"A vivid portrait of life in the druggy demimonde of petty scams, aimless loafing erupting in sudden violence, and epic pharmaceutical hangovers." -PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
"Ben Gwin writes like F. Scott Fitzgerald high on meth and Clean Time is The Great Gatsbyfor a generation that thinks fame is the answer to every question." -LORI JAKIELA, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker
"A nightmarish dispatch from America in the age of Donald Trump." -DEREK GREEN, New World Order
"If Vladimir Nabokov, George Saunders, Denis Johnson, and Hunter S. Thompson were trapped in an elevator for a month, they might conceivably come up with a book as funny, frightening, and entertaining as this one." -MICHAEL BYERS, The Coast of Good Intentions
"Read Clean Time. It is many things; dark, inventive, hallucinatory, funny as hell, but above all just hard to put down. And like all journeys worth taking, you won't always know where you're headed, but do so with Gwin and you will be rewarded for it." -ADLAI YEOMANS, Owner, White Whale Bookstore
"Clean Time is an exuberant debut from novelist Ben Gwin, a satirical vision of the American nightmare that's a pure joy to read. Like a Nabokovian Eddie and the Cruisers, Gwin's novel goes in search of the missing Ronald Reagan, break-out star of The Recovery Channel's hit reality show Clean Time, and finds instead an America gone off its meds. Clean Time is a darkly comic odyssey through a land of serial killers, hipster poets, and Bob Seger." -KRISTOFER COLLINS, Manager, Caliban Book Shop
"Clean Time is a meta novel so good it will end all meta novels, a satire so current it reads like a headline in The New York Times. Ben Gwin has dumped the prison memoir, the recovery memoir, the academic treatise, and an unscrupulous blast of reality TV into the literary blender and come up with something entirely new and entertaining and horrifying." -DAVE NEWMAN, Please Don't Shoot Anyone Tonight
2018-04-03
An acerbic and multilayered debut novel satirizing reality television, drug-rehab memoirs, and academia.Framed as a memoir written by the drug-addicted reality TV protagonist Ronald Reagan Middleton—as annotated by a Ph.D. candidate named Harold Swanger—Gwin's novel follows Ronald after his wealthy New Jersey family disowns him out of frustration with his abusive behavior. He gets caught up in the underworld of the Southern drug trade and is eventually arrested and imprisoned for the murder of another addict. Encouraged by an MFA student named Sophia, he begins to write the story of his life but is suddenly released from prison in return for an agreement to enter a rehabilitation facility in New Jersey called Rose-Thorn Recovery Center. The center's ominous name ends up being prescient: Rose-Thorn is not just a rehab clinic, but the site of a reality television experiment called Clean Time, in which drug addicts "compete for the right to stay in treatment based on their popularity." What follows is a bizarre, gonzo exploration of America's obsession with reality TV and redemption narratives. Pieced together via fragments of Ronald's memoir, excerpts from the Clean Time script, interviews with Sophia and the villainous television producer Margaret Turner, and commentary by Swanger, the novel is dizzying in its formal experimentation. Unfortunately, the novel's logic is opaque and mostly results in a number of characters and storylines disappearing in the middle. The unconventional form also highlights the novel's lack of a plot. It doesn't help that the satire—especially when it targets academic writing programs—is less biting than bitter. Characters like "White Reggie," a poet and self-proclaimed feminist conducting ethnographic research on the working class so he can write about them, after having inherited "a couple million bucks from his dead uncle," just about sum up the novel's disdain for MFA culture when he says, "Honestly, bro, I try to avoid MFA students. Bunch of suburban kids trying to sound edgy." It's too bad the humor doesn't comment on such hypocrisy so much as merely observe its existence.An ambitious and unorthodox novel whose humor misses the mark.
