In the Open

Timothy Donohue lives in a world we have seldom understood. He spends his days in missions and flophouses; daily labor offices and the work they provide; public libraries in which this and other manuscripts have been written; and many campsites in several states, including Minnesota, California, Nevada, and Hawaii. These campsites are neglected corners of out-of-the-way lots where Donohue pitches his small tent and keeps his belongings, or they are culverts or abandoned boxes and containers where his gear is stolen. Remarkably, his writings have somehow survived his bouts of self-destruction and the accidents and vicissitudes of his hard life. . We see his world from the inside. We learn the coping strategies, the natural reactions, the logic and self-deceptions of the homeless alcoholic. Donohue remembers most of the details of his prodigious drinking. Alcohol produces pleasant highs increasing his perceptual acuity and his poetic appreciation for landscape. He experiences momentary optimism, followed by pits of despair. Alcohol becomes the Devil's visit, the ruination of all plans; the substance that leads him to alienate those he loves and even to insult strangers and otherwise behave in a manner for which he later feels revulsion and guilt. Donohue tries to stop drinking, using rational methods such as limiting his drinking to a predetermined amount, but fails. He inherits money which he will use as the basis of a sober productive life, but fails. Yet his life is suffused with hope and will. Donohue spends many nights in the desert writing songs and melodies. He calls upon Emerson when discussing balance and natural justice in creation; he reflects on Einstein's theories of space and how they confirm the existence of God. He even develops an extensive proposal for food stamp reform while working for a food processing industry. Donohue is an economist, a composer, a social critic, a theologian, and a writer whose prose is as honest and uncompromising as it is fluid and poetic. In the Open is a brilliant journal. Like Orwell's Down and Out, it will make an enduring contribution to our understanding of a fringe of social life.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.