Review by New York Times Review
Lily King's novel delves into the relationship between a charismatic but troubled man and his devoted daughter. IF you could return as an adult to the staging ground of your youth - showing people you'd turned out all right after all; taking that Ferris wheel ride with the middle-school crush who'd ignored you; reassuring your parents about how wise, how capable, how worthwhile you were - would you? Would it be the grown-up thing to do? Daley Amory, the protagonist of Lily King's third novel, "Father of the Rain," confronts this question as she revisits the wealthy Boston suburb where she grew up in the 1970s, summoned to tend to her narcissistic father, a man who lives by the WASP code, circa 1952, in which martinis, filet mignon and brick-red pants are what matter and "to take something seriously is to be a fool." At 29, Daley, an earnest Berkeley-bound anthropologist, yearns to fix her father's life, so as to mend her own. But was his life broken, just because it broke hers? King is a beautiful writer, with equally strong gifts for dialogue and internal monologue. Silently or aloud, her characters betray the inner tumult they conceal as they try to keep themselves together, wanting others to see them as whole. Whether they're children, teenagers or adults in their 40s, 50s and older, they demonstrate through their confusions that what we like to call coming-of-age is a process that doesn't always end. Like people in real life, King's characters alter their behavior each time they interact with someone different - parent, sibling, friend, lover, student, boss - exposing the protean nature of personality. Context controls character. King's masterly first novel, "The Pleasing Hour," follows an under-parented 19-year-old American au pair through a year in France as she negotiates her rapport with the members of a French family. They have secrets; so does she. In King's second novel, "The English Teacher," an emotionally numb single mother in her 30s (the teacher of the title) tries to impose a conventional life on herself by marrying a widower with three children. She thinks of his marriage proposal as "rehearsing, hypothesizing," unable to regard her choices as anything but rough drafts. In "Father of the Rain," King reverses her practice of backing into past causes from the present. Instead, she begins amid the welter of Daley Amory's childhood at its most painful moment, deep in her "child mind, which senses only the visceral - the smells of my father, low tide, wet dog, and the sounds of sea gulls and church bells and station wagons." It's early in the Watergate summer of 1974, the day after Daley's 11th birthday, the day before her mother will leave Gardiner Amory for good, fed up with his drinking and his zestful bigotry. While her mother plays Lady Bountiful in the family's backyard, holding a pool party for underprivileged African-American children, Daley goes to the pet shop with her father to choose a puppy for her birthday present. "I'm not saying you's not ugly because you is ugly," her father croons to the new pet. "But you's a keeper." Back home, he mixes himself a martini, jeers at his dogooder wife, then invites Daley to join him in streaking nude around the pool to taunt the guests. The next day, mother and daughter will drive off, leaving him behind. Daley agonizes: When they come back, will her father still consider her a keeper? Her fear is justified. Returning at the end of the summer, Daley finds another mother swimming in her pool, another child sleeping in her room. While she was gone, her father replaced his family. The advantage of following Daley's story chronologically - from her chaotic, insecure adolescence to her orderly, insecure adulthood - is that it helps explain the disproportionately large space that childhood miseries occupy in the adult psyche. Ours is an age fluent in "therapy-speak," and close friends habitually discuss their parents' scarring misbehavior, trading tales of family woe like ghost stories. When, at a graduation, a wedding or a funeral, those friends at last meet the grousedabout malefactors - a mild lady with a snow-white bob and a hopeful expression, a courtly father who jokes amiably with his children's peers - they ask themselves, wonderingly, These nice people, these were monsters? Decades past the age of the night light, it's hard to understand the terror of old shadows. But it's a long time before Daley, haunted by her adolescent turmoil, can muster the courage to assemble a family of her own. When, in college and after, she makes wary steps toward that goal, she avoids the men who are most drawn to her, "overgrown prep school" kids with "long bangs, athletic achievements, loose-limbed walk, cow eyes and quick sardonic responses." Such boys, she tells herself, "turn into men like my father." Instead, she falls in love with an academic named Jonathan Fleury, a black man who grew up in the projects in Philadelphia, far from beaches and lobster traps, someone who, unlike her, has "the ability to articulate emotions that most people simply feel as a clump in the belly." "I've never crossed the color line before. It just never seemed worth it," Jonathan tells her before their long-deferred first kiss. Nonetheless, they make plans to live together in California - until a crisis pulls Daley back to her father in Massachusetts. Daley doesn't tell her father she has a boyfriend, much less that she has "crossed the color line." Persuading him to join A.A. to secure her companionship, she transforms herself into the dutiful daughter she thinks