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Father of the Rain: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, July 6, 2010
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Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who's beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when they divorce, and Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed, the chasm quickly widens and Daley is stretched thinly across it.
As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father’s fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own separate lifeuntil he hits rock bottom. Lured home by the dream of getting her father sober, Daley risks everything she's found beyond him, including her new love, Jonathan, in an attempt to repair a trust broken years ago.
A provocative story of one woman's lifelong loyalty to her father, Father of the Rain is a spellbinding journey into the emotional complexities and magnetic pull of family.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAtlantic Monthly Press
- Publication dateJuly 6, 2010
- Dimensions6.25 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100802119492
- ISBN-13978-0802119490
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Marilynne Robinson’s Home and Roxana Robinson’s Cost are the most exquisite recent [literary] examples . . . of what living with an addict must be like. . . . Now Lily King’s Father of the Rain is a worthy companion on this theme. Surprising and wise . . . by a writer who understands the horrible burden of trying to save someone who’s ruining your life. . . . A brilliant exploration of the attraction of martyrdom, the intoxication of playing savior. . . . King poses the questions so powerfully that you can’t answer them easily: What kind of abuse finally abrogates one’s responsibility to a self-destructive parent? What is too much to ask of a child? . . . An absorbing, insightful story written in cool, polished prose right to the last conflicted line.”Washington Post
Spellbinding . . . Marvelous . . . A story of high drama in the court of Nixon-era New England aristocracy . . . King brilliantly captures the gravitational pull of the past and the way it can eclipse the promise of the present. . . . You won’t be able to stop reading this book, but when you do finally finish the last delicious page and look up, you will see families in a clearer and more forgiving way.”Vanity Fair
Luminous . . . Uplifting . . . Fresh, with vividly drawn characters . . . and a clear eye for the details of their singularly messed-up relationships.”O, the Oprah Magazine
King infuses soul into this tale of a family torn apart by abuse.”Marie Claire (Summer Reads)
King is a beautiful writer, with equally strong gifts for dialogue and internal monologue. Silently or aloud, her characters betray the inner tumult they conceal as they try to keep themselves together . . . [and] demonstrate through their confusions that what we like to call coming-of-age is a process that doesn’t always end.”Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
You know that moment when the ingenue in the horror movie heads downstairs to check the radiator, and you’re screaming, dumbfounded, at the screen? That’s the sort of protective rage you feel for Daley Amory, the narrator of Lily King’s novel Father of the Rain. . . . Haunting, incisive . . . King is brilliant when writing from the eyes of a tween, all self-conscious curiosity but bright and hopeful as a starry sky. And as Daley grows up and learns how to trust and to love in spite of herself, King cuts a fine, fluid line to the melancholy truth: Even when we’re grown and on our ownwives, mothers, CEOswe still long to be someone’s daughter. The dream of an absent ideal father is like a thick, soft blanket; find one to burrow under, and enjoy.”Elle
[An] excellent novel . . . Sensitive and perceptive . . . King gives us the messy complexities of family without tidying them up or providing neat morals. . . . The moving final pages depict a reconciliation all the more realistic because no one dramatically repents or forgives; they simply acknowledge bonds that can’t be broken. . . . [Father of the Rain] may be King’s best yet.” Chicago Tribune
Lily King’s breakout third novel, Father of the Rain, harrowingly evokes a daughter’s fierce devotion to her magnetic WASP father, whose flair for cocktail-fueled self-destruction rivals anything out of Cheever.”Vogue
Searing . . . Father of the Rain excavates the powerful forces of love and dysfunction with staggering aplomb. . . . King pulls no punches in her treatment of Gardiner’s alcoholism. . . . The principal feat of this powerful, moving novel is how deeply we understand and feel compassion for Daley, and, amazingly, for Gardiner too; instead of condemning him, we enter into their dynamic on its own distorted terms. This novel is as unflinching as it is beautifully true. You won’t soon forget it.”Cleveland Plain Dealer
A beautiful, ruthless novel . . . What is particularly fine about Father of the Rain is King’s unflinching description of Daley’s emotional universe. The devastation in a child’s psyche caused by an alcoholic or drug-addicted parent has never been so well described, so far as I know. The 1970s were the years that kicking over the traces, discarding the supposed repression of centuries, became common. King shows us in precise and inescapable terms just what havoc that freedom’ wrought for the most sensitive. . . . Lily King’s Daley triumphs, but she is also Lily King’s triumph.”The Globe and Mail
