Customer Reviews

Memories of My Father Watching TV (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

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I have been reading this book for a while, because I am in school and I have other books that I'm forced to read. When I pick up _Memories of my Father_, it's like finding a forgotten half-carton of Ben and Jerry's ice cream in the fridge. I find this book EXCRUTIATINGLY funny, STAGGERINGLY smart, and as thick as a scoop of Chocolate Fudge Brownie. It's not very often that you can pick up a book by a critically acclaimed author and laugh out loud. It's not very often that you can laugh out loud while reading a book, and feel absolutely justified because the humor is smart, sharp, and challenging.

I am 26 years old and have no memory of ANY of the TV shows White is spoofing. I also have no memory whatsoever of my father. However, this book's critique of American values and the complex and worldview of the Velveeta-eating, armchair-inhabiting American male is relevant beyond the scope of its irreverent title. It's the funniest book I've read this year.

Hilarious, irreverant, highly original, and deeply resonant, but finally a sad lament about the relationship of a father and son via the TV. Memories of My Father Watching TV has as its protagonists television shows of the 1950s and '60s, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience, veering off into whacky "memories" where what really happened is often confused with vaguely remembered television plot lines, and become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in shows like "Combat," "Highway Patrol," and "Bonanza." In the background, as children try to fit themselves into the family mythology of good and bad TV, their budding imaginations record every hurt, near hurt, or imagined hurt inflicted upon them by silent, depressed, nearly catatonic fathers. Comic in many ways, Memories of My Father Watching TV pricks at the pain lurking beneath the blue-light glow of one of our most universal experiences -- staring at the tube.

Whether he's talking about the Kitchen Debates or about the Third Man, Curtis White's prose is absolutely stunning. A challenging and difficult read, Memories of My Father Watching T.V. is both a devestating social critique and an honest and heartfelt personal journey. Grappling with complex themes which focus on identity formation and masculinity, White masterfully constructs his novel around the ways in which a father and son are constructed by 50's and 60's television shows. While some of his subtle allusions to Freudian psychoanalysis may be jarring and grotesque, his narrative is seamless and eloquent. Particularly interesting is reading Memories while also reading Montrous Possibility, essays in which he talks about himself as a writer, and more specifically as a postmodern writer. Edgy and daring; I loved the book and highly recommend it. Who couldn't love flowers spontaneously errupting from a underneath a general's helmet?!

I've been kicking around for a familiar author to compare Curtis White's writing to, and the best I've come up with is Paul Auster. Which is weird, because at first glance they don't look much alike. Auster writes in a more traditional (although similarly amazing) narrative style, whereas White's book is what you might call postmodern--which in this case means, among other things, that he includes everything from movie stills to gameshow scripts to prose poems shaped like coniferous trees. The similarity I'm seeing is that White and Auster are the only contemporary authors I can think of who've turned the influences of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka into something brand new and incredibly interesting and uniquely their own. So if you like Beckett and Kafka you might want to check this book out. Also: that unbelievable ease and clarity of Auster's prose meets its bad-ass postmodern brother (that's blurb-speak) in White's book.

Buy it. Read it. Savor it.

My 28 year old daughter gave me this for Father's Day because she knows I like old TV shows. I believe she had no idea about the content. I guess to be chartiable I will call this an artist's book about fathers. old TV shows, sexual fantasies, and altered mental states. I like books in which I can see and follow the plot. I like an interesting story. Two of my favorites this year have been A Civil Action and Confederates in the Attic. If you like dream-like sequences of action, you might like this book. I simply couldn't get into the flow of action or plot because I couldn't find one. I must give the author a good deal of credit for creative thinking but he did not engage me in his private worlds of TV and fatherhood. In the beginning I thought I was reading a critical review of TV. I even rechecked the book to see how it was described. It was called a work of fiction but felt more like a stream of unconsciousness, in which there was no sense of reality. If you want so! mething really offbeat and short, you might try this book. If you want a good story, definitely look elsewhere.