Reviews for Memories of My Father Watching TV

The average rating for Memories of My Father Watching TV based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-06-23 00:00:00 Richard Caron Since the 1950s countless children have lost their fathers to the television set. At the beginning, I'm sure nobody ever dreamed the question would prove quite so binary: 'Do you want to have children or do you want to watch television?' But it turns out that these two hobbies, seemingly unrelated, rarely intersect. So many evenings, he (my own father) splayed in that fucking brown leather recliner'at first, shockingly cold to the touch but later intimately, disgustingly warm from the dim energy radiating from his back and buttocks. There, in the darkness of the finished basement, the television'luminous and spectral'trysted with my invertebrate father. The way he lay there, limp and spent, sometimes had the air of the postcoital about it and, at other times, the posthumous. Mother, Sister, and I could hear him downstairs with that slatternly Other Woman, manipulating all the pixels at her disposal only to bring him pleasure. Oh. Haven't you heard about the patriarch? He's got a right to this. He works hard everyday, breaking his goddamn back, so you kids can have a roof over your head, clothes on your back, some food to stuff in your traps. And what? He can't come home from a long day and watch a little fucking M*A*S*H, for Chrissake? My father still thought Eisenhower was president, I think. And by the way, he wasn't a bricklayer or an ironworker or a coal miner. He was an accountant. The breaking of his back consisted of sitting at an oversized desk, puffing cigarettes all day, and fiddling with his adding machine. He counted money, and then he collected it. He needed to come home and not be bothered with any of your crap. He needed to relax. But hey. What was so goddamn unrelaxing about spending time with your children anyway? (Did that sound too earnest? Too needy?) This is one of the reasons why I get so mad when I hear about people watching TV all the time, in case you wanted to know. I don't really want to hear about the Real Housewives of Where-the-fuck-ever. You may not have children even, but maybe you should be curing cancer, visiting shut-ins, or tending to lepers instead. (Do people still tend to lepers? You don't hear about leper-tending much anymore.) You get my point. I have a history. There's a father'my father'and there's a television over there and me over here. Which way do you think he looks? Anyway, you can plainly see that I'm onboard with Curtis White's premise in Memories of My Father Watching TV. He situates the (I want to say innate) conflict between father and son in the battleground of the TV room. This novel is actually a collection of thematically related stories in which the son reconfigures his relationship with his unloving, depressive father through the medium of old television shows, like Bonanza, Highway Patrol, and Combat. The hybrid of television fiction and emotional fact yields a surreal and often downright bizarre kaleidoscope of hang-ups and resentment. Besides that, it's extremely funny, but the humor is probably more Charlie Kaufman than Charlie Callas, so if you're locked into the easy and the straightforward, then do a drive-by on this one. It won't hit the spot. Don't worry if you're not familiar with the old shows that the book references. I have never seen any of them and was only really aware of maybe half of them. The humor and insight isn't reliant upon inside jokes so much as upon the tweaking of the usually stodgy, old school male archetypes of the early days of television. Still, this isn't light reading. Realize what you're in for and meet it head-on, and you'll be rewarded for the effort. (Oh. And David Foster Wallace apparently loved the heck out of this book. So there's that too.)

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-23 00:00:00 David Minor This is not a novel in any real sense. I truly do not understand why it has that designation in all caps on the cover. It reads like a series of very distinct short stories. In any case, each one is rather unusual. I felt deeply disoriented much of the time while reading this--wondering things more or less like "What is this? Who is viewing this? Where is this story taking place? In the mind of a child watching TV with their father? Is it just a story?" Et cetera. Perspectives are blurred with great gusto. Viewpoints are mashed and juxtaposed with a seeming abandon. But it all works rather well at creating vivid (strange and disorienting as they are) and often jarring portraits of fathers and sons, passive audiences and creative and imaginative entities, and an implicit story of a thoroughly televisualized culture in between its lines and pixelations. It also doesn't hurt to notice the prominent David Foster Wallace blurb on the front cover that reads: "Witheringly smart, grotesquely funny, grimly comprehensive, and so moving as to be wrenching." [One other curious thing I noticed is that in the author bio it states his year of birth as 1951 then goes on to list his bibliography, beginning with a book called Heretical Songs (1951). Assuming Mr. White didn't pen his first novel before the age of one, I'm assuming this is some kind of odd joke. It's curious is all.]