Customer Reviews

Note Found in a Bottle (Wsp Readers Club)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

The autobiographical drinking story has been done many times before, so the subject matter here is nothing new.

What's so striking different about this book is that there is almost no self-reflection. It's just a compilation of what Susan Cheever drank, the places Susan Cheever drank, the men Susan Cheeer screwed while she was drunk. We'd get much the same result of Susan had gone to Kitty Kelley and asked "Will you write a shallow, vapid account of my life?"

Note Found In a Bottle is self-absored and boringly so. I imagine what keeps Susan awake at night is that most people have found this account of her drinking years Not Very Interesting. She earnestly wants the reader to believe her life was glamourous, but in fact it's just an average drunk story.

I guess there are worse ways to spend (money) than to throw it away on this book....but not many.

I started this book hoping to find a thoughtful, absorbing account of how somebody can sink into alcoholism but ultimately survive. Was I off base. What I found instead was a lurching, unfocused, egocentric chronicle of all of Cheever's various love affairs and famous people she would just happen to bump into for lunch. The first few chapters, when she talks about the origins of her alcoholism and how widely social drinking was accepted in the 50s and 60s, are moderately interesting, but the book quickly degenerates from there into a litany of name-dropping and sexual escapades. Who cares? If she was trying to impress readers with her supposed attractiveness, I think she needs to wake up and get a life. Not only is her egocentricity and immaturity overwhelming. At one point she compares herself to Shirley Jackson-I wanted to ***. If this book hadn't been written by someone with a famous name, it never would have seen the light of day.

Susan Cheever presents a picture of an alocholic who is sophisticated, talented and brilliant, but a drunk nonetheless. In telling her no-holds- barred story, she addresses millions who believe that their accomplishments, their clothing and their connections completely separate them from the drooling, the homeless and the crazies we all know to be alcoholics. Her story presents without varnish the moral degeneration and denial of personal responsibility brought about by her drinking. She does not polish sobriety either...thank God she did not become the perfect human like so many of the reformed. Thanks to Susan for the trip through the reality that does not contain all of the answers. Too bad so many readers are willing to fault her for not trying to give what she doesn't have.

At one point in her recent memoir 'Note Found In A Bottle', Susan Cheever tells us that looking back on her life she almost feels as though it had happened to someone else. I find that very easy to believe, because this comes off as an amatuerish biography by a not-so-close aquaintance. Reading this book, I felt as though Cheever were fast-forwarding through a poorly made movie of her life. She has clearly been through a lot and has experienced enough to write something formidable, but instead she rushes through her life stopping only to drop the occasional name. What is truly amazing to me is the lack of introspection on Cheever's part. Once in a while she attempts to analyze her past, but the attempts are shallow. Simply put, she was unable to get close enough to her own life to allow me to empathize.

It is very difficult to review a memoir, because in the end you are not only reviewing an individual's work, you are reviewing the individual. That being said, I don't think I would have enjoyed having Susan Cheever as a friend. While she seems to have made some vague connection between her past problems and her drinking, she often writes as though she were patting herself on the back for her cool friends and hip lifestyle. Now she pats herself on the back for outgrowing her desire for a drink. If only she had spent more time thinking and less time revelling in the hype she has created for herself, this could have been a book worth reading.

Susan Cheever has written a superficial, narcissistic account of her life as a drunk. Even as she purports to be giving a tell-all account of her years of drinking, as a reader I had the feeling that she wrote nothing that she thought would make her appear "uncool". Plenty of name-dropping and anecdotes designed to illustrate just how hip she really is, drunk or not. There must have been plenty of disgusting episodes not revealed here. More to the point, the author as yet doesn't realize just how unhip a drunk can be and presents her story as a romp through jet set life, glossing over the devastation I'm sure she left behind. The people who wrote the blurbs for the jacket have lost my respect forever.