Lily King writes with huge compassion about this shattered family and the girl growing up in the wreckage. . . . Father of the Rain is a relentless examination of a damaged man and his traumatized, but still loving, daughter. Its strength lies in the particularity of its detail. King creates a fleshed-out world in which, over and over, Gardiner feeds his dogs, opens bottles of vodka and stirs his drinks with his finger. All that happened is here, along with all the feelings.”Vancouver Sun
John Cheever and Barbara Kingsolver . . . come to mind when reading Father of the Rain. . . . King shows once again her feel for the emotional undercurrents that control our most important relationships.”The Seattle Times
Lily King’s Father of the Rain is one of the most richly satisfying and haunting novels I've read in a long time.”Richard Russo
King captures with easy strokes the bold and dangerous personalities lurking inside the . . . frame of domestic drama. . . . Original and deftly drawn, the work of a master psychological portraitist.”Publishers Weekly
A riveting portrait of a father so spectacularly dysfunctional that he rivals Alfred Lambert, in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. . . . Readers will be thoroughly taken by King’s exceptionally fluid prose and razor-sharp depiction of the East Coast country-club set.” Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
[A] powerful family study . . . Daley is so beautifully portrayed that readers will clench their fists and protectively rail against her actions, only to be taken breathtakingly by surprise when her complicated, determined strength to do the right thing for both her father and herself replaces her losses with a wondrous resolution. Highly recommended.”Library Journal (starred review)
Lily King’s Father of the Rain is the most unsettling and exhilarating kind of love storythe sort that interrogates just how resilient the bonds of unconditional love can remain, even after a lifetime of damage at the hands of a heedless parent. This is a passionate and beautifully observed and fair-minded novel”Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway
In Father of The Rain Lily King creates a brilliant portrait of a man who lives in the everyday world but follows almost none of the everyday rules. The result for his family is excruciating and for the reader a wonderfully intense and absorbing novel that reminds us of just how complicated love can be.”Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street
One of King’s extraordinary feats in Father of the Rain is her capacity to travel unflinchingly into the darkest recesses of family bonds, but do it with such unerring specificity that the effect is both comic and utterly heartbreaking. Like The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, this book beautifully depicts the emotional tightrope a child must walk with a charismatic, intelligent, and emotionally crippled parent. King also has a suspense writer's gift to make the ways her characters love and betray each other a complete, up-late-into-the-night page-turner with an ending that simply took my breath away.”Cammie McGovern, author of Eye Contact and Neighborhood Watch
We think back through our mothers if we are women,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, but Lily King's powerful novel about a daughter's odyssey to find her way through the tangle of her father's heart and so find herself, claims new terrain. In King's masterful hands, Daley Amory's quest for her drunk, charming, impossible father is heart-breaking and familiar in the oldest sense of the term. I wanted to shut my eyes, and couldn't because I couldn't stop reading. When I finished, I cried for us all.”Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress
A moving, impeccably written drama . . . Packed with phenomenal depth. . . . Fresh with resonant details . . . Beautifully structured . . . King is skilled at zeroing in on the nitty-gritty dynamics of this intense father-daughter relationship . . . [and displays] her ability to capture with visceral complexity a primal yearning to be treated with care.”The Barnes and Noble Review
King doesn’t flinch away from telling family secretsthe embarrassing and hurtful moments, the points of danger and ridiculousness. . . . Anyone with complicated family relationships can understand feeling disgust and longing, and King writes it all so clearlyhow the little things mean so much and cad add up to so much time lost.”City Paper (Baltimore)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Father of the Rain
By Lily KingATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Lily KingAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1949-0
Chapter One
My father is singing.High above Cayuga's waters, there's an awful smell. Some say it's Cayuga's waters, some say it's Cornell.
He always sings in the car. He has a low voice scraped out by cigarettes and all the yelling he does. His big pointy Adam's apple bobs up and down, turning the tanned skin white wherever it moves.
He reaches over to the puppy in my lap. "You's a good little rascal. Yes you is," he says in his dog voice, a happy, hopeful voice he doesn't use much on people.
