Clean Time: The True Story of Ronald Reagan Middleton

by Ben Gwin

“Ben Gwin writes like F. Scott Fitzgerald high on meth and Clean Time is The Great Gatsby for a generation that thinks fame is the answer to every question.” – LORI JAKIELA, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker Framed as the drug-addled memoir of addict-turned-reality TV star Ronald Reagan Middleton (annotated and published by floundering doctoral candidate Harold Swanger), Clean Time is a darkly comic satire set in a near-future America ravaged by addiction. Beginning with journals written in jail, Ronald Reagan recounts his days in Booth, North Carolina, where he had a semblance of peace, a job manually distressing designer jeans, and a girlfriend with a lucrative drug dealing operation. After his inevitable arrest, Ronald Reagan’s parents send him to a North Jersey rehab center, which doubles as the set of The Recovery Channel’s reality TV show, Clean Time. Here, Ronald Reagan is prescribed Nedvedol, a new drug engineered to end all addiction. His viewer ratings spike as he interacts with fellow addicts and meets a new love interest, quickly achieving celebrity status. Though he seems happy performing for the cameras, his journals tell a different story. He’s become dependent on Nedvedol and can think of only one escape. Chased from rehab back to his squalid life in Booth by a salacious TV producer, a relapsing counselor, and a serial killer who targets addicts, Ronald Reagan struggles to stay clean while continuing to hit new bottoms. As Ronald Reagan’s life spirals out of control, Harold Swanger’s narrative interruptions become more frequent, his endnotes increasingly dubious. In a poor attempt at academic notoriety, Swanger presents Ronald Reagan not as a troubled, lost, and obnoxiously privileged drug addict, but as a new kind of American hero. In this sprawling and ambitious debut novel, Ben Gwin masterfully balances farce and irony with a genuine compassion for the large cast of characters that fumble through a nightmarish and all-too-familiar version of America.

337 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 29, 2018

Reviews

[Kimberly Lojewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It is, first of all, really funny, despite the fact that you're following around a self destructive meth addict through jail, a televised rehab reality show, and gut twisting amounts of super dark, drug-fueled disasters. None of those topics usually hit me in the funny bone, but Ben Gwin uses humor and absurdity as a platform to examine the parts of our culture that are the most ridiculous, with a particular nod towards media, capitalism, celebrity, big pharma, academia, and addiction. I literally laughed at loud quite a few times reading his versions of recovery meetings and slogans, rehab activities, and portrayals of hipster poets.

Underneath the humor is also the super disturbing plight of Ronald Reagan and his "friends". Most of the characters initially seem to be stereotypical junkies and addicts whom you are fascinated with (and quasi-horrified by) while watching them destroy their lives in a spectacular manner. You are watching the fictional reality show in the book. This isn't a novel where you get a lot of backstory, and when you do, it is in a snippet from a TV promo, interviews outside the narrative, or footnotes at the end. You slowly piece together each character, and how they got to where they are in the novel, uncovering things as you go. It is a strangely enthralling way to read a story, and I formed some surprising attachments. Mooch and Gasman in particular, will stay with me for a while.

Ronald Reagan is likable pretty much from the start, I think because it's clear that he's smart and that he doesn't quite belong in his situation. You just feel kind of certain that he will get his shit together and escape the nightmare circus that he's taking you through. The fact that it doesn't really happen was possibly one of the most effective parts of the novel for me. Of all the different subjects the novel examines, the addiction one was probably the most poignant for me.

I was really impressed with all of it. The creativity and structure, the actual talent of Gwin's writing, and the ability to make tragic and depressing things funny, even while they hit you in the stomach. Not far beneath the surface of the absurd is such a well-mined vein of truth that it is almost unsettling.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

The plodding pilgrim's journey of the standard addiction narrative is as rote a form as the locked-room murder mystery. First there is wretchedness, then there is redemption. Between the two states one typically finds a whole passel of fallacious inferences and unfalsifiable pieties. Nervy, unpredictable, complex, and thoughtful aren't words that come immediately to mind when describing such a story. And yet here we have Ben Gwin's new novel, and it is these things and more.

