Word: dad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...glance over at Dad. His eyes are open and he's looking at me! I mean he's looking at me, not past me, or through me or around me! He's looking into my eyes...
...riding on the back of a motorcycle with his son. Tremont's sister and daughter, who both live near by, bask in this sunny remission; his son Billy, a college dropout, shows up and is equally delighted. After a lifetime spent working at factory jobs he hated, Dad is finally enjoying himself. The only one unhappy about all this is Mom, who fears that her husband of 50 years has become a stranger. She throws an extended tantrum. Before too long, Dad is back in the nursing home. Tremont mourns: "He's gone, totally, completely gone." Giving...
...sleeps, on different occasions, in the same room with both. Observing this pattern, he muses on its meaning: "I'm caught up, beached, between two tides, the old one of fathering-husbanding and the new one of aging-dying." occasionally, a third voice interrupts the narrative. It is Dad's mind, rehearsing the elaborative fantasy that has been a retreat for most of his adult life. In it, he owns the farm that he always wanted, raises a family of four (not two, as in that other place), lives in harmony with his wife, and moves...
...presence of this obsessive, comforting vision links Dad to Birdy (1979), Wharton's acclaimed first novel about an adolescent boy who wants to become a canary and fly. But Dad is a rather more tenuous success than its predecessor. For one thing, it dissipates some of its power in prolixity. When Dad goes through his brief recovery, Tremont notes, within a few pages, "he's like a seventeen-year-old . . . he could have some feelings of being physically thirteen or fourteen years old . . . he has all the ego isolation and drive of a twenty-year-old." These sound...
Ultimately, the effectiveness of Dad lies beyond logic. The novel has the feel of an intense autobiography, not recollected in tranquillity but dashed off from life, with all its uncertainties, mixed motives and false starts preserved intact. Wharton, himself an artist and an American expatriate in France, has photographed this story instead of painting it. But, like the best snapshots, Dad is touching, commemorative and candid...