The puppy was a surprise for my eleventh birthday, which was yesterday. I chose the ugliest one in the shop. My father and the owner tried to tempt me with the full-breed Newfoundlands, scooping up the silky black sacks of fur and pressing their big heavy heads against my cheek. But I held fast. A dog like that would make leaving even harder. I pushed them away and pointed to the twenty-five dollar wirehaired mutt that had been in the corner cage since winter.
My father dropped the last Newfoundland back in its bed of shavings. "Well, it's her birthday," he said slowly, with all the bitterness of a boy whose birthday it was not.
He didn't speak to me again until we got into the car. Then, before he started the engine, he touched the dog for the first time, pressing its ungainly ears flat to its head. "I'm not saying you's not ugly because you is ugly. But you's a keeper.
"From the halls of Montezuma," he sings out to the granite boulders that line the highway home, "to the shores of Tripoli!"
We have both forgotten about Project Genesis. The blue van is in our driveway, blocking my father's path into the garage.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," he says in his fake crying voice, banging his forehead on the steering wheel. "Why me?" He turns slightly to make sure I'm laughing, then moans again. "Why me?"
We hear them before we see them, shrieks and thuds and slaps, a girl hollering "William! William!" over and over, nearly all of them screaming, "Watch me! Watch this!"
"I's you new neighba," my father says to me, but not in his happy dog voice.
I carry the puppy and my father follows with the bed, bowls, and food. My pool is unrecognizable. There are choppy waves, like way out on the ocean, with whitecaps. The cement squares along its edge, which are usually hot and dry and sizzle when you lay your wet stomach on them, are soaked from all the water washing over the sides.
It's my pool because my father had it built for me. On the morning of my fifth birthday he took me to our club to go swimming. Just as I put my feet on the first wide step of the shallow end and looked out toward the dark deep end and the thick blue and red lines painted on the bottom, the lifeguard hollered from his perch that there were still fifteen minutes left of adult swim. My father, who'd belonged to the club for twenty years, who ran and won all the tennis tournaments, explained that it was his daughter's birthday.
The boy, Thomas Novak, shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mr. Amory," he called down. "She'll have to wait fifteen minutes like everyone else."
My father laughed his you're a moron laugh. "But there's no one in the pool!"
"I'm sorry. It's the rules."
"You know what?" my father said, his neck blotching purple, "I'm going home and building my own pool."
He spent that afternoon on the telephone, yellow pages and a pad of paper on his lap, talking to contractors and writing down numbers. As I lay in bed that night, I could hear him in the den with my mother. "It's the rules," he mimicked in a baby voice, saying over and over that a kid like that would never be allowed through the club's gates if he didn't work there, imitating his mother's "Hiya" down at the drugstore where she worked. In the next few weeks, trees were sawed down and a huge hole dug, cemented, painted, and filled with water. A little house went up beside it with changing rooms, a machine room, and a bathroom with a sign my father hung on the door that read WE DON'T SWIM IN YOUR TOILET-PLEASE DON'T PEE IN OUR POOL.
My mother, in a pink shift and big sunglasses, waves me over to where she's sitting on the grass with her friend Bob Wuzzy, who runs Project Genesis. But I hold up the puppy and keep moving toward the house. I'm angry at her. Because of her I can't have a Newfoundland.
"Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear," my father says as he sets down his load on the kitchen counter. "Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair." He looks out the window at the pool. "Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy, was he?"
My father hates all my mother's friends.
Charlie, Ajax, and Elsie smell the new dog immediately. They circle around us, tails thwapping, and my father shoos them out into the dining room and shuts the door. Then he hurries across the kitchen in a playful goose step to the living room door and shuts that just before the dogs have made the loop around. They scratch and whine, then settle against the other side of the door. I put the puppy down on the linoleum. He scrabbles then bolts to a small place between the refrigerator and the wall. It's a warm spot. I used to hide there and play Harriet the Spy when I could fit. His fur sticks out like quills and his skin is rippling in fear.
"Poor little fellow." My father squats beside the fridge, his long legs rising up on either side of him like a frog's, his knees sharp and bony through his khakis. "It's okay, little guy. It's okay." He turns to me. "What should we call him?"
The shaking dog in the corner makes what I agreed to with my mother real in a way nothing else has. Gone, I think. Call him Gone.
Three days ago my mother told me she was going to go live with my grandparents in New Hampshire for the summer. We were standing in our nightgowns in her bathroom. My father had just left for work. Her face was shiny from Moondrops, the lotion she put on every morning and night. "I'd like you to come with me," she said.
