“‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.’”
–Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans
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Most of what I’ve learned in life I got out of novels. This is addle-pated, I know, as well as shallow and possibly dangerous (just look at what happened to Madame Bovary, or Don Quixote). Then again, I didn’t always have the best role models, out here in the real world. And on matters of love and loyalty, ambition and virtue, I’ve found literature to be as good a guide as any.
It seemed natural, then, that on the eve of becoming a father, I’d turn to my bookshelves for counsel. My impression as a reader had been that the parent-child relationship was central to my favorite books. What I discovered, though, was that I’d been suffering from a kind of optical illusion. Through the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, the novel as a form remained obsessed with questions of procreation and legacy and inheritance, yet the quotidia of actual parenthood appear to have fallen into the same blind spot as those of marriage. David Copperfield’s beloved mom? Dispatched by page 115. Pierre and Natasha? Congrats, here’s your tot, end of novel.
No, what the canon offers in place of family life is a cavalcade of what we’d now call dysfunction…especially from the dads. Why is this? I came to suspect it has something to do with the division of labor that prevailed before the sexual revolution—the division, that is, between those who knew firsthand the daily work of child care and those with a “room of one’s own” in which to write about it.
What the canon offers in place of family life is a cavalcade of what we’d now call dysfunction…especially from the dads.
On the other hand, a novel isn’t an instruction manual, and there’s plenty to be learned from even a negative example. Years later, when I started pouring my confusions about childhood and fatherhood into my own sophomore novel, The Second Coming—about a struggling daughter and her tenuously recovering dad—it was liberating to look around my library and remember that bad behavior often makes for good art. And whenever Father’s Day rolls around, the resemblance of these sketchy forerunners to my own complicated father makes me feel less alone, in a way no advertising campaign can.
As a salute to the holiday, then, I offer the following to anyone who shares my experience with, and taste for, paternal complexity, discomfort, and mess: a pocket guide to the canon’s worst dads.
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Abraham, Father of Nations (ca. 2000 BC)
The line of lousy literary fathers goes all the way back to the Bible: absentee Adam, drunken Noah…yet even amid such company, Father Abraham is the daddy of them all. In Bob Dylan’s cover version, when God tells Abraham “Kill me a son,” the reply is, “Man, you must be putting me on.” In the original, Abe’s more like, “You got it, boss.” Of course, you could say the real problem parent here is the deity who’d make such rash demands in the first place. But in either case: in the beginning was the word, and shortly thereafter came a bad dad.
Laius, Father of Oedipus Rex (ca. 400 BC)
Another O.G. of bad fatherhood, this time from Greek drama. Informed by an oracle that he will be killed by his son, does King Laius call in a therapist? Cruise around for some “gentle parenting” essays? No, he leaves baby Oedipus to die on a mountaintop! A lot of ink has been spilled about Oedipus’s murder of his own father, but we tend to skip over the fact that the old man plainly had it coming.
Pretty Much Any Dad in Shakespeare (ca. AD 1600)
In the annals of parental failure, it’s hard to get past Lear’s towering narcissism and hubris. But the bard also gives us Hamlet Sr. (bloodlust, boundary issues), Mr. Capulet (judginess, intransigence), Henry IV (total disregard for the challenges facing teens in 1402)….Note, too, that Shakespeare himself was no great shakes as a dad, so this may be a case of art imitating life.
Mr. Dombey, Dombey and Son (1848)
Perhaps you spotted this Dickens title and thought, Finally! The poet laureate of orphanhood casts his tender eye on the father-son bond! No such luck. Dombey Senior is one of the coldest fish in all of literature, so emotionally gelid that he doesn’t even get a first name. And not only is he terribly hard on Son; he frequently forgets that Daughter even exists. (By comparison, Little Dorritt’s pop looks positively doting.)
Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
You know what’s ingenious? The structure of this book. It’s a murder mystery, but one where the victim, patriarch of the Karamazov clan, spends the first 250 pages supplying each of his children with a motive, and then being like, “You want to kill me? Yes? Go ahead then, kill me, I dare you.” The suspense is both unorthodox and exquisite.
Dr. Sloper, Washington Square (1880)
Just barely beating out feckless Beale Farange from What Maisie Knew, Dr. Austin Sloper takes pride of place in a corpus not notable for its profusion of great fathers. In so doing, he shows us a different version of failure: a character whose unyielding rectitude renders him entirely immoral within the novel’s own system of values.
Pap Finn, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Another early American entrant in the parenthood dishonor roll, Huck Finn’s progenitor is a triple threat: alcoholism, abuse, neglect. Huck might even be called a parentified child, if his own larceny and recklessness didn’t so clearly mirror the father’s. No, the true adult in the room here, notwithstanding Huck’s need to see him as a child, is Jim—a subtext beautifully brought to light in Percival Everett’s recent James.
Lawyer Royall, Summer (1917)
Not a father per se, but the guy standing in loco parentis when Charity Royall’s family sends her down the mountain for education in this neglected Edith Wharton classic. And what does he do, the man now responsible for a seventeen-year-old’s care and feeding and ethical development? Comes on to her, punishes her for rejecting him, subjects her to verbal abuse… and still won’t take no for an answer. Probably not what Charity’s biological dad had in mind.
Anse Bundren, As I Lay Dying (1930)
The tellingly named Anse spends most of this novel making an utter arse of himself, no matter whose point-of-view you’re occupying. While his wife’s corpse molders in a nine-day cortege from hell, and his children wrestle with (in no particular order) madness, gangrene, and pregnancy, Anse mostly bitches about how ill-used he is by everyone… and schemes toward a conclusion too amazing to give away.
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Finnegans Wake (1939)
What crime, exactly, precipitated the fall that starts the Wake? Rumors abound, palimpsest-style, but they point persistently to either Earwicker’s inappropriate interest in his daughter or his fear that such an interest exists. The novel is, of course, a dream, so it would be a mistake to read any of this straight. Still, it’s possible to say this much for certain: If Earwicker is the “allfather,” the state of the next generation, what with its warring twin brothers and their dissociative sister, suggests something’s gone seriously wrong.
Samuel Clemens Pollitt, The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
Again, don’t let the title fool you. Sam, the father of six other Pollits, is a kind of daylit Earwicker, all-encompassing, all-pervading, and in love mostly with himself. Quite apart from being a bad dad, he is also a horror as a husband. That said, Christina Stead’s novel is an utter joy to read. (It’s no wonder Sam can’t get enough of the sound of his own voice; neither can we.)
(tie) Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit at Rest (1990)
The last spot on the list could go to many a protagonist from what David Foster Wallace once called the Great White Male Narcissists. (Moses Herzog, I’m looking at you. And no, I haven’t forgotten what happened in Something Happened.) But Updike’s work deserves special mention for its portrayals of men who show up bodily for their kids—sometimes—but can never quite put them first. In the Rabbit series, at least, it’s clear that Updike’s aware of this as a failing. While we see some detente between Harry and poor Nelson in the middle two books of the tetralogy, these bookends give us a Rabbit majestically immovable his self-regard, right up to (spoiler alert) the end.
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The Second Coming by Garth Risk Hallberg is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
