How does an ordinary middle-class husband and father lose all self-respect and become an addict living in squalor? First his daughter is killed by a car, then his wife leaves him. Charlie Crosby, the narrator of what’s left of his life in Enon (Random House, $26), self-medicates his grief and a broken hand with whiskey, pain killers, and story-telling, obsessively recounting his childhood experiences and the family lore he would have passed on to his daughter (which includes many admiring tales of George Crosby, his grandfather and the protagonist of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer-winning first novel, Tinkers). At first Charlie’s interior monologues buoy him, but as they become more fantastic and less coherent, Charlie is forced to face the depths he’s sunk to and find a way back to normality. Harding’s recounting of Charlie’s descent into and rise from emotional and physical ruin is vivid and heartbreaking.