[In the following review, Delacorte lauds Carroll's ability to create witty one-liners and clever vignettes in Forced Entries, but asserts that the book lacks substance and has an unfulfilling conclusion.]

Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries was an extraordinary piece of work—an account of four years, more or less, in the life of a kid growing up in New York City.

The kid happened to be a basketball star, a thief, a male prostitute and an incipient junkie, so there was plenty of action and things got pretty lurid. But still the most impressive thing about the book was the smooth sophistication of its prose. To be sure, Basketball Diaries didn’t appear in book form until 1978, when Carroll was in his late 20s, and various anachronisms suggest that its text had been altered or augmented well after its 1963–66 time frame. But enough of Basketball Diaries had been published contemporarily, notably in The Paris Review, to provide ample proof that most of this cool, nihilistic, terrific stuff really was composed by a kid no older than 16.

In Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971–73 the author is now an adult, already something of a celebrity in New York poetry circles and a heroin addict of several years’ standing. His life is nowhere near as interesting as it was back in the mid-’60s, but it’s still consistently weird, and when he’s not nodding off or trying to kick the habit, he tends to be in the presence of lots of famous people. Most of these people, of course, are not the sort you run across on Entertainment Tonight.

Carroll serves as Edwin Denby’s escort at Lincoln Center; he baby-sits for Allen Ginsberg; he works at Andy Warhol’s factory; he swaps anecdotes with William Burroughs at a party; he goes out to dinner with Bob Dylan; he has a taxi brazenly rustled from him by Salvador Dali; he spends a bizarre Christmas Day speeding around Manhattan with a famous painter (easily guessed as Larry Rivers) until they get arrested because the artist can’t prove he owns his brand new Cadillac; they get sprung from jail by Jacob Javits.

If Basketball Diaries was Oliver Twist projected into the late 20th century, then Downtown Diaries is a sort of rococo and very hip Liz Smith column, with Carroll as both gossip columnist and central character. Does this mean it’s a bad book? No. Not by any means. It zips along, most of the time; it’s full of great stories, and occasionally it steps out and says something that makes us wish it hadn’t been treated as (to use a favorite Carroll word) such a goof.

Toward the book’s beginning, Carroll finds himself watching the NBA All-Star game on television, “watching guys I used to seriously abuse on the court scoring in double figures now against the best in the game. … I should have stayed an athlete, body well-tuned, cruising around with my accountant in a Porsche, maroon and chrome.” In basketball, Carroll says, “there’s always only one direction: to the cylinder on the fiberglass rectangle. And you don’t have to aim. If you do, you’re off.”

Instead he’s chosen poetry, which is “like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you—call it heart, call it mind, call it soul—accelerate out of control … You realize, then, that you can’t attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out.”

Writing about writing, writers generally can’t get too far beyond the most pedestrian observations. Here, between anecdotes, Carroll casually tosses off an epiphany and earns great respect. But does he deserve it, really?

I’m still trying to figure that out. In Basketball Diaries, intentionally or not, he did a marvelous job of establishing his character—pulling no punches and holding nothing back. There were moments, particularly excursions into petty crime and not-so-petty sexual violence, when my gut reaction was that Carroll was drifting into fantasy or fiction, or repeating stories he’d heard, perhaps from other kids who actually had experienced them. Then I’d catch myself, and I’d wonder whether my disbelief was based entirely on my wanting to like, to identify with the Carroll character. Was I saying, logically, hey—this kid wouldn’t have stooped that low? Or was I saying, emotionally—I hope he didn’t do those things, because I sure wouldn’t?

Of course, from the author’s point of view the reader’s confusion on such a point is absolutely irrelevant, as long as the reader stays interested. And through Basketball Diaries the reader was likely to stay riveted for any number of reasons—the most striking of which were that it was so well written, and that we were rooting for Carroll, for this kid. Given the circumstances, what exactly were we rooting for? For a happy ending, I suppose, and that’s precisely what Carroll, what the kid, wasn’t about to give us.

Basketball Diaries ends with 15-year-old Carroll “nodding on this ratty mattress … both my forearms sore as s—t with all the little specks of caked blood covering them.” Downtown Diaries begins with Carroll turning 20, as he uses his aunt’s birthday present, ＄20, to score some heroin. Five years under the bridge and not much has changed, evidently. But then how many junkies would report: “The dope was as good as Hector said. On the way back over to my room at the Chelsea I saw an owl on Seventh Avenue. It was doing a little gymnastic routine on a lamppost.”

Downtown Diaries is stuffed with little throw-aways like that, with vivid little moments, and with terrific stories. And yet…

And yet I kept expecting something, some substance, that never arrived. Basketball Diaries was a sort of perverse bildungsroman; we may not have been pleased by its developments, but they did occur. Here, there is rather languid movement in no particular direction until, a few months in, Carroll starts talking about moving out to a little town in Northern California to kick his habit. There is a reference here, a reference there, and then all of a sudden on page 125 he arrives in … Bolinas!

And for the next 30 pages the book is incessantly boring, because Carroll is a fish out of water. In its meandering way, the book has been leading to this: the rite of purification, the great battle against the “small pink simian” that holds Carroll captive. But nothing happens. Carroll makes vapid observations about California. He gets a dog. He has teeth extracted. He makes his big attempt to kick drugs; little regard is paid to the major event. He returns to New York.

And he never really regains momentum. Back in Manhattan there is a strange and awful party, there is the Dali anecdote, and there is a final, nice bit regarding the exorcism of an abscess, an ultimate cleansing. Ironically, the happy ending that didn’t come in Basketball Diaries has thus sneaked into the final pages of Downtown Diaries. It’s good news, but unfortunately we don’t care nearly as much for the 1973 Jim Carroll as we had about the kid he’d been.