Father of the Rain: A Novel Review
One thing I've mused about in a couple of different reviews is that sometimes it takes a while for a book to get going. In those instances, being patient can really pay off as by sticking it out the end makes up for the slow beginning. "Father of the Rain" doesn't quite fall into this category, but almost.
The story starts off in Massachusetts in '73 or '74, during the Watergate scandal. This is used as a backdrop to the dissolution of Daley Amory's parents' marriage. Daley is 11 at the time and her father is like Archie Bunker, only with more alcohol. He's not (usually) physically abusive, but his recklessness and insensitivity emotionally abuse Daley, her older brother Garvey, and in particular their mom.
Mom finally moves across town with Daley while Daley's father shacks up with another woman named Catherine. She too is recently divorced, has three kids, and likes to drink. It's a match made in Heaven...or somewhere a lot hotter.
This first part of the story bored me. It all seemed so cliche, like something taken out of a Judy Blume novel or an After School special about coping with divorce and drinking. Even the idea of using Watergate as a backdrop is a cliche. (For instance, I used this in a short story 5 years ago--if you have a Kindle you can read it as part of my collection "The Carnival Papers." It also took place in Massachusetts.)
The second part of the story picks up more momentum. In that, Daley is 29 and an aspiring professor at Berkeley. She's dating a black philosophy professor named Jonathan. But then she gets an urgent call that brings her back home, where her father has lost another wife.
Daley attempts--quixotically everyone thinks--to get her father on the wagon. She hopes to not only get him sober, but in the process to repair the shattered bond between them.
I'm not sure why exactly the first part of the book didn't work for me and the second part did. It might have to do that as an adult I can relate a lot easier to Daley's struggles as an adult than as a child. Especially since unlike 50% of people my parents didn't divorce--and didn't drink either--so none of that really hits home for me. Whereas an adult trying to reconnect with a parent is something I can understand better.
The writing is sound. I don't really see any benefit from using present tense instead of the more traditional past tense, but it doesn't really hurt the story either. It's solid literary writing, but nothing beautiful or particularly memorable.
Anyway, I enjoyed the last 2/3 of this book and other people will probably enjoy 3/3 of it. Then others will enjoy 0/3 too. Still, it's worth a look.
That is all.
(PS: The author also lost points with me for making Michigan outside of Ann Arbor sound like Mississippi in the '50s. We ain't all a bunch of slack-jawed yokels out here in the sticks.)
Father of the Rain: A Novel Feature
- ISBN13: 9780802119490
- Condition: New
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Father of the Rain: A Novel Overview
Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who's beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when they divorce, and Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed, the chasm quickly widens and Daley is stretched thinly across it.
As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father’s fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own separate life—until he hits rock bottom. Lured home by the dream of getting her father sober, Daley risks everything she's found beyond him, including her new love, Jonathan, in an attempt to repair a trust broken years ago.
A provocative and masterfully told story of one woman's lifelong loyalty to her father, Father of the Rain is a spellbinding journey into the emotional complexities and magnetic pull of family.
Father of the Rain: A Novel Specifications
Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: There's an emotional heft to Father of the Rain that comes not in the form of high drama, but in the feel of its characters. Daley Amory is an acute and attentive witness to her parents' divorce, which coincides with the larger dissolution of Nixon's presidency--itself a particularly appropriate historical counterpoint for a novel that explores how fiercely parents and children can polarize. Daley's father, Gardiner, is a jovial but capricious blue-blood New Englander, an alcoholic whose behavior is increasingly erratic and punishing to the point that Daley finally breaks away--in spite of how much she loves him--for much of her adult life. She is resilient, a woman you can respect but also challenge, and her love is (ultimately, amazingly) uncomplicated and true. The award-winning author of two previous novels, Lily King has long been admired for her deft, graceful characterization, and in no novel is this more evident than Father of the Rain. She takes on difficult characters but never vilifies them, choosing instead to seek out the feelings they shield, raise them up, and set them free. --Anne Bartholomew
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Customer Reviews
Difficult decisions - captdan -
Ate this book up in a couple of bites. My way of saying it was difficult to put it down. Explores multiple emotional mine fields. Could easily have gotten stuck in self-inspection/self-wonder, but brilliant editing keeps it moving. I imagine there is a lot of fine prose on the cutting room floor.
A fine book, a great entertainment and a piece that makes you wonder how and who you are and what you do to and for your family.
So poignant, elegantly written. - Starr Osborne -
I grew up with these people. Ms King has written hauntingly in a way that is revelatory, humorous, tragic, and achingly human. The protagonist's numbness as she faces a priveledged yet painful upbringing is heartwrenching. One wants to scream Munch like into the night: We are with you. Her prose are exceedingly impressive.
"It's 1952 in Ashing. And it always will be." - M. Feldman - Bowdoin, Maine, USA
It's the nineteen-seventies, and at the center of this novel about a painful father-daughter relationship is Gardiner Amory, an well-bred (St. Paul's, Harvard), well-to-do (old money), tennis playing alcoholic who is suspicious of intellectuals, venerates athletics, avoids vegetables, votes Republican, loves dogs, wears red pants, and belongs to a club that excludes blacks and Jews. John Cheever would know what to do with this guy. The Amory family lives in Ashing, a North Shore Massachusetts town straight out of John Updike-land. His daughter Daley is caught in the middle of a divorce in which all parties, but particularly Dad, behave in execrable fashion (alcohol + vulgarity + sex). Is it any wonder that she becomes a well-bred (local private school), less well-to-do, sports-avoiding vegetarian intellectual (anthropology) who avoids dogs, refuses to go to the club, votes Democratic, dresses sloppily, and becomes involved with a black man? There you have the conflict of "Father of the Rain." I won't say whether or not there is any redemption for this fraught relationship, except to say that the novel ends with the election of Obama.
The novel certainly sets forth, in detailed fashion, the pain that alcoholism inflicts on a family. Told in the present tense, from the perspective of Daley, it sometimes has the confessional quality of a memoir, although it is fiction. The character of Gardiner, however, never comes really alive; for most of the novel, he lives comfortably in his stock WASP persona, and it is often difficult to understand why Daley nearly ruins her life to try and save him.
The novel, at 384 pages, seems long; there are many passages of banal, predictable dialogue and many scenes (breastfeeding at the beach, shopping for preppy clothes, Thanksgiving dinner, and so on) where the inclusion of every little detail slows the pace of the narrative. Some of this detail is downright wince-worthy; a hot dog becomes "a pink tube of pig intestine," a lactating woman's breasts are "pale raw tubers."
If you like contemporary novels about family relationships, you may enjoy this novel. However, as one who loves the hard-drinking preppies of the stories and novels of Cheever and Updike, I wish there had been more to Gardiner Amory than a set of prejudices, a certain zip code, a tennis racket, and a bottle of gin.
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