When I was a child, there were times when I thought my mother should leave my father. Children only slowly get a feel for the limits on action: if, I reasoned, my parents still had checks in their checkbook, then why could they not write one to purchase a new car (or bike, etc.)? If my mother sometimes felt as much pain as she clearly did because of my father, then why could not she and I, and later my sister and brother, simply move to Anaheim (one of my dream destinations, home of Disneyland and near movie studios that I hoped to crack) and start over again? My mother, so I thought, would find a new husband (someone powerful, with connections to movie studios), and life could resume afresh. In pursuit of this goal I used to write letters to the Chamber of Commerce of Anaheim and Burbank concerning housing and jobs.

I am shocked now at how quickly I seized on divorce, on abandoning my father, as an escape-hatch from pain. Among my own kind—that is to say, white Southern Catholics—divorce was so uncommon that the closest I came to knowing about it was through the case of a friend of a neighbor, a pious woman who would not go against the sanctions of her religion to marry the divorced man with whom she was in love. Of course, I never imagined that one could actually do without fathers altogether, and my daydreams always featured a new father to replace my own. This sense of interchangeability I now regard as something of a moral failure, with all due consideration for my tender years.

But now the social forces that were subliminally affecting me so many years ago have come, as it were, to fruition. At the end of the 20th century, what with sperm donors, fertility specialists, selective abortion, and all the other proxies of reproduction, biological paternity has come to seem something almost quaint, and certainly tangential. To believe The Modernization of Fatherhood, a recent academic study,¹ the father of the future will be interchangeable with the mother of the future or, depending on your income level, with the modern nanny or social worker. In a bland, nonjudgmental tone, this book details the development and institutionalization of “parenting skills,” “household division of labor,” “caretaking,” and so on, quite as if actual biological fathers were a commodity we could do with, or do without, as we pleased and as circumstances allowed.

And if the notion of the father as more than an accidental link to our physical inheritance is rapidly disappearing, so too is any notion of the father as a link to our spiritual inheritance, to the cumulative consensus of the millennia—also known, by those hoping to usher it off the stage of history, as the patriarchy. For women in particular, the easy availability of birth control and abortion has meant a new freedom, not only from unwanted conception but, in some cases, from all the burdens and necessities represented so potently by the figure of the Father. Indeed, as a number of recent memoirs suggest, some contemporary women feel under no compulsion to make their peace either with their dads and what they represent or, more generally, with anything having to do with our cultural tradition and its claims. Their motto might be that of Mary Wollstonecraft: “Every obligation we receive from our fellow-creatures is a new shackle, takes from our native freedom, and debases the mind.”

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Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss² is by now a notorious book—notorious above all for the passages in which Harrison narrates the incestuous affair she conducted with her father. But even aside from the central subject of incest, The Kiss offers more compelling themes for contemplation than Aeschylus or Eugene O’Neill could handle in a dozen plays: self-mutilation, sadism, starvation, necrophilia, soul murder by one’s nearest and (supposedly) dearest. Harrison’s mother, as represented here, was a real Medea, who liked to discuss her sex life and past lovers with her daughter and took her to a gynecologist to be fitted for a diaphragm before she went off, still a virgin, to college. So Kathryn was a very confused individual when Dad, banned from the household since she was a baby, waltzed back into her life as a twentysomething and the two proceeded to engage in furtive trysts as they crisscrossed the country in their Lolita-like saga of turpitude.

At odds with the horrors Harrison narrates (the authenticity of which has been doubted by some reviewers) is a flatness of tone that is suggestive of someone merely going through the motions of her emotions. Harrison employs a postmodernist style—pastiche, sentence fragments, backtracking, fast-forwarding, a general lack of narrative momentum. This grab-bag style is about avoidance: the point, one might think, is that there is no point. Such dead-endedness also characterized Harrison’s 1993 novel, Exposure, which mixed kleptomania, cocaine, pornography, classy exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, and suicide in about equal portions.

The bland, affectless presentation, however, fatally undercuts Harrison’s desire (presuming she has such a desire) to make us appreciate her situation as the victim of a predatory father. More than that, by failing to set her story within the context of any larger repository of shared human experiences, Harrison effectively forestalls the reader from entering imaginatively into her life. Although from one point of view this lack of cultural resonance may seem purposeful—the author’s break with the baggage of tradition cunningly replicating her break from the evil Father—most likely it simply indicates ignorance. Like many contemporary authors, Harrison does not appear to be very well or very deeply read: it is hard to tell from this memoir whether she is even familiar with the Oedipus story. And without cultural freight, without history, although there may be self-invention, there is no connection.

