Prize-winning author Lily King’s masterful new novel spans three decades of a volatile relationship between a charismatic, alcoholic father and the daughter who loves him.
Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who's beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when they divorce, and Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed, the chasm quickly widens and Daley is stretched thinly across it.
As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father’s fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own separate life—until he hits rock bottom. Lured home by the dream of getting her father sober, Daley risks everything she's found beyond him, including her new love, Jonathan, in an attempt to repair a trust broken years ago.
A provocative story of one woman's lifelong loyalty to her father, Father of the Rain is a spellbinding journey into the emotional complexities and magnetic pull of family.
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Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: There's an emotional heft to Father of the Rain that comes not in the form of high drama, but in the feel of its characters. Daley Amory is an acute and attentive witness to her parents' divorce, which coincides with the larger dissolution of Nixon's presidency--itself a particularly appropriate historical counterpoint for a novel that explores how fiercely parents and children can polarize. Daley's father, Gardiner, is a jovial but capricious blue-blood New Englander, an alcoholic whose behavior is increasingly erratic and punishing to the point that Daley finally breaks away--in spite of how much she loves him--for much of her adult life. She is resilient, a woman you can respect but also challenge, and her love is (ultimately, amazingly) uncomplicated and true. The award-winning author of two previous novels, Lily King has long been admired for her deft, graceful characterization, and in no novel is this more evident than Father of the Rain. She takes on difficult characters but never vilifies them, choosing instead to seek out the feelings they shield, raise them up, and set them free. --Anne Bartholomew
Lily King grew up in Manchester, Massachusetts. She received her B.A. in English Literature from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has taught English and Creative Writing at several universities and high schools in this country and abroad. Lily's first novel, THE PLEASING HOUR (1999) won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second, THE ENGLISH TEACHER, was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award. FATHER OF THE RAIN, her third novel, was published in July, 2010. A few weeks after publication, it won the New England Book Award for Fiction. It is a New York Times Editor's Choice, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, an Indie Next Selection, and on O the Oprah Magazine's 2010 Summer Reading List. Lily is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Ploughshares and Glimmer Train, as well as in several anthologies. For more information--reviews, interviews, appearance locations and dates, reading recommendations, and more--visit Lily at lilykingbooks.com.
This book was just spellbinding. I had no idea what to expect, and took a total flyer on it, and I was astonished. I'm a middle age family guy, and I usually trend toward action/mystery/thrillers, with an occasional drift into historical fiction and general literature. I figured I'd try something a little different, and Father of the Rain looked interesting. It would just not be on my radar in most cases.
Its a story, told over some 40 odd years, of a small town family, mostly centered around one woman and her father. It is told through the eyes, and mind of Daley, who was born into a typical uptight, New England family in the 60's, where alcoholism, racism, sexism, and just about any other "ism" you could think of was rampant. We follow Daley from a small child, and her impressions of her life, through teen years, college and post college, into her late 20s, and then into her 40s. The early part of the book sets the stage for the family's issues and Daley's early influences. The bulk of the latter part of the book is centered around the very complex relationship Daley has with her father.
We learn of her father, her mother, their dysfunctional relationship, her father's later wives, the small town gossip, Daley's artificial beliefs, her real beliefs, all told through her growing ideological point of view, and finally, through her maturing point of view.
I cannot describe the absolute natural cadence, language and moods that Lily King has created, as the words on the page almost became real life narrative, like a movie playing in my head where I was watching real life unfold. The stitching together of time, of descriptions, of details small and large, is just mesmerizing. I simply could not put down this book....
Simply put, I was blown away, and could not stop reading. It took me 5 days, much of it on a business trip. I didn't hear the airplanes, hotel rooms, or anything else when I was reading. I was totally sucked in. I grew up during the same time period, and have some roots into the New England setting, so some of it resonated with family history. Her writing is on the scale of Richard Russo, and the richness that Ms. King deliver is simply uncanny and wonderful. Buy this book. Read this book.Read more ›
Years ago, I sent out a birthday invitation with the theme, "It's never too late to have a happy childhood." Funny - or so I thought.
