Trocchi's Cain's Book: Smack on a Scow in New York

It’s funny reading descriptions of Alexander Trocchi’s final novel, Cain’s Book. For the most part, the writer, a heroin devotee, is couched in terms of existential uncaring and set in a line with Albert Camus and any number of other beats.

What separate’s Trocchi from his American brethren is admittedly his uncaring about pretty much everything apart from how to get high. But in Cain’s Book, that flippant perspective on life is related in some of the most poetic language possible. Granted, the subject matter and the resultant physical toll is apparent at times as Trocchi’s prose moves in and out of this flowery language. But the writer does maintain a rather concerted tone throughout the entirety of the work.

Differentiating Trocchi from Camus is rather simple, though. Both obviously ape that apathy that so many rock stars picked up on and turned in dollar signs. But where Camus’ disassociation with everything manifests itself in an uncaring funeral procession for his mother, Trocchi gets excited about things that have nothing to do with killing Arabs. Well, that’s mostly reserved for scoring heroin. Occasionally, though, the author exudes interest in fornicating and seemingly can’t decide if men are all that bad, but certainly doesn’t mind the company of a good women. Whether or not she’s married is another story.

Regarding story and plot, well there isn’t much in Cain’s Book. All of that actually makes it seem like the more plausible novel to have Kerouac’s myth accompany it. Surely that guy didn’t sit down at a typewriter and spill a few hundred pages, not with that arc. But Trocchi ambles through various unconnected vignette’s, the entire thing held together only with the most tenuous of junky logics.

Scoring, finding a place to find a vein and evading cops and other seamen seems just about the only thing that concerns the narrator here. Granted, those same concepts solder together any number of other artistic works – Last Exit to Brooklyn to a much lesser degree. But each successive portion of Trocchi’s work cements him as the pinnacle of the Beat Generation’s ability to fluidly and endlessly spit out lines that might be found in verse as opposed to holding together disparate settings within a single novel.

Trocchi won’t ever be accorded the same place in American literature as the more popular Beats – he was born in Glasgow, though. What the man wrote in this country, though, might even usurup J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man for the title of Irish-American or American-Irish prose.