Book Review: Nightmare In Bangkok

In an age of wannabe I lived to tell scribes — James Frey comes to mind — here is a story whose authenticity and immediacy spills off the page, placing you in the thick of a breath-taking and, at times, gut-wrenching whirlwind of what is one fast-paced adventure of a “lived life”: Andy Botts, my friends, is the real deal.

The American anti-hero pattern is definitely part of the attraction here: on display is the kind of made-in-America social pathology that gave Ray Liotta a hit starring turn in Good Fellas, Johnny Depp the cut of a swoon-inducing bad boy in Blow, and Leonardo DiCaprio the allure of a charismatic wunderkind in Catch Me if You Can – indeed, the cinematic possibilities for Botts’s tale are outrageously palpable.

What makes Botts’s story a standout rather than simply a retread of this particular genre of American downfall and redemption is that his is, at bottom, a spiritual journey. This is an awakened individual coming to grips with a series of personal encounters with divine intervention. The book also serves as a great introduction to the social, cultural, and historical iconography of the Hawaiian Islands from a unique and, I daresay, important perspective. If Hawaii is a ‘closed’ society, then Botts just may be the ultimate insider.

While the book is not without its writerly faults – problems easily enough addressed and that, hopefully, will be reflected in the next edition  – the sheer balls to the wall vitality of the narrative makes this mostly a minor distraction. The truth is this book is full of great writing. Necessity is the mother of invention, and Botts’s resourceful prose admirably rises to the occasion throughout. Editor Laura Rectenwald clearly deserves credit for preserving the authenticity of Botts’s singular voice; her efforts are also presumably part of the reason the book hangs together so well.

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I must own up to something: I know Andy Botts. He lives across the hall from me on the 13th floor of a building in which I’m currently temporarily holed up. It’s not every day that you meet someone who has made it through the kind of ordeal that Andy, not content to merely survive, actively plumbed the depths of. With the unfolding of a new chapter in his life, one hopes that Andy Botts will be able to share his spiritual insight with the kind of mass audience that an experience-rich memoir of this caliber clearly deserves.