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Toward the end of The Kiss, at a Jewish memorial service for her grandfather, Harrison finds herself healed of her unholy attachment to her father. Two other recent books, Mary Gordon’s The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father³ and Nancy K. Miller’s Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death,⁴ similarly end at cemeteries. While such moments often force us to come to terms, however feebly and tentatively, with our past and our own place in the chain of transmission, both these artful memoirs remain suffused with undigested resentments and with a continuing and ultimately sterile refusal of family loyalty of any kind.

Mary Gordon’s father died when she was seven years old; her book recounts her quest as a mature adult to discover and understand this “shadow man.” In the course of her search, which took her to archives and public-records offices from Massachusetts to Ohio, Gordon, who is also the author of such “Catholic” novels as Final Payments and Men and Angels, pieced together an American story of Gatsby-like transformations. Her father’s life traced an arc from Lithuania, where he was born a Jew at the turn of the century, to emergence as a conservative Catholic in New York in the 1930’s, with many a racy escapade in between.

Gordon represents herself as having been almost agonizingly in love with her father as a child. Thus, it was a shock to discover as an adult that he was less than God (the comparison is her own), that he was possessed of a vulgar side (he wrote for “humor” magazines), and that he may have been a Jewish anti-Semite. As a writer, Gordon might at least be expected to appreciate, however wryly, the fictions her father invented about himself—e.g., that he had gone to Harvard with T.S. Eliot. Instead, though her rage is to some extent disguised, censure inevitably follows on her declarations of love:

Everything he wrote or edited was patched together, cobbled together not very smoothly, not very well. I’m not even left with the pride of the daughter of a fine stylist. He was far from great; he wasn’t even very good.

Does the fact that he is, by every standard, a failure, relieve me of the responsibility of exposing him? And the fact that he is dead?

This memoir gives new meaning to the sins of the ninth circle of hell. Even Lady Macbeth hesitated to kill Duncan, her benefactor, because he reminded her of her father. Shadow Man continually put me in mind of the East German children who revealed to the secret police their parents’ reading habits or such mundane details as their choice of cigarette brands. Ultimately Gordon’s father is even indicted by his daughter, on the most trumped-up evidence (one of her chapters is titled “Police Investigation”), for the Holocaust and the crimes of Hitler.

Somehow, I suspect that had he followed the really smart people of the 1930’s and gone leftward rather than rightward, this man’s daughter would be telling his story differently. But whatever he was in actuality, his example seems to serve a larger purpose. In demonstrating the sham nature of her father’s existence, Gordon not only extinguishes him and the tale he told about himself but exposes the spurious nature of other, even more resistant, patriarchal institutions, including God Himself and the Roman Catholic Church. The effect is to leave Mary Gordon standing alone—the author of this memoir, the one and only author of her own life. Amid so much else that arouses her displeasure, this, at least, is a prospect that appears to please her.

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A similarly empty exercise in self-invention is Nancy K. Miller’s Bequest and Betrayal. It too is narrated in the first person, though the “I” of the book is oddly decentered. (Miller, appropriately, is a professor of literature of pronounced deconstructionist sympathies.) The memoir takes the form of a kind of conversation, in which Miller’s account of her father’s progressive debility and death from Parkinson’s disease is interspersed with the voices of writers like Philip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir, and Susan Cheever, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and others, all of whom have in one way or another given us their thoughts about their fathers.

It is ironic that men who daily stand on train platforms, in cold weather and hot, who worry if the pain in their chest means they will die before they get their children through college, should have produced a class of daughters like Nancy K. Miller. That her father worked for decades as a lawyer on Wall Street, which enabled her to attend Barnard College in the 1950’s, elicits not the slightest hint of retrospective gratitude. (“[H]e rented space in the glorious Woolworth building,” she comments tartly, “an address his practice never quite lived up to.”) Instead, after going on to earn a Ph.D. from Columbia, and to become a professor, Miller took her mother’s maiden name. So shadowy is her father’s existence that I had to go back through this book and search for his given name.

In writing about the intimate details of her father’s sickness, Miller declines to refer to her own feelings or to examine her conscience concerning the propriety of what she is revealing. Instead, she hides behind the work of her chosen interlocutors who, she suggests, have committed “betrayals” of their own. Her betrayal, at any rate, comes not from writing about her father but from her inability to honor him. It is chilling to contemplate her lack of pity—of fellow feeling—for his weaknesses during his final year, when there seems to have been no one, including her, who cared whether he lived or died:

One day when his fingers had grown so rigid that he couldn’t, as he put it, “snare” his penis, he wanted to get up and go to the bathroom. It was late and I wanted to go home. So looking and not looking, I fished his penis out from behind the fly of his shorts and stuck it in the urinal. It felt soft and clammy.

