2024 Book Review #5: The Dispossessed by Don Carpenter

I had never heard about Don Carpenter since I read about him recently in a French magazine. His interests about human frailty and marginal characters, from pool sharks to struggling actors, seemed tempting.

Another article in the Nation magazine once mentioned he focused on “small-timers, last-chancers and no-hopers.” Carpenter died tragically at the age of 64 by suicide in 1995 in his tiny apartment in Mill Valley, California, after an extensive career of writing novels and screenplays, which took him from Berkeley to Hollywood.

Few of his books are available for cheap, but one I was able to find is The Dispossessed. Having interviewed, written and reported on the unhoused in Reno over the past 10 years, I was surprised to see how little has changed in 40 years, and how immersed Carpenter’s writing feels.

The dispossessed in his book are drifters who pretend to be crazier than they actually are but then sometimes become so, teenage runaways fleeing abusive households and looking for adult figures to guide them, the too sensitive and vulnerable, the street philosophers who repeat their mantras, veterans with nothing to give back anymore, the falsely accused and the unwanted artists.

The location is a small commuter Northern California town, and more precisely a square surrounding the main breakfast place, called the Depot, which has its own overlapping dramas and tragedies.

The eccentrics who hang out looking for a place to feel connected live within harsh fantastical worlds with nicknames and their own legends, empathy and brutal honesty, and their secret spots at night. They appear, never seem to want to leave, and then suddenly disappear.

The novel has its dated moments, dialogue and characters, but it’s that rare novel which so accurately describes those without a home to call their own, how they get misunderstood and brutalized by police and our courts, but how those who watch and listen closely enough can see the light, love, purpose and humanity within the madness.