Not to make this about me, but I've also been working (for such a long, long time) on a novel that starts out with an addiction narrative yet also wants very much to be about something else—the Recovery-Pharmaceutical-Industrial Complex, race, identity, family, class, money, gentrification, the politics of resentment and contentment, the absurd notion that one can ever escape or transcend all the above—and so I understand the difficulty of writing an interesting story about substance abuse that doesn't follow the tired formula of the Christian/12-step redemption story, or the psychiatric case study, but that doesn't, conversely, bog down into the passive-aggressively maximalist (and masculinist) stream-of-consciousness navel-gazing of Infinite Jest. It's hard. Try it yourself.

So I relished the story's twists and feints, its peripatetic interludes, its silly serial-killer subplot—but mostly I liked its hilariously- but subtly-altered timeline (we learn in a footnote that Ronald Reagan Middleton, the protagonist, "was conceived the day President Reagan's head was blasted into Mount Rushmore," for instance, one of the few explicit mentions that things might be awry in his fictional universe), the scholarly bracketing story that both clarifies and muddies Ronald Reagan's story while also providing a comical Homeric interpretation of his plight (that's right: Gwin takes a little poke at Joyce), and the reality-TV plot that pulls Ronald Reagan out of the obscurity of a downward spiral and into unwanted fame and another downward spiral. It's a hell of a ride.

But Gwin never loses focus on his characters, their pain, fear, and uncertainty, their mixed loyalties and unexpected jukes—and the way that both physical addiction and the grim profit-logic of late capitalism tend to force their moves and deny their humanity. Ronald Reagan's love interests—both bad-girl Jacky and bad-girl-in-recovery Althea—spark with canny, witty life. Even the story's villain, a (pitch-perfectly) jargon-spouting recovery center director with designs on Ronald Reagan both commercial and carnal, seems more controlled by her desires and her network bosses than in control of herself.

Somehow, by pulling every last gonzo instrument out of his writer's toolbox and flourishing them with sufficient violence and art, Gwin has constructed a farce that shows the tendency of individual behavior to mirror the behavior of society as a whole (and vice-versa), and that raises serious questions about who is in control of whom when everyone is in the throes of a convulsive, devouring need to stay entertained at all costs. Is it useful or even rational to search for causal "reasons" for individual behavior in such a situation? Can any of us escape, and into what? Ben Gwin doesn't, and probably can't, answer these questions, but he has such an interesting (and, yes, entertaining) time asking them.

[Dave Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to blurb this excellent novel:

Clean Time punches a hole in the American Dream with double-fisted prose, a brilliant narrative, and enough footnotes to make Junot Diaz proud. This 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. Clean Time is so funny, it will make you cry. You want to know what's happening in America right now? Turn everything off and read Ben Gwin. He is a young writer with a frightening amount of talent.

[Rich Engel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good review by Bill O’Driscoll at https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books...

[Bill O'driscoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Debut novel follows a screwed-up rich kid through addiction, jail, love and rehab in a reality-TV show for recovering addicts. It's billed as a satire, but that's a row that's increasingly tough to hoe these days, when there are actual reality-TV shows about recovering. Gwin is a lively writer and depicts credible characters in this novel's various underworlds (from drug deals to show biz -- not all that different). But he also wants us to like his protagonist and other key characters, in a way that really undercuts the satire; he's plenty candid about their flaws, but the tendency toward creating empathy doesn't give the necessary ironic distance. Still, quite a promising first novel.

[Finley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was quite the whirlwind. I felt swept away by the pace of the writing and got through the book very quickly, as I almost felt like I was watching a movie. The author really captures the darkness of addiction without venturing into wallowing and self-pity that is often common in books about drug addiction. The writing style is shocking and in your face, reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk. It was fascinating to have the novel separated into sections with scripts, memoirs, and essays from various characters in the book. It was fascinating to see America's obsession with addiction, pseudo-academia, reality television, and rehab culture wrapped up into one wild and, at times, over the top novel.

[Deborah Klodowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

So funny and clever, Gwin's style held my attention the entire time. The novel is a successful balance of light and dark. Wonderfully built suspense. Highly recommend for its originality.