Sams in a Dry Season: Sams in a Dry Season

by Ivan Gold

Two decades after writing the acclaimed Nickel Miseries and Sick Friends, Ivan Gold has broken his silence and produced a novel which brings back the character Jason Sams.

Combining fiction and memoir about triumph over the blackness of alcoholism, Sams in a Dry Season tracks Jason as he drowns in liquor and then, after several eye-opening experiences, puts down the bottle for good.

256 pages, Paperback

First published September 21, 1990

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no reason I should have enjoyed Ivan Gold’s late-career comeback novel SAMS IN A DRY SEASON. Though published in the early 1990s, it harks back in tone and content to when the author was first gaining renown in the late 1960s. The novel takes place in the late 1970s and carries the cliches of literature in that time. The Jewish narrator with the immigrant parents from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, who is a failed writer, fired academic, womanizer and drunk. Even worse, he ends up sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, another wellspring of cliches, which ends the book and shapes it as a — gasp — recovery story. In fact, it reads a bit like the longest share ever. Oh, and it’s obviously autobiographical — the author switches from the third person to the first often. Yet, I found the whole thing highly entertaining and plowed through it happily in a few days. It’s not a great book but there’s a pathetic charm to it, the prose is strong and his degradation lacks the stealth bragging of much AA storytelling. Still, like any narrative, there’s a tendency to mythologize and romanticize, which I guess is the baggage we always have to check when dealing with anybody who makes their living in fiction.