Dave's Book Blog: "Dad" by William Wharton

Wednesday, 12 March 2025

"Dad" by William Wharton

When your parents get old and need help, family tensions and secrets are exposed.

Jacky, a painter living in Paris, returns home to 1977 California to care for his father after his mother has had a heart attack. Then his father gets cancer and has a mental breakdown. Sudden onset dementia or worse? And when his ferocious mother returns home, how can anyone cope with her? To add to the mix, Jacky's son, Billy, has quit university and turns up on the doorstep.

The narrative is told from the first-person present-tense PoV of the two sons: mostly Jacky and occasionally Billy. The narrative flips between the pair of them driving across the USA (in a road trip that reminded me hugely of the one in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and Jacky's experience with his ailing parents. From time to time a third voice breaks in, in italics; we learn later whose voice this is.

The plot reminded me of that puzzle (referenced in the text) in which you have to transport a fox, a chicken and a pile of grain across a river in a boat that will only take two of the items. First the mother was in hospital and then the father, then he was in a care home, then she ... Add to this swirling confusion the repeated gut-wrenching hammer blows of heart attack, dementia, cancer etc in which almost everything that could go wrong did and there was no way you could stop reading even though the going was sometimes gruelling. There's a graphic description of a terrible road traffic accident at one stage which summarised my impression of the book to that point: I didn't want to rubberneck and yet I couldn't look away. There was also a puzzle aspect to the plot: just trying to work out the relationships between the characters and the main narrator's back story was an incentive to keep reading. So I turned pages and read this big book in four days.

The main characters are thoroughly drawn:

Jacky is a superman, perhaps a little too good to be true, a sort of Marty Stu. He is good at every aspect of keeping a household going from domestic chores to DiY. In addition to this he has a PhD (I wasn't quite sure in what but it seems to be medicine related) but now supports his family living in Paris with a second home in the French countryside by painting pictures. This was one aspect that didn't quite ring true: he just didn't seem to view the world in the way that painters do. There were moments when he thought, for example: “There's something special about painting landscape in the cold when it isn't snowing. The colors are toned down, muted, and the forms are much more visible.” (Ch 2) But these felt like add-ons rather than integral to his personality. At one point he thinks: “He's probably seeing forms, shapes, colors and movements in an original, personal sense, the way an artist tries to see and never can.” (Ch 10) But I thought that Jacky, as an artist, should see everything in terms of form, shape and colour, as does the artist protagonist in My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok and as I have tried to do with the protagonist-narrator in my novel Bally and Bro.
His father is a working man, brilliant with his hands, who is easily intimidated and has become a carpet for others to walk on; nevertheless he retains deep mental reserves of compassion and understanding and strategies to cope with the bullying behaviour of his wife.
Mother is a fascinating character - “the Lady Macbeth of Colby Lane” (Ch 20) - whose default strategy is attack and whose weapons include passive aggressive emotional blackmail - “first, recrimination, doubt I'd come; second, self-pity.” (Ch 2) - and straightforward aggression.
Billy, the grandson and university drop-out is trying to understand the complexities of life while retaining sufficient independence to chart his own way forward.
Other characters, including Jacky's presumably long-suffering wife Vron who stays in Paris and from whom we never hear, are less complex, but I don't think I could have coped, as a reader, had they not been.

The book ends with a terrifying summary of what to expect as one grows old: “Maybe it's time for me to start learning how to be old. ... Somehow, I've got to get myself ready to accept being weak, in pain, mentally debilitated, forgetful, less sensitive, less aware, inflexible, intolerant ... I need to absorb, without resentment, the hurt when my grown grandchildren feel violated by my most cherished values, while their ideas, in turn, will violate me. I must get ready for the deaths of lifelong friends, relatives, the frequency increasing with time. I must also live with those who survive who will be boring, uninteresting. ... I'll become a bore to others, a drag in conversation, repeat myself, be slow at comprehension, quick at misunderstanding, have lapses in conceptual sequence.” (Ch 23)

An emotionally hard read, but a compelling one.

Selected quotes:

“You're old when most people would rather have you dead.” (Ch 1)
“It's weird seeing this counterfeit world inundated with thick, caking, beige mud, cracking in the sun like a Christmas tree in a trash can, tinsel still sparkling.” (Ch 1)
“It's well past noon. Lead-heavy sun is forcing itself hard into the tops of our heads.” (Ch 1)
“In any competitive-comparative society there are hundreds of losers for every winner.” (Ch 4)
“It's not fair. you do what you're supposed to do when you're young, Then they change the rules.” (Ch 6)
“There's something about being with a woman, knowing mutual pleasure, sharing the most natural part of being alive.” (Ch 8)
“Mother ... doesn't actually invent so much as she grabs onto rag-tail ends of things and elaborates them into personal fantasies.” (Ch 12)
“There's something tenuous about being male, nothing in line, all so zigzag.” (Ch 12)
“He must’ve paid a fortune for them. That's the way he is, tight as a witch's cunt; then bango, big-shot spender.” (Ch 13)
“America is clots of people, joined by gigantic straight highways.” (Ch 13)
“Most men are scared, so they’re scared for their sons.” (Ch 20)