But for Daley Amory, the main character of Lily King's poignant and at times heartbreaking Father of the Rain, those words are anything but funny. We meet her as an 11-year-old, torn between the liberal and do-good world of her mother and the conservative, erratic, liquor-soaked world of her charismatic and arrogant father. A WASP of the first-degree - rich, Harvard-educated, disconnected - his signature phrase, while lying on his chaise chair, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other,is, "I wonder what the poor people are doing today."
Daley soon learns the rules of engagement with her father: "In my father's culture there is no room for self-righteousness or even earnestness. To take something seriously is to be a fool. It has to be all irony, disdain and mockery. Passion is allowed only for athletics. Achievements off the court or playing field open the achiever up to ridicule. Achievement in any realm other than sports is a tell-tale sign of having taken something seriously."
This could fall into the world of stereotype or cliché - the toxic, alcoholic father and the daughter who tries to please him. But it doesn't. Lily King takes great pains to paint Gardiner Amory - the father - as damaged but not evil. It is inevitable that the grown Daley try to reconnect with him and be the savior, attempting to liberate him from his alcohol dependency...as if that would make everything all right.
Her beau will say to her: "Oh Daley...you want the daddy you never got. You want him to make your whole childhood okay...You've got it nicely cloaked in a gesture of great sacrifice...."
The heartbreak, of course, is that none of us can ever "fix" another human being or get our childhood back. As Daley becomes more and more immersed in his world, falling into her charismatic and narcissistic father's gravitational orbit, the stakes get higher and higher. There is not a false note in this authentic book, which takes the reader right into the vortex of a broken family relationship gone asunder. It is a compelling psychological study of how much we give up - including our own survival - to try to save and repair those relationships that are most dear to us. In a non-manipulative way, this book will pull at your heartstrings and stay with you.Read more ›
John Updike made the lives of Boston's suburban elite his territory--emphasizing their sense of entitlement and superiority, their "clubbiness," their alcoholism, and their sexual experimentation. One generation later, Lily King shares her similar insights within a similar, more "Brahmin" Massachusetts setting. Dividing her novel into three parts, she tells the story of Daley Amory, daughter of Gardiner and Meredith Amory, from her eleventh birthday, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon, through her forties and the election of Barack Obama. Though she lives for long periods of time during those years without contact with her alcoholic father, she never really escapes her need for him, even, on occasion, subsuming her own "best interests" to care for him.
With a fine eye for imagery, an unerring ear for dialogue, and a firm grasp of the depths of emotion that underlie the interplay between Daley and Gardiner, she creates a novel that establishes her themes about daughters and their fathers, a surprisingly rare subject for fiction. The novel opens on Daley's eleventh birthday, just before her mother leaves her father and persuades Daley to come with her to her parents' house in New Hampshire for the summer. Three months later, after a summer in New Hampshire, Daley returns to her former home to visit her father-and finds him living with someone else, the woman's daughter sleeping in Daley's bedroom.
Part II takes place during a going-away party for Daley in Michigan sixteen years later. Having completed her advanced degree, she is about to begin work in California. Then she gets a call saying that her father needs her. In Part III, Daley is the mother of two children. She has had no contact with her father for fifteen years.... And then she gets another phone call asking her to return to see him.
Gardiner Amory is nearly impossible to like, primarily because he is so ignorant and self-satisfied. He has no interests beyond the elite little world of his town and his club. Snide and snobbish, he is a manipulator, willing to do anything to get his own way. His profanity, his alcoholic tantrums, his insulting behavior toward his succession of wives, and his flagrant sexual performances are more than many readers will want to know about. It is this last issue which, unfortunately, casts a clinker into the mix of scenes--several sexual episodes so (unnecessarily) explicit that they will, for some readers, negatively affect the thoughtfully observed mood and style of the novel overall.
Daley is sympathetic and largely believable. Though her decision to nurse her weak father emphasizes her overwhelming need for him, the length of her stay is more difficult to understand. The fact that her devotion is taken for granted, rather than appreciated, makes her stay especially hard to credit. A fascinating look at the extent to which girls and women yearn for a father and the lengths to which they will go to make that father love them, Father of the Rain is a thoughtful novel which shows the evolution of a woman who must help her father, with his limited view of life, even as her own world view is expanding. Mary WhippleRead more ›
