Reviewed by Jordan Earnest
The phrase “history does not repeat but it often rhymes” is repeated to the point of being a cliche. The entire course of history and especially the last century is a continuous process of doubling back on itself, new optimism tapered with old fears. Great Disasters by Grady Chambers is obsessed with this idea, but goes even further by cementing itself to the idea of history as a wheel, a wheel that people hitch themselves to and are subjected to the push and pull of their own time.
The novel is at its finest when it’s working with these ideas. Tracing the trajectories of a group of boys throughout the oughts. Initially I figured the book would be more akin to a coming of age story, and of course, to a certain degree it is, however its structure refuses the clean throughline of those stories. The book is told nonlinearly with sections from high school, undergrad, and post college life intermittently pulling and pushing at each other, and in multiple occasions bleeding into one another. The post high school sections in particular carry with them the fatalism, loss of direction, and the miseries of addiction found in hard edge literary fiction.
Great Disasters is Chamber’s debut novel but is clearly a work honed by his past contributions in journals like The Atlantic and The Paris Review. His bibliography is mostly poetry, but it shows a clear history of using connected vignettes to fill out a larger whole. Chambers’ writing style is confessional at all times but the tone of these confessions carries gradations depending on the circumstances of the main character, Graham. Graham is intensely interior, offering his thoughts about his friends, his anxieties, the global war on terror, and eventually the housing crisis of 2008. The novel is fascinating in that way, using its characters to illustrate the turning of the wheel, the great differing waves of time that pull people in every direction.
The dynamic between Graham and Ryan sits at the heart of the story. Graham is infatuated with Ryan. His confidence, his brazeniness, and eventual turn to the military buffer at Graham’s inner narrative continually. The novel makes parallels to the civil rights movement and Vietnam. Ryan coming from a broken home, flunking out of high school, and working in a warehouse all serve to put him at a juxtaposition to Graham, whose parents are ex-hippies, leftist organizers, and support Graham’s time in university working in the political science field. The novel telegraphs Ryan’s enlistment immediately but continually piles on the dread, the certainty of Ryan’s enlistment. You know it is happening and the novel depicts that just as the 1960s, everyone has a future, everyone was born into their time and place and must act out their historical role. The choice is framed as unconscious, simply a reaction to the pains of maturing into adulthood.
The novel uses more than events and politics to frame history as a wheel. Continually, characters spin themselves around back into Graham’s life, with new baggage and goals that have to change with the situation at hand. Alcoholism is used to tie most of the characters together, and it is pervasive as both a cause of life change, just as well as an effect of the rigors of time. Ryan and Graham, despite the chasm of difference in their trajectories, share a love for the demon drink. The novel interrogates why the characters drink, for fun? To escape? to subside and delay another eventual hangover? Graham is cognizant of his folly, how time and time again he knowingly watches himself let life wash him over, both figuratively and literally. The prose occasionally simulates the drinking as best as it can, events happen in quick, sequential order, not offering much room for interpretation. The drunken escapades then follow brief windows of reflection, as well as illustrating the immediate effects of drinking. It’s not necessarily didactic, but it does center the addiction as a drain and one that, reaching sobriety is an uphill battle.
Graham himself states that his life was not obtained by him but rather given. The novel situates its reader as receiving the story in retrograde, more so than others. Graham consistently writes like he is at the tail end of a long, long ride, where relationships and historical consequence fall onto and through each other like Dominos. When the fears of today are reminiscent of the fears of the 2000s, which themselves are reminiscent of the fears of the 60s and 70s, Great Disasters is a novel that illustrates the relationship between the times and us.