Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous is the recovery organization Jim Gardener turns to in managing his alcoholism, but the novel presents attendance as an imperfect safeguard rather than a clean resolution. His changing relationship to meetings, drinking, and sobriety exposes the gap between outward abstinence and an addiction that can return with sudden force.

Acknowledgment and Routine

Gardener knows that alcoholism cannot, in his view, be divided into a stable middle ground: a person is either drinking or not drinking. He sometimes attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting if two weeks have passed without one, feeling uneasy in its absence, and introduces himself there as an alcoholic. Yet when he is not actively craving alcohol, the declaration can feel untrue to him. He may go months without thinking about booze, and during those periods he can drink moderately at a faculty gathering or share a few beers with Bobbi Anderson without seeing himself as in danger.

That mismatch makes the meetings both meaningful and limited. They provide a recurring acknowledgment of the problem, but they do not make its severity continuously present in Gardener’s mind. The novel distinguishes not drinking from recovery: a stretch of apparent control can coexist with a vulnerability that Gardener is tempted to discount.

Craving and Relapse

On June 26, while away from Bobbi in Boston, Gardener wakes wanting to drink. The craving feels physical and overwhelming, not like a considered decision to resume drinking. When Ron Cummings proposes drinks, Gardener accepts and raises a glass of Jack Daniel’s, telling himself that he can stop whenever he wants. The scene marks the turn from a period of relative restraint into a binge.

Gardener’s own history gives that relapse grave context. His previous major binge, the Thanksgiving episode of 1980, ended his marriage and teaching career and nearly cost Nora her life. The novel therefore places his new loss of control against consequences he already knows, rather than treating it as an isolated lapse. During the later binge, memory is lost; when he begins eating again, he cannot tell when he last had food. Shame and despair return with the physical aftereffects, and he thinks that he should have killed himself. The episode shows how far the distance between meeting-room acknowledgment and actual control can widen.

Aftermath and Continuing Risk

After eight days of drinking, sleeping rough, and making his way back to Maine, Gardener experiences a sense of physical regeneration as the hangover and depression begin to lift. He recognizes that this restorative feeling is something he tends to forget during a binge: waking without having put alcohol into his system can eventually feel good. The recovery is real but provisional; it does not erase the binge or the harms attached to his drinking.

Later, while staying with Bobbi, Gardener secretly disposes of the Valium tablets she believes he is taking. The episode shows him concealing his actions even as he resists one form of medication, and it leaves his motives uncertain. His alcoholism remains part of a wider pattern of concealment and impaired judgment, affecting what he notices and what he tells Bobbi. Alcoholics Anonymous is thus neither a cure nor a mere formality in his story: its language and meetings give him a way to name his condition, while his cycles of craving, relapse, and renewed abstinence reveal how precarious that recognition remains.