Given the lack of attention to social work novels, I've decided to establish a new category of awards: the Soci (pronounced so-shee) Awards, akin to the Emmy Awards, for the best social work novel published that I know about. Laura Kalpakian is the 20th Century's winner for the Most Engaging and Insightful Novel about a Fledgling Social Worker. I'm sure Ms. Kalpakian is thrilled beyond words at this honor.

Zachary's Wings by Rosemarie Robotham is decidedly more realistic, and takes on a rare bird in a fictional subject category already rarefied — the male social worker. The book stars Zachary, a twentysomething African American guy living in Philadelphia and moseying along as a caseworker for the chronically mentally ill. Zachary hooks up with Korie, a Jamaican-born reporter for a magazine that seems to be based on the magazine Life. It's the '80's, and drinking and drugging are part and parcel of the lifestyle for both Zachary and Korie, except that Zachary, who has been drinking since childhood when his single mother gave him beer on the porch most evenings, can handle his intoxicants, while Korie, the child of affluence and a troubled first marriage, can't handle life or drugs, and is in over her head on both counts. Zachary becomes her caretaker as she spirals into full-blown addiction. He accepts a role similar to the role he played with his mother as a child: secret-keeper and pain-bearer. With a kind of devotion that is both beautiful and tragic, Zachary keeps on helping, taking on the care of Korie's first husband, a task which gets uglier unto death. Meanwhile, Korie becomes incapable of reciprocating Zachary's deathless devotion, unable to desire anything but her next high.

Zachary's Wings had some striking insights on addiction and the addictive lifestyle. One of these insights is about how the substance a person craves gives them stability and predictability in life. In Korie's voice, after she has entered into recovery and is watching the movie Drugstore Cowboy, we get this glimpse:

"'Most people don't know how they're going to feel from one moment to the next,' the Matt Dillon character says at the end, 'but the junkie has a pretty good idea.' That's the thing about drugs. About life. About those of us who feel buffeted by a surfeit of emotion. Drugs hook us because it seems they offer a little certainty. You do the drug, you know how you're going to feel. I guess only when the uncertainty the drugs ends up giving becomes greater than the uncertainty of life itself does it become possible for a junkie to dream of quitting."
For Korie, whose life becomes mired in harsh losses that she can't predict or control, drugs become the reliable consolation that she craves, until finally she ends up in "the rooms," — what she and other people in recovery call the anonymous meetings they attend for support. Here again Robotham provides rich and unique description: