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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Of Albert and Enid's children, the first one we meet is Chip, who represents the bohemian alternative to Alfred's way of life. He's alternately touching and completely ridiculous. Yet he is his father's favorite. I think that's kind of interesting, that the most flailing child is the one that the very controlled father loves best.
Is hardest on and loves the best. That's partly a matter of Chip being the most like his father. He wants to see himself as the most unlike his father, the most "transgressive" and wild and crazy of the children, but you don't have to be as repressed as Alfred is if you don't have anything to repress. To me, they're two sides of the same person. On one side, you have the older version who has all of these same anarchic and amoral impulses and whose response is to just screw the lid on really, really tight and to keep it screwed on until he dies, basically.
And in Chip you see why he does that, why that was not such a bad decision on Alfred's part because once you let it out, you want to screw every 19-year-old walking by on the street. Nothing makes any sense; you attempt to do something and soon realize the emptiness of that pursuit, you try another pursuit and then that's an empty pursuit and it's just a mess. The love between Alfred and Chip is partly just that irrational, prodigal son kind of love, but to the extent that I understand why Alfred has a soft spot for Chip it's because of that underlying identity between them.
As bad as Alfred's marriage to Enid is, his son Gary's marriage might be even worse. And he's the good boy.
Well, yes and no. Gary's the oldest child, who's more or less done what parents might expect a good boy to do, which is to get a good job as a banker, marry an attractive woman, have three kids and live in a big house in a nice part of Philadelphia. And not surprisingly, this being contemporary fiction, he's not entirely satisfied with the life he's achieved. He's done all the things expected of him while also attempting not to repeat the mistakes his parents made. He's chosen what he believes to be a very different kind of woman to be married to, his approach to work and parenting is different. His father was a ferocious worker, Gary's very strict about only 40 hours per week. While his father was very strict with his children, Gary is permissive, and where his father dominated his mother, Gary is more or less dominated by his wife. So right down the line, a set of corrections. I wouldn't want to sign off on the idea that it's just as unhappy a marriage, but it speaks to the idea that there's no gain without loss and almost no loss without potential gain. That's a spirit that animates the whole book.
Then there's Denise, the baby of the family. How does she fit into all this?
She's the daughter, and daughters tend to do a lot of the emotional caretaking to begin with. One of the ways I think that families work is that there's never enough of something to go around in them. Everybody is always hungry. It's unimaginable that there could be a point at which everyone is satisfied with what they're getting from everyone else. There's never enough food to go around.
If you're a daughter in a family like that, you really worry about getting eaten alive. So she's particularly well-defended, by necessity, simply not to get devoured by her needy mother in particular. But also, as the father falls apart, every head in the family turns to the daughter to say, "What are you going to do about this?" So she's walled herself off in a career and not tried to correct that impulse to work really hard that her father had but instead has embraced it. She's a demon worker in a restaurant and reasonably good at what she does -- and then she enters a dark wood.
