The Self-Aware Gringo

On David LeBrun's 'Delirium Vitae'

Dear Republic,

Continuing our work of providing a space for people to review books from the wider Substack-verse, we have a fine addition this morning: the curious, ever-incisive Derek Neal brings us a thoughtful review of David LeBrun’s Delirium Vitae.

-ROL

THE SELF-AWARE GRINGO

Every young writer believes they have greatness inside themselves. Given enough time, they will produce a great novel, their artistry will be publicly recognized, and they will be the voice of their generation, or, at the very least, “a voice of a generation.” We’ve all been there. David LeBrun’s memoir, Delirium Vitae, is about his own time as this stereotypical and clichéd writer.

In 2001, David is 24 years old and working on a broccoli farm in Canada. He has had 16 jobs in his young life, and these jobs form the narrative of his manuscript in progress, called Curriculum Vitae. Predictably, he soon quits his 17^th job and decides to drive to Costa Rica, where he can stay with his friend Mac and finish writing his novel. The rest of Delirium Vitae recounts David’s hitchhiking across Central America and Mexico, his encounters with other young vagabonds, many of whom he travels with, busking for change and scrambling for places to sleep at night, and his slow realization that the life of a struggling and penniless writer is not quite as romantic as he’d imagined.

For someone who repeatedly comments on being a writer (“I stayed with Púas and his mother for a while, finishing revisions.” “Every morning, before Antonio and Zuriaa woke, I made notes on my manuscript.” “‘Why Mexico?’ ‘To write.’”) there is little reflection on the books that have shaped David. Mordecai Richler, Henry Miller, and Hunter S. Thompson are mentioned briefly, but we expect more. Part of the pleasure in reading about a character who is also a writer are their reflections on literature, and David’s exploits would lead us to look for references to other writers who have written about life on the road or in foreign locations, such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, or perhaps Denis Johnson. David, however, rarely picks up a book. It’s unfair to judge a contemporary novel against canonical works, but at the same time, comparing Delirium Vitae to possible influences like On the Road or Jesus’ Son presents what is, to my mind, a shortcoming of the novel: it’s not quite delirious enough.

To be sure, drugs are consumed, crimes are committed, and general debauchery occurs. But rarely by David, who remains relatively pure and innocent throughout, letting others get their hands dirty. He repeatedly rejects the advances of various female characters—somehow, they all seem to be attracted to him—except for one, who leaves him no choice (“At the cabin, Violet had it her way—shoving me onto the bed and tearing off my shorts. She jumped onto me and screamed so loud I had to smother her mouth with my hand and say, ‘Shhh! They’ll call the police.’”). Whereas other characters pop pills and rob their friends, David, for the most part, sticks to weed and rarely deceives anyone. On one hand, this makes sense, as the memoir can be seen as a coming-of-age story, with David realizing that a life of hitchhiking, odd jobs, and petty crime is not for him; on the other, I couldn’t help but feel that if the main character were not also the author of the story, or if LeBrun had gone deeper into his own psyche, his own motivations for his actions (or lack of action), the story would have benefitted. Some of the strongest moments in the memoir, when it seems as if the story asserts itself, are when David takes other drugs—mushrooms, prescription pills, cough syrup—which surface repressed feelings or simply allow the story to slow down, so that rather than moving from place to place restlessly, David stops and pays attention.

Numbness, or deliberately avoiding introspection, can also be an aesthetic choice. In the background of David’s wandering is the death of his father—an event he refuses to confront—and the stroke that his mother has suffered. The characters he meets on his travels ask him why he writes, but he can’t provide an answer. These characters—Antonio, Púas, Zuriaa, and Faustina, to cite the most memorable—compensate for what David lacks. Their conversations, which are understood to take place in Spanish, are peppered with slang that LeBrun includes in the English text. David is a güero but rarely a gringo, meaning a white guy, but one who’s earned the respect of the locals. He and whoever happens to be with him buy tubos of marijuana and drink caguamas of beer. Even without knowing Spanish, it’s easy to pick up on the meaning of these words through context, creating a sense of place and atmosphere in the text.

Lebrun also includes other details that show his sensitivity to the political realities in North and Central America. In one scene, David hitches a ride with a group of men who plan to cross the border illegally into the United States. They develop a bond, but at the border between Guatemala and Mexico, their differing legal status forces them apart. Directly after this, David is stopped at a military checkpoint in Mexico when “a white man approached. He had a scruffy, grey beard, ratty hair, dirty jeans, a torn T-shirt.” He asks David for a sandwich, but David refuses. The man is then detained by federal agents despite his protestations that he’s Americano, and as David’s ride pulls away, “the Federales slammed him to the ground” Lebrun knows that a white Canadian or American has privilege in Mexico—there are chapters with tourists and students on Spring Break—but class plays a role, too. Without money, David and others who wash up in Central America have few prospects.

The narrative thrust driving Delirium Vitae forward eventually reaches a head when David receives feedback from an editor on his manuscript, Curriculum Vitae. To this point, the metafictional possibilities of a novel with a novel have not been fully exploited, but here they are. The editor writes:

I’m rather fond of… your protagonist and the little random encounters at his various places of work, which evoke his wandering, but you need to ask yourself why, somewhere inside, there is fear and resistance to what he needs, why he’d rather intoxicate himself and cut and run, than feel vulnerable.

These comments could equally apply to Delirium Vitae. LeBrun knows this, and in the following scene, when David has the chance to connect with another character by talking about his father, he says that he “could only think of running away.” He ends the conversation saying, “Let’s not talk about it.”

David eventually returns to Canada and is able to provide an explanation for his desire to write:

I knew why—why I wanted to write about the dirt, about rage, dread, and dejection, about exhaustion and shame—because these were things to heave and excrete, to scrub off, and to shape into art—something to put on a shelf and forget about.

The ending to LeBrun’s memoir is satisfying, but I also wondered what shape the book would have taken if he’d let David realize these things at the beginning of the story rather than at its conclusion. Delirium Vitae is apparently the first of three memoirs LeBrun plans to publish—perhaps we’ll find out.

Derek Neal is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. He writes the Substack Derek Neal's Newsletter.