writing is created in fragments. Stories like the powerful “Orange Pill, Yellow Wrangler” and “Spit Backs” rely on splintered narratives. These pieces emerge from voices who relate their mostly linear stories in a dispassionate fashion that doesn’t adhere to a traditional arc. “I’ll tell you about the time I cheated on Mary and she died” is how the narrator of “Orange Pill, Yellow Wrangler” begins. As it unfolds, we learn that this indiscretion was purely a fantasy; on a trip to procure Suboxone with his longtime partner, Mary, the nameless narrator falls into an infatuation with the driver of a Jeep tailgating him. Later, as Mary begins to seize from an overdose, the narrator shoves her body from the car in front of a hospital, too terrified of being caught to stay and see her admitted:
“I’d like to tell you we can be normal and beautiful again, but now I’m nothing but a dapple of track marks, the Jeep’s driven off, and Mary might as well be dead. The day I chased the Wrangler was the day I dreamed of impossible cleanness.”
The awareness of this narrator is neither self-pitying nor particularly remorseful, which is why the story is quietly crushing. The dullness of the disease of addiction sets the emotional timbre of so many of these characters. Survival and the next high will always win out over introspection.
Gardner can be an economic writer, using this to his advantage in many instances. But he also writes lush descriptive passages, with language that is sonorous without being overbearing. The novella Captain Failure opens with a lengthy, beautiful passage describing an aerial view of Westinghouse “viewed from a Beechcraft single-prop airplane, flown by two brothers in the dusk of their lives:
“The heart of Ohio has been rubbled before. A landscape lathed by glaciers, bunched into hills and a sprawl of moraines regrown with maple, sycamore, and hemlock only the be stripped again and plowed to farmland. . . . A new landscape of storefronts gone blank, old factories devoured by vines and heavy rains whose runoff sunk to the creek and flowed away. . . . All those histories covered up or rendered back to nature once again, but at that moment, evident in a five-minute flight.”
In the excellent “Psychedelicious”—the story of an aimless young writer who returns home and starts a food truck with his best friend from his former drug-addled life—Gardner writes, “We were already food truck experts, smash burger virtuosos, burrito hotshots, savants of kimchi slaw.” This sort of overzealous wink toward food truck culture, while longwinded, makes sense: by continuing such heavy-handed description as “fare skewed towards adventurous palates, multi-cultural delicacies blended with working-class American flare” a reader is left as dazed and un-appetized as if interacting with a quirky menu in real life.
Though he has an excellent grasp on the interiority of his characters, Gardner does have the occasional stumble when writing identities other than his own. There were some female characters (notably in “Psychedelicious” and “Captain Failure”) who were written far too predictably, particularly for a writer who is so mindful of allowing his troubled characters to experience grace while avoiding the formulaic. I was also off-put by a moment occurring in the story “Lifers, Locals, Hangers-On.” In an exchange between the main character, Lissa, and her best friend, Glory, Glory complains of a recent ex who “tried to teach her about line breaks—imagine that! Glory! The most prolific poet Westinghouse, Ohio had ever known!” While this indignation is both familiar and funny to anyone who’s ever offered a critical note to a writer, the passage continues:
“Glory was on one: If you’ve got such a hard-on for traditional forms, then go publish in Poetry Magazine like the other stuck-up White dudes. I’m too old and Black for that shit. I’m here to innovate. I want to feel.”
The intention here is to poke fun at self-important white male writers—a diversion I myself have more than a passing fondness for. But the sole purpose of this standalone identifier sentence is seemingly to offer the (white, male) author opportunity for a jab. Never again is reference made to Glory’s race, and her Blackness has no apparent impact on any other facet of this story. Using it in this particular moment feels reductive. Gardner consistently shows compassion to his flawed characters in this collection, and for this reason, these moments where that falls short ring out as surprisingly cumbersome.
At this moment in history, with the bumbling ascent of JD Vance focusing eyes back on the impoverished white communities of the Rust Belt, Gardner has ultimately created a timely and moving collection, refusing neither condemnation nor celebration of characters who people it. While it may not exist outside the pages of Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts, Westinghouse, Ohio, is as real a place as any in terms of its inhabitants. Too often, addiction-focused stories rely on calamitous turning points: the horror of the overdose, the unforgivable act or unspeakably ugly withdrawal, the grim come-to-Jesus moment where the protagonist makes the literal choice of life or death. Instead, Gardner insists on the mundanity of the true addict’s grind to set the tone of his stories. Even the casualties are quiet here, and the overall tone is that of listlessness. It is the dogged nature of existing in a vacuum where want can never truly be met, no matter how good the stories may be.
