Memories of My Father Watching TV (American Literature) - Softcover

White, Curtis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564781895 ISBN 13: 9781564781895

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998

Synopsis

"Memories of My Father Watching TV" has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat, " "Highway Patrol, " "Bonanza, " and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, "Memories" is finally a sad lament of father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.

About this title

Review:

In this darkly funny novel about family in the 1950s and '60s, television serves as both stage and star. It is a capricious god that provokes and shapes the family members and their relationships with each other, particularly the relationship (or lack thereof) between father and son. ("My father has been in a cataleptic trance before the TV since November of 1963. I think there was something hypnotic in the Kennedy funeral procession.")

Instead of being punished by his own feelings of guilt for his neglect of his family, Dad is figuratively punished by imagining that the cast of Combat is pursuing him. In the text, however, the scene of his pursuit appears to be real. In his here's-what-it-means-to-be-a-man role, Dad eats the cheapest no-name brand of liverwurst, Vienna sausages right out of the can, uncooked Spam, and Cheez Whiz--aerosol--sprayed straight from the container. All of it is consumed in front of the TV, of course.

These hours in front of the idiot box illuminate the tragic truth of the stuff that many father/son relationships are made of: silence but for media mentoring. Curtis White brilliantly depicts the family unit transformed into rage and reruns. --Susan Swartwout

About the Author:

Curtis White is the author of the novels Memories of My Father Watching TV and Requiem. A widely acclaimed essayist, his work appears regularly in Context and Harper's. He is an English professor at Illinois State University and the current president of the Center for Book Culture/Dalkey Archive Press

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1564781895
• ISBN 13: 9781564781895
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 158