Sins of the father, tepidly told

New work by Burroughs is short on artistry

"He had missed so much not knowing me," Burroughs writes of his father. (CHESTER HIGGINS JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES)

A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
By Augusten Burroughs
St. Martin's, 242 pp., $24.95

In his wonderful book of essays, "Burning Down the House," Charles Baxter laments the proliferation of "dysfunctional narratives," in which events take place but no one bears responsibility for them. Victim literature, Baxter calls it. Or, to quote Richard Nixon, "Mistakes were made."

I thought of Baxter's book when reading Augusten Burroughs's new memoir, "A Wolf at the Table," and also of Flannery O'Connor, who famously said that whoever lives until the age of 10 has enough material to write about for a lifetime. Anyone who has read Burroughs's best-selling "Running With Scissors" suspects Burroughs has enough material to write about for a hundred lifetimes, and there's nothing in "A Wolf at the Table," his account of the horrors of growing up with his father, to suggest the well has run dry.

"A Wolf at the Table" begins when Burroughs is a toddler and follows him until he's 12, after which the story flashes forward into adulthood. (Summed up in a single paragraph are the years when, after his parents' divorce, Burroughs is taken in by his mother's psychiatrist, material he has already plumbed in "Running With Scissors.")

The characters feel like familiar types, and here's how Burroughs describes them. There's his father, an alcoholic who rapes his wife and beats his son. There's his mother, a painter and poet who, though she loves Augusten, is unwilling or unable to protect him. There's his older brother, who purportedly tortures him (one time burying him upside down in the ground). There are intimations of a struggle with gender identity. (Forced to choose sides on the playground between the boys and the girls, Burroughs chooses the girls. He's then subject to merciless teasing; to his horror, he's often confused for a girl.)

Roughly speaking, the first half of the book consists of Burroughs's attempts to win his father's affection. He tries to enlist his father to play baseball with him. He follows his father, a philosophy professor, to school. He goes grocery shopping with him. But whatever Burroughs does earns his father's wrath, and so he's reduced to taking his father's clothes and making a stuffed version of him, with which he sleeps at night.

Slowly, Burroughs begins to recognize his rage at his father. He dreams about killing him. But these dreams make him only more fearful and self-loathing. Is he like his father? Is he capable of the same violence? Along the way, he writes that he comes close to actual violence, handing his brother a loaded gun, which his brother points at their father. Later, after his father has moved out, he calls Burroughs and tells him he's driving over to kill him.

But Burroughs survives. "I was going to make something of myself," he tells the reader. "Something big." And he does. He becomes a successful ad man and a best-selling author. In the end, "A Wolf at the Table" is about recovery, and who would begrudge Burroughs that experience? The problem is that the sentiment is too familiar (there's even the obligatory chapter about Burroughs's father's own abusive childhood), the writing canned. Although occasionally Burroughs comes up with a striking image - he describes his father's Dodge Aspen as "so bare of features it didn't even have an AM radio, just a blank metal panel where a radio should be, like an automotive birth defect" - for the most part the language is at best serviceable, often a good deal worse.

Here, for instance, is Burroughs describing his mother on her wedding day: "At five foot nine and with her long neck and strong, defined jaw, she looked something like a movie star." A long neck, a strong jaw, a character who looks like a movie star: this is lazy, stock writing, and the sentence is hardly atypical.

By the end, the book has devolved into a series of nostrums and talk-show pieties: "Because I never hugged my father, it was his embrace I sought most of all." "I was two people. The sane, funny, advertising me. And the other me, that came out at night." "Whatever happened between [my father and me] had happened a long time ago, I told myself. You made it. You're fine. If there is a hole there, simply walk around it." "If I could just feel he was only a bad father, he was only flawed, he only didn't care. If I could believe that, I felt, I could move on." "My father . . . would never give me what it was I wanted from him. And somehow, I seemed almost all right." "I was not him. I was me. Whatever wrong thing he contained, he had not passed it on."

Recent revelations about fabricated memoirs may give readers pause about " A Wolf at the Table," particularly since Burroughs faced a lawsuit, eventually settled, over alleged inaccuracies in "Running With Scissors." Already, according to The New York Times, some of Burroughs's relatives question some aspects of " A Wolf at the Table." But unless the book proves to be an utter fabrication, the problem with it has nothing to do with accuracy. It has to do with a failure of imagination.

One senses that writing this book has been therapeutic for Burroughs, and reading it may very well be therapeutic for others like him. It's a credit to him that he has persevered - indeed, flourished - in the wake of a dreadful childhood. But suffering on its own doesn't make for literature, nor does it make this a good book.

Joshua Henkin is the author, most recently, of the novel "Matrimony."