he wants, cooking him steaks (though she's a vegetarian), donning a tennis skirt to wear at the club (though she's a feminist). But Gardiner remains defiantly himself - minus the vodka. When he spews racist remarks before dinner, Daley thinks, "Would Jonathan be horrified at my cowardice?" Eventually, Jonathan confronts her: "Everything is at stake for you. Don't you get that?" But Daley is in the thrall of her 11-year-old self. "I want a father who doesn't get drunk. He wants a daughter to take to the club," she tells herself. "You want him to make your whole childhood O.K.," Jonathan protests. "This isn't about me," she retorts. "It's about him." But is it? Gardiner Amory, whatever his failings, has a permanent address. He knows how to marry and remarry, how to hold his liquor and keep up his tennis game. His daughter thinks he's a mess, but to himself and his peers, he seems "perfect the way he is." Some of his friends think Daley's the one with the problem. "I wish you wouldn't focus on your father's flaws," a neighbor chides. King shows the truths of their conflicting perceptions. Certainly, at 60, Gardiner doesn't want to be reformed. "I know exactly what I want," he blurts out at last, sick of his daughter's interference. What he wants is for her to "butt the hell out." In "Father of the Rain," King knowingly, forgivingly, shows both why Daley can't butt out and why she must. Daley knows she's guilty of being "bad at trusting the future," but she can't admit that this weakness is a crime against herself. Her father, with his unreflective gusto, and her lover, with his pragmatic idealism, have more in common than first appears: both engage with the future, however complicated, however uncertain. In their differ ent ways, these two must steer her forward, teaching her about the duty she owes herself. King's characters demonstrate that 'coming of age' is a process that doesn't always end. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 25, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
The first half of gifted writer King's (The English Teacher, 2005) new novel presents a riveting portrait of a father so spectacularly dysfunctional that he rivals Alfred Lambert in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001). Daley Amory is 11 when her parents separate, forcing her to navigate between two entirely different households. Her father immediately takes up with a divorcée who has three children, institutes a 24/7 cocktail hour, encourages nude swimming, and reads aloud to the kids from Penthouse magazine's letters to the editor. Daley instinctively realizes that she must go along with the new family and the new rules or risk losing her father's love; meanwhile, her older, charismatic brother, Garvey, tries to clue her in to their father's narcissism, but it's a lesson she won't learn for years. The second half of the novel isn't nearly as strong because Daley grows up to play the part of a scold, and Garvey is only a fleeting presence. Nevertheless, most readers will be thoroughly taken by King's exceptionally fluid prose and razor-sharp depiction of the East Coast country-club set.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Whiting Award-winner King (The English Teacher) captures with easy strokes the bold and dangerous personalities lurking inside the mundane frame of domestic drama. Her third novel, narrated by the clear-eyed daughter of an alcoholic father, follows their evolving relationship. The opening scene- with 11-year-old Daley and her father wreaking delirious havoc by streaking naked at a martini-fueled pool party in the sleepy Boston suburbs- brims with Daley's love for her father and desire for connection with him, but is also tinged with the repercussions of a charismatic man divorced from the role of parenthood, unlike Daley's socially responsible mother. Daley watches her father's continued degradation, but after years of self-imposed cultural and emotional distance from him-she flourishes at Berkeley and builds a loving, stable relationship with an African-American man she knows her Waspish father will despise-she eventually returns to her father's side after he is no longer capable of living alone. While Daley's perfect romance with her strapping, intelligent suitor is simplistic though sensual, King's latest is original and deftly drawn, the work of a master psychological portraitist. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This powerful family study from King (The English Teacher) begins in the 1970s, when 11-year-old Daley endures the cruel and wildly sexualized behavior of her boorish, alcoholic father while trying to protect her mother. Daley has learned early how to walk the tightrope of misery that stretches between her battling divorcing parents. Fast-forward to Daley as a 29-year-old adult on the brink of living her dream: a professorship at Berkeley and a life with her beloved Jonathan. When her brother calls her home, expecting her to care for her father, who is drowning in the bottle when his second marriage implodes, Daley is faced with impossible choices: save herself or stay with her father while he settles into his shaky sobriety. VERDICT Daley is so beautifully portrayed that readers will clench their fists and protectively rail against her actions, only to be taken breathtakingly by surprise when her complicated, determined strength to do the right thing for both her father and herself replaces her losses with a wondrous resolution. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/10.]-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
