Fathers who think they know it all
Today, according to my calculations, is the 100th anniversary of Father's Day in the United States. For decades this has meant neckties and golf balls; now it means dainty electronics and sultry perfumes. In any case, the celebration has long struck me as being somehow unmanly or, rather, unmanning. Making a big fuss about Dad and acting like he's this great guy undermines his authority, to say nothing of his dignity, which, as it's never been as great as Mom's in the first place, could do without this queen-for-a-day business. One of the best takes, and certainly the funniest, on the father's slippery grip is Ian Frazier's "Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father," a pastiche of biblical prescription and a faultless amalgam of command and desperation.
The piece, which appeared in The Atlantic 11 years ago, has been imitated and reproduced all over the place, but is now seated for the first time among 35 other, mostly brilliant, comic pieces by Frazier in the collection "Lamentations of the Father" (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $22). Every time I read "Laws," I fall to pieces laughing for it captures the futile punctiliousness of efforts to civilize small children and the general impotence of authority before their essential antinomianism: "Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is. And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it on the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why."
The voice of this piece comes from on high, as do the lofty judicial utterances of "the Court" in "Kid Court," an excellently funny set of legal summaries laying out decisions made in disputes between young children. Other well-known voices also inhabit these pages. Indeed, it is Frazier's great genius that he replicates the chatter and voice-overs that come at us all day from all sides, the public servant's, the marketer's, the friendly adviser's, the confessional bean-spiller's, the host of people out there whose most fervent desire is to serve us better or to crawl into our laps and share their story. Frazier maintains these personas in all their aggressive banality even as they go disastrously "off message," as they would say.
There is the uber hack travel writer of "Walking Tour," whose desperate puffery is so bound to the gravitational pull of cliché that it continually finds itself spiraling into potted biographies of such people as Cher or snap histories of Fruit Loops. There is the po-faced reporter of scientific studies in "Researchers Say" ("According to a study just released by scientists at Duke University, life is too hard."); the instruction-manual pedant in "How to Operate the Shower Curtain;" and the aggrieved confider of "What I Am" whose ineptitude in loading the dishwasher is only one symptom of a little understood condition ("crippling bouts of idiocy"). The best of these pieces are truly inspired blends of unlikely parts as in "Pensees d'Automne," a meditation on acorn stomping that metamorphoses into a tirade against predatory health-insurance companies; in "The American Persuasion," which casts the American Revolution as a charm offensive and fashion directive (Ethan "Allen and his men wore a perfume they invented themselves, a kind of balsam-juniper-bay-rum thing, which made a strong statement about who they were.") and in "He, the Murderer," whose writer shares with us the everyday hassles of his life as a murderer and, topically enough, his role as a father ("To hear his talk about that son of his would break your heart, if he weren't murdering you.").
There is nothing like writing a regular newspaper column for making you sound like a parody of a regular newspaper columnist. This truth is demonstrated, alas, by none other than the great Kingsley Amis in the columns collected in "Everyday Drinking" (Bloomsbury, $19.99). The book, which draws from three previous collections published between 1971 and 1984, is introduced by a worshipful Christopher Hitchens (who causes us to avert our eyes in revealing that he was allowed to call Amis "Kingers").
Amis had no peer in writing about drink and drinking and the morning after in fiction, but as a commentator on the subject he is not in the same class as L. Rust Hills who, as "Don Vivant," wrote a brilliant, highly idiosyncratic column on drinking for Forbes FYI, and Bernard DeVoto, whose book "The Hour" is criminally out of print. Amis's first failing is that an oppressive spirit of knuckle-rapping pervades his discussions of practically everything. He won't, for instance, tolerate "wine chatter" and tells us: "You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that watch out. . ." This know-it-all attitude, so absent from his fiction, is oppressive, though perhaps born of a columnist's desperation over finding material and meeting deadlines. His views on women, too, which are funny when projected into his novels, are here simply hackneyed: We are, of course, killjoys in the world of drinking. I must say, however, that I absolutely agree with him on the subject of "the bloody music," that is, the ubiquitous presence of LOUD music in drinking establishments, a scourge that has caused me and my friends to wander like lost souls from pub to pub seeking a place conducive to talk.
Much of Amis's advice (for more, see Short Takes) is frankly useless to us today, with its tales of bottles of good wine going for one British pound (approximately $2) and recipes for vile drinks (Queen Victoria's Tipple: red wine and Scotch). The best-known part of this work treats the hangover, a condition with which you may or may not be acquainted. Amis has divided it into its physical and spiritual manifestations, the latter which he calls the "metaphysical hangover." This is an "ineffable compound of depression, sadness . . . anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear of the future" and does not mean, whatever you may think when under its thrall, that "your family and friends are leagued against you in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a [expletive] you are." I wouldn't be too sure about that in anyone's case, but especially in Amis's if accounts of his life are true. Be that as it may, his treatment for the condition is to take up gloomy reading. I, on the other hand, suggest Ian Frazier.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.