Like many other readers, I was appalled by Cheever's book. Her self-absorption and narcissism seem to have survived her drinking days. This book would be merely another volume in the "me first" series of self-revelatory accounts we've had to endure lately, except that there are children involved. Cheever seems to have given no thought to her kids' welfare as she moved from place to place and man to man. Her confessions of faith at the end of the book are totally unconvincing. She's revealed herself to be an immature and irresponsible woman.

This book is a huge disappointment. I kept reading it because I kept expecting it to get better, to have a point, to go somewhere. It's an example of really bad writing by a woman whose ego keeps getting in the way of what could be an interesting story. I was hoping to find a book I could recommend to someone who is trying to stay sober; instead I will tell her to run as fast and as far from this drivel as possible. The one positive thing I've gotten from it? If this woman can be published, there's hope for me!

By her own account, Susan Cheever has had quite a romp. For nearly six heady decades she's had her fill of dry Martinis, fine wines, champagne, Famous Grouse scotch, and up to three famous lovers in a single day. Publishing doors have swung open to her as the daughter of a revered writer and the wife of three other writers. (The most poignant parts of this book heavily owe their style to her father. Who but John Cheever, in the 1978 Preface to his "Stories," characterized the post-war years in NYC as a time when "almost everybody wore a hat"? Susan writes: "the men all wore brimmed felt hats trimmed with grosgrain ribbon.") Now, in her ninth book, a memoir, she assures us she has turned her back on her drunken, sluttish ways. She promises to tell all, while omitting almost everything, including the surname of her first husband. (Cowley-- it's in the biography of John Cheever.) She says she has found God and given up alcohol for hard candy. She says she is now lying sober in the arms of her current lover, having cleared away her drunken husbands along with the bottles on the sideboard. But is she truly reformed? Why is this book about drinking strangely free of morning-after headaches? Why aren't there scenes of Susan desperately guzzling rubbing alcohol? (Even Kitty Dukakis drank some strange brews.) Herein lies the problem with "Note." While Susan may now be sober, she's still narcissistic, and she's not sorry. And why should she be, exactly? She has had a fun life. She can't quite resist the temptation of dropping all those famous names (and many, many more in the pages of thanks following the text). Yet we never get to know the "real Susan." "Note" irritates, packaged as it is as a trendy confession of a sot who has seen the light. Why not just level with us, Susan: Your life has been a lucky one, full of marvelous things that were given to you. Why turn it into this silly, silly drunkalog?

This short chronicle of a lifetime's drinking leaves the reader numbed by the illogic of it all .Cheever says her judgement and memory were damaged by steady ,daily drinking. Yet, though her brain was pickled most of the time, she appears to have become a star writer,with publishers and Hollywood eagerly buying what she had to offer . Does this mean that the successful American writer,such as Cheever, can also be a hard drinker ? Does it mean that hard drinking never interrupts the stream of saleable words? Cheever's book does not solve the mystery . The subtitle of this book is :" My Life as a Drinker ". Yet,parallel to the alcohol intake is a life of uninterrupted financial success. Moreover,Cheever is a champion name dropper,who suggests that other financial succcessful writers in her life were also champion drinkers .Something does not click here. A non-drinking reader can only conclude that while drinking may destroy the brain, it never interrupts the flow of publishers' contracts.Read Cheever's book to get a taste of Cheever's ego.But this volume raises a big question about Cheever's purpose. Much of the name -dropping -- Cheever says she met mostly stars on the way up the ladder to great financial success --were addicted to alcohol,too . Yet, nobody in the Cheever universe ever gets setback financially through alcohol. That's not the way it works in real life .

I would say, "Shame on Susan Cheever," but it's not her fault she can't write. It may not even be her fault that she can't recognize that she can't write. But in making this book available, her publisher has done something rotten to readers and writers alike. Guilty, too, are the folks who supplied blurbs ("this is what Fitzgerald would sound like if he was writing today"...or something like that) and the reviewers who lacked the guts to tell the truth. Jeez, even the famously grumpy Kirkus handed this book an approving review! Like many others, I give this book no stars. Please allow us to tell the truth, Amazon. Get rid of the one-star minimum.