The Alchemy of Meth, to me, is really about the second part of the title, A Decomposition. It is steeped in the materials of meth making, but it is also an alibi for talking about decomposition in the United States in its multiple forms: the breakdown of everyday consumer products—the active unmaking of industrial
chemicals in meth labs and their ordinary, passive leaching and off-gassing anywhere
and everywhere; the slow deformation of any ordinary home and the accelerated transmutation
of people and landscapes through biochemical tweaking and ecological injury; and
the disintegration of the American Dream, which has had a very long toxic half-life.
The American Dream is the gateway drug. Intoxicated and
triggered by it, some people reach for meth because it promises to make dreams
come true. Meth increases energy and alertness. More importantly, it generates
excitement about good rewards to come. This felt sense of futurity is like
hope. The Alchemy of Meth is set in this overdrawn future. It follows how
things, people, landscapes and lives have come to decompose and bust apart,
leading the way toward how they are composed in the first place, and how they
are recombining again and again in unforeseen ways.
I needed a form of writing that wouldn’t simply describe, or
worse, explain decomposition, but instead perform it. At some point the answer
became obvious: rather than compose a book (academic writing as usual), I made
a decomposition. That is, the book is my refusal to overwork the material I
gathered and subordinate it to authorial mastery (theory as usual). Of course,
I am the author from beginning to end and every choice, even the most
uncomfortable ones like self-exposure, is mine, but the decompositional form of
the book—the fragmented and incomplete narratives and the third-person voice
(free indirect discourse) that issues simultaneously from me and the author and
the people I write about (including “Jason”)—leaves room, I hope, for readers
to enter the text and make their own way.
So I hope readers do just that. I wield my authorial power
not to direct their reading as much as to make one kind of reading untenable.
That is, a comfortable, distanced reading that leers at a “them” in “that place
over there.” Meth cooking is a hyperbolic version of something intimately
familiar to a lot of people: coming undone while in pursuit of something
greater, or simply something livable, in late liberalism. I implicate myself
and I hope the book implicates readers. More than anything, I want readers to
feel something for the people whose stories make the book what it is.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
The Alchemy of Meth, to me, is really about the second part of the title, A Decomposition. It is steeped in the materials of meth making, but it is also an alibi for talking about decomposition in the United States in its multiple forms: the breakdown of everyday consumer products—the active unmaking of industrial chemicals in meth labs and their ordinary, passive leaching and off-gassing anywhere and everywhere; the slow deformation of any ordinary home and the accelerated transmutation of people and landscapes through biochemical tweaking and ecological injury; and the disintegration of the American Dream, which has had a very long toxic half-life.
The American Dream is the gateway drug. Intoxicated and triggered by it, some people reach for meth because it promises to make dreams come true. Meth increases energy and alertness. More importantly, it generates excitement about good rewards to come. This felt sense of futurity is like hope. The Alchemy of Meth is set in this overdrawn future. It follows how things, people, landscapes and lives have come to decompose and bust apart, leading the way toward how they are composed in the first place, and how they are recombining again and again in unforeseen ways.
I needed a form of writing that wouldn’t simply describe, or worse, explain decomposition, but instead perform it. At some point the answer became obvious: rather than compose a book (academic writing as usual), I made a decomposition. That is, the book is my refusal to overwork the material I gathered and subordinate it to authorial mastery (theory as usual). Of course, I am the author from beginning to end and every choice, even the most uncomfortable ones like self-exposure, is mine, but the decompositional form of the book—the fragmented and incomplete narratives and the third-person voice (free indirect discourse) that issues simultaneously from me and the author and the people I write about (including “Jason”)—leaves room, I hope, for readers to enter the text and make their own way.
So I hope readers do just that. I wield my authorial power not to direct their reading as much as to make one kind of reading untenable. That is, a comfortable, distanced reading that leers at a “them” in “that place over there.” Meth cooking is a hyperbolic version of something intimately familiar to a lot of people: coming undone while in pursuit of something greater, or simply something livable, in late liberalism. I implicate myself and I hope the book implicates readers. More than anything, I want readers to feel something for the people whose stories make the book what it is.