Book Review: Low Side of the Road: a life of Tom Waits, by Barney Hoskyns

Tom Waits is one of the best living characters in the story of mankind, specifically the chapter on America. He inhabits a strange twilight land in which he is both famous and virtually unknown. I’ve never done it, but I would bet that if you approached ten random people and asked them what they thought of Tom Waits, six or seven of them wouldn’t have any idea who you were talking about, and the other two or three would gush near-fanatical fandom. I am one of the fanatical, and apparently so is “Low Side of the Road”, author, Barney Hoskyns. To those of us who have or do love naively, (which is any of us who have ever loved, since to love wisely only comes after many loves lost, if at all) our love quickly becomes indistinguishable from a greed to possess. And so it seems that Hoskyns’ love of Tom Waits has motivated him, via some lame, albeit understandable, altruistic justification that he is doing this for the world and not himself, to try to possess the character that is Tom Waits, and thus reduce him to something concrete, something with definable beginnings and endings, something that can be placed upon a bookshelf for future reference. I sympathize with that, but I like Tom Waits just the way he is: a great character, which is to say he is entertaining, and inspiring and amusing, even if not necessarily something that actually exists in what we think of as “reality.”

Without getting into the whole psychological debate of whether or not there is such a thing as an authentic “self,” and whether or not we are all, in some way, performance artists, let me just say that I think there is something essentially futile in the endeavor of biography. For all of the other things that a biography is, it is mostly a story, a long, complex, incomplete story. How can a life be summed up in words in a finite number of pages? So there are ways to biograph that reduce the story that they try to tell into something flat and monotonous, and there are those that nurture the story by embracing the fictional element of any story, even those stories we like to call “true.” The best recent example of this is the Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There,” which didn’t even bother to attempt to tell the story of Dylan, but by taking up the tradition of his legend, ended up saying more than anyone could’ve thought possible, never mind whether or not it was “true.” The character of Tom Waits is ripe for a biography of that sort, but as it is, us fanatics will settle, somewhat ambivalently for Hoskyns’ “Low Side of the Road,” which, although I don’t think it contributes anything to his character’s story, doesn’t diminish it either - a rare feat in the genre.