Book Review : Robert Dean - Existential Thirst Trap (2023)
Whether it is fiction or not, good writing always features two necessary components : vulnerability and truthfulness. You need to reveal something uncomfortable about yourself for other people to feel less alone and embrace a sense of connexion with you. You need to be fun and engaging too, reveal how you see the world in a unique and interesting way. Robert Dean's essay collection Existential Thirst Trap is a quite simple, disarming read, but it does all of these little things remarkably well.
So, what is Existential Thirst Trap exactly? A collection of essays can take many forms and here, Dean's work reads like a series of columns or spoken word pieces written for an audience of one. The short entries vaguely follow one another chronologically (at least, they seem) and cover a wide-array of topics from random encounters in New Orleans bars to the fundamental differences between cake and pie. If it seems like stories a captivating friend would tell you over a beer, that's because it is.
Living in New Orleans, you forge a bond with death (p.47)
Outward Rob
The first Robert Dean we're introduced to in Existential Thirst Trap is the New Orleans veteran taking us to a guided tour of its most Dionysian pleasures. In Grease & Grim, he recalls guiding friends from outside of town to some of the best and worst stripper bars in the city, like Virgil taking Dante through the afterlife. A common question that's going to follow the reading of this essay will be : "wow, is this true?" I think it is or at least mostly. There's no real narrative structure and it is by far the wildest story in the collection.
Anyone's entitled to have at least one fucked up bar story and if you've been to New Orleans, you know an evening can do from deluxe to apocalyptic within an hour.
This outgoing, hard living persona reappears through several other essays, mostly in the first segment of Existential Thirst Trap, recalling intense memories and interesting encounters of the past. In one of my favourite essays New Orleans Hard, he recalls a murder happening on his work shift after writing a melancholic love letter to the city. Another favourite of mine is Last Course, where he imagines what a day with the late Anthony Bourdain would’ve been like. It's a collaboration between Outward Rob and Inward Rob.
This one pulled my pants down because I do this a lot. Escape reality within the confines of my own mind and imagine what I would say to people who I loved unilaterally in my life. Tom Araya doesn’t eve know I exist and I would love to sit down with him to explain my undying love for the sound of his voice. Dean did it with Bourdain's openness and James Dean-cool in a beautiful, elegiac way in Last Course. When I told you earlier about how vulnerability creates connexion, this is what I meant.
Overall, the Outward Rob essays reminded me of one of Leonard Cohen's famous sayings : "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." Dean's life has been burning well or, at least, has burned well for many, many years.
Inward Rob
Two-thirds of the essays in Existential Thirst Trap are not about bars and chaos and violence. They're more concerned with Robert Dean's inner life. They're not about how things are, but rather how they feel. A great, wildly fun example is Bathroom Code, where Dean shrewdly observes that male bathrooms around the world respect a rule of silence. It's a simple enough thought, but since no one talks in male bathrooms, no one ever verbalized the weird uniformity of this phenomenon until Robert Dean did.
Some of these essays form inside Dean's head and live their lives on paper are humorous is nature, but most of them are not. No Matter How Hard They Try, A Playlist Will Never Be A Mixtape is about unconditionally loving something that lives and die outside of you. In this case, music. Dean expresses the Sisyphean task of exploring your subjectivity through ideas that have nothing to do with you in a clever, but powerful way. He explores this weird quirk we all have of existing through a shared culture.
Other pieces in Existential Thirst Trap are more personal. Some of them later in the collection deal with his divorce, which he writes about with the wisdom of someone who know what it's like to get hurt. It also marks a passage in his life where he moved away from New Orleans to Austin to build a more conventional life for himself, only to wash ashore on the margins again. Why the fuck do I write like I know the guy? Well, that's what Existential Thirst Trap does to you. It create a unilateral relationship.
*
Existential Thirst Trap manages to be entertaining and deeply personal and moving. Not just to Robert Dean, but also to whoever gives it an earnest read. This is a journey inside the soul of someone who is riddled with scars and experiences that you might also have. Dean is both extraordinary and perfectly relatable. I have become more or less allergic to podcasts over the last couple years, but I’d definitely sit down and listen to this man talk for hours. Robert Dean knows a thing or two about creating relationships.
