In his rich, visceral debut novel, All Day Is a Long Time, David Sanchez sketches a portrait of addiction and young adulthood that wrestles with the limitations of recovery narratives.
Sanchez's protagonist, also named David, is driven by appetite. A voracious reader from a young age, he reflects: "I would do anything to relieve that restlessness in my heart." At 14, after running away from home to follow a girl from Tampa to Key West, David tries his first hit of crack cocaine. The high catches him like a riptide, setting him adrift on a sea of addiction and precarity, doomed to "decades of misery and haste, ecstasy and boredom."
Floating between jails and treatment centers, between exhilarating benders and tedious, tenuous sobriety, David's life loses its sense of linearity. Sanchez smartly subordinates the plot to the vivid textures of his narrator's interiority; aware of the pitfalls of addiction narratives, David resists surrendering to their fatalism. "I needed some kind of agency," he protests. "I just wanted some reason that didn't lead to the dead end of predestination that haunted me everywhere I went."
Forgoing many plot beats typical of a coming-of-age story, Sanchez sets his novel to the frenetic pace of his narrator's thoughts. As he sifts through his drug-singed memories to piece together an account of himself that is free of "blame shifting" and "flimsy excuses," David's fitful passions become a genuine yearning for self-knowledge. Only David, Sanchez suggests, could author his own salvation. --Theo Henderson, Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash.