I
n this charming memoir, Andoe narrates his journey from his Tulsa childhood through redneck, hard-partying teen years to a highly successful career as a (hard-partying redneck) painter in New York City. While Andoe may not be a professional writer, his humor and offbeat artistic sensibility make up for any lack of prose-writing chops. Through discrete anecdotes that seldom run longer than two pages, Andoe assembles vivid portraits of his family and friends and of the various environments he inhabited—the working-class Tulsa neighborhoods of the 1960s, the high school and college drug culture at the end of the hippie era, and the New York art scene of the 1980s. Andoe rarely said “No” to drugs, and the marginal characters and dangerous encounters of the lowlife provide the book with a great deal of energy and pathos; at times his memoir reads like a more amateur version of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son
. Yet whenever the gonzo stories verge on tedium, Andoe modulates his tone and shows himself as the stay-at-home dad, the outdoorsman, the artist. While Andoe has an occasional tendency to settle scores (his ex-wife receives particularly brutal treatment) or trumpet his status as an outsider, for the most part his wide-eyed sense of wonder and keen observations make the everyday strange and fresh. (Aug.)