In passages like this one Miller shows just how far she is from, say, Philip Roth, one of her interlocutors, who in Patrimony (1991) similarly stooped to exposing some of the most shaming episodes of his father Herman’s last year but who at the same time gratefully accepted not only his father’s inheritance but his own responsibility for guarding and transmitting it. Blocked by the ideology of self-invention from acknowledging the sacrifices her father made for her, Miller is ill-equipped to deal either with his dying or with his legacy. Precisely because she is one of those professors who have done so much to kill off the pleasure people used to get from literature, I am tempted to nominate her as a main character in the novel of human disconnectedness (by Philip Roth?) that is screaming to emerge from this bloodless memoir.

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Is there a connection between the loss or repudiation of the figure of the father and the failure of authors like these to create compelling works of the imagination? It is almost as if, in severing themselves from their patrimony, Harrison, Gordon, and Miller have committed an act of impiety for which the Furies have taken just revenge: they write very bad books. But perhaps the question should be asked in a different way: is there a positive connection between spiritual and literary procreation, such that a writer’s progeny—her books—owes something crucial to the attitude she takes toward her inheritance?

Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, which won a PEN award for nonfiction in 1996 and has been on the paperback best-seller list for over a year, vividly links a family’s epic struggle to raise its children with the evolution of the daughter into a writer,⁵ and in doing so points up what is missing from the books I have discussed so far. The memoir takes its name from a group that included Karr’s father and several other men who cleaned the rigs in the oil fields of East Texas, and who would spin tales as young Mary sat and listened:

“I’ll tell you just exactly how my daddy died,” Daddy says. “He hung hisself.” This is easily the biggest lie Daddy ever told—that I heard, anyway. His daddy is alive and well and sitting on his porch in Kirbyville with his bird dogs. I gawk at Daddy’s audacity, while the men in the room shift around at his seriousness. . . . They twist around on their folding chairs like they would rather corkscrew holes in the floor and drop out of sight than hear about somebody’s daddy hanging hisself. Daddy unfolds the blade of his pocketknife—dragging out their squirming for them—and cuts a circle from a log of pepperoni. He lifts it to his mouth on the blade edge, then chews, “This is kind of tough, ain’t it?”

The year in which these events took place was 1961, when Mary Karr was seven years old. The events she relates in the second half of the book occurred when she was nine. Even allowing for poetic license, the immensity of detail and the display of nearly total recall suggest that Karr learned well the art of lying from her father. And, like him, she can draw out a story: the scene above takes place in Chapter 6 of The Liars’ Club, which is about when it finally dawns on the reader that the child’s mother was an alcoholic, a realization that in other books would be the main point, and perhaps the only point.

Unlike Harrison, Karr links her own story to our oldest stories, thereby allowing readers much deeper access to the inner life of human beings than can be gleaned from the usual confessional mode of contemporary memoirs about incest or alcoholism:

It was during one of those [college] visits that I found the Thibideauxs’ burned-out house, and also stumbled on the Greek term até. In ancient epics, when somebody boffs a girl or slays somebody or just generally gets heated up, he can usually blame até, a kind of raging passion, pseudo-demonic, that banishes reason. So Agamemnon, having robbed Achilles of his girlfriend, said, “I was blinded by até and Zeus took away my understanding.” . . . When neighbors tried to explain the whole murder-suicide of the Thibideaux clan after 30 years of grass-cutting and garbage-taking-out and dutiful church-service attendance, they did so with one adjective, which I have since traced to the Homeric idea of até: Mr. Thibideaux was Nervous.

All this is embedded in the opening scene of the memoir, in which we also learn that Karr’s own mother was taken away because of being Nervous. Not until 145 pages later do we finally get to witness the actual precipitating attack of the mother’s até, a drunken rage during which she destroyed everything of value in the house, including her own paintings and books and the children’s toys and clothes.

Beyond being a well-told tale of troubles endured and troubles overcome, Karr’s memoir constantly leads one to think afresh about families and the complicated ways in which children, even in the most trying and imperfect circumstances, become moral beings. And to be a moral being, one is reminded by The Liars’ Club, means among other things to be imbued with a sense of one’s ties to others, including preeminently one’s parents and, beyond them, to the generations that recede far into the past.

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In book II of The Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem, Aeneas flees burning Troy carrying on his shoulders his aged father, who in turn carries the ancestral gods. Educated women with even modest means today have libraries much larger than Virgil’s, or Newton’s, or Goethe’s, and certainly have better kitchens. Emancipation also means that women can indulge all the opportunities for good and bad behavior, for skullduggery and rectitude, that participation in the widest range of public life offers. But it takes a writer like Mary Karr, grafting her story to our oldest literary roots, to remind us that women also have a stake in the transmission of our common spiritual inheritance, and to demonstrate what is lost when they repudiate it.

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¹ The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History by Ralph LaRossa. University of Chicago Press, 281 pp., $55.00 ($18.95, paper).

² Random House, 207 pp., $20.00.

³ Random House (1996), 274 pp., $24.00.

⁴ Oxford (1996), 194 pp., $23.00.

⁵ Viking Penguin, 320 pp., $11.95 (paper).

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