The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll (1978)

The story of latter day American punk rocker and poet Jim Carroll (1949-2009) at age 12, sniffing, screwing, stealing, and doing everything else that begins with the letter "s" in New York City.

Book Review: The Basketball Diaries is labeled a memoir, but seemed incredible to me from the start, and I wasn't sure why. Carroll is 12 as he's doing all these things, which seems a bit young (first page: "I'm too young to understand about homosexuals"). Teenagers have been known to exaggerate their stories for effect. Sure, some of these things. I knew kids who did some of this stuff (usually when they were a little older), but everything at that age just didn't seem believable for me. It's not a pretty picture. Then finally it dawned on me. Why is he doing this self-destructive, escapist, nihilist stuff? The kids I knew that were doing the worst stuff had intelligible, articulable reasons (reasons on-lookers could identify even if the kids themselves could not). They had bad stuff in their lives. But Carroll doesn't seem to have any such bad stuff in his life. His only problems are those he creates for himself and leaps in with both feet. Without some motive for his behavior, the story rang a little hollow. I mean, The Basketball Diaries makes Charles Bukowski look like a Boy Scout. Carroll lives just a borough (and a couple of decades) away from Hubert Selby's characters, and they have loads of reasons for doing what they do. Even Hunter Thompson didn't have such a résumé. As the story of a basketball prodigy doing his best to ruin his life, looking at the seamy side of New York in the early Sixties, living a life without caring, concern, or empathy, it's an interesting excursion into the wilds. In the second half he begins to mention the words swirling in his head, and quotes a poem he wrote at 15 about an acid experience: "I just want to be pure." Later after a stint in jail he mentions, "I didn't become pure on Riker's Island." It's unclear whether he wants to be pure, or even what "pure" means to him. In the end nothing is examined, there is no reflection. As an adult (when a teenager I might've loved this: crazy stories, man!), The Basketball Diaries just seemed a little pointless.  [3★]