Junky reads less like a memoir and more like one of those casual travelogues popular in the early 20th century... only instead of sun-drenched cafés or exotic landscapes, we get dingy rooms, withdrawal symptoms, and low-level hustlers. It’s the kind of writing that sketches a world without ever getting dirty in it. You drift through the book the same way Burroughs drifts through his scenes: flat, observant, mildly amused, and weirdly unaffected. You become a tourist of the low-life through his works.
It reminded me of genteel wanderers like Paul Theroux or Robert Byron, writers who chronicled the “curiosities” of foreign cultures with a mix of detachment, curiosity, and quiet superiority. But where they explored temples, mosques, or colonial outposts, Burroughs gives us addicts, peddlers, and petty criminals, each described with the same bemused distance. Drug prices, shooting-up techniques, and detox routines are listed with the matter-of-factness of someone describing hotel amenities. The difference is that in Junky, there’s no landscape to marvel at — just a flat sprawl of misery, passed through and left behind.
The book claims to document an underground world, but never truly immerses itself in it. The people are transient and interchangeable: never fully human, never fully seen. Even Burroughs himself seems like a ghost in his own story, hovering a few inches above the ground. He is a drifter, and the book drifts with him.
I understand that this was, to some extent, the point. Burroughs presents himself as a floater — disconnected, passive, suspended in a narcotic fog. The style is meant to reflect the lifestyle. And maybe that works on a conceptual level. But for me, it never lands. The detachment feels less like literary precision and more like emotional evasion. There's no intimacy, no risk, no desire to connect. The effect is not immersion, but insulation.
Perhaps, Junky might work better when understood in the context of its original publication, as a pulp paperback from 1953, published under a pseudonym. Read as a lurid little curio, a paperback document of the drug underworld meant to shock or educate the square reader, it has a certain historical and subcultural value. But as literature, it feels inert. The narrative wanders, the people blur, and the world it claims to expose stays safely out of reach.
In the end, I never felt like I was in the world of Junky. I felt like I was passing through, looking out the window of a slow-moving train, with Burroughs sitting across from me: vaguely amused, unwilling to say too much. It’s a tour, not a plunge. And for all its grit and grime, it left me strangely clean.