"But what about sailing classes and art camp?" I was signed up for all sorts of things that began next week.
"You can take sailing lessons there. They live on a lake."
"But not with Mallory and Patrick."
She pressed her lips together, and her eyes, which were brown and round and nothing like my father's yellow-green slits, brimmed with tears, and I said yes, I'd go with her.
My father reaches in and pulls the puppy out. "We'll wait and see what you's like before we gives you a name. How's that?" The puppy burrows between his neck and shoulder, licking and sniffing, and my father laughs his high-pitched being-tickled laugh and I wish he knew everything that was going to happen.
I set up the bed by the door and the two bowls beside it. I fill one bowl with water and leave the other empty because my father feeds all the dogs at the same time, five o'clock, just before his first drink.
I go upstairs and get on a bathing suit. From my brother's window I see my mother and Bob Wuzzy, in chairs now, sipping iced tea with fat lemon rounds and stalks of mint shoved in the glasses, and the kids splashing, pushing, dunking-the kind of play my mother doesn't normally allow in the pool. Some are doing crazy jumps off the diving board, not cannonballs or jackknives but wild spazzy poses and then freezing midair just before they fall, like in the cartoons when someone runs off a cliff and keeps moving until he looks down. The older kids do this over and over, tell these jokes with their bodies to the others down below, who are laughing so hard it looks like they're drowning. When they get out of the pool and run back to the diving board, the water shimmers on their skin, which looks so smooth, like it's been polished with lemon Pledge. None of them are close to being "black." They are all different shades of brown. I wonder if they hate being called the wrong color. I noticed this last year, too. "They like being called black," my father told me in a Fat Albert accent. "Don't you start callin' 'em brown. Brown's down. Black's where it's at."
The grass feels good on my feet, thick and scratchy. I put my towel on the chair beside my mother.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Father of the Rainby Lily King Copyright © 2010 by Lily King. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Atlantic Monthly Press; First Edition (July 6, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0802119492
- ISBN-13 : 978-0802119490
- Item Weight : 1.38 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.25 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,318,228 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17,395 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #57,145 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #64,779 in American Literature (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Lily King grew up in Massachusetts and received her B.A. in English Literature from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has taught English and Creative Writing at several universities and high schools in this country and abroad.
Lily’s first novel, The Pleasing Hour (1999) won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second, The English Teacher, was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award. Her third novel, Father of the Rain (2010), was a New York Times Editors Choice, a Publishers Weekly Best Novel of the Year and winner of both the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Maine Fiction Award. Lily's new novel, Euphoria, was released in June 2014. It has drawn significant acclaim so far, being named an Amazon Book of the Month, on the Indie Next List, and hitting numerous summer reading lists from The Boston Globe to O Magazine and USA Today. Reviewed on the cover of The New York Times, Emily Eakin called Euphoria, “a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace.”
Lily is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Ploughshares and Glimmer Train, as well as in several anthologies.
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There has to be something about Maine that brings out the best in writers: Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer winner, "Olive Kitteridge"; Richard Russo's Pulitzer novel "Empire Falls"; Roxana Robinson's amazing "Cost"; and resident Lily King's "Father of the Rain" to mention only a few.
The first-person narrative is consistently in present tense even though the novel covers four decades, a technique that drew this reader immediately into the novel and the conflict the sixth-grader experienced between her mother and father. The mother has decided to leave her alcoholic father, and she will be taking Daley with her. I have read many novels that deal with this theme: the alcoholic in the family and the chaos that results. But this is the first one in which all the stereotypes fail to emerge. And what the reader experiences is the most intimate details about the polarization that occurs, in this case between a daughter and father.
So many contemporary novels unfold in little jigsaw pieces, something I like when it is well done. And Lily King is just about the best at it. The dialogue is very authentic. And the descriptions of people and places draw one in. When I arrived about two-thirds through, I became really annoyed and put the novel aside, thinking "Darn you, Ms. King. Don't keep making Daley do such stupid things." In fact I picked up the other novel I was reading--usually I have at least two going at a time--but found myself unable to concentrate. I had to get back to the King one in spite of my annoyance. That is how powerful this writing has been for me.
Gardiner Amory is the father, a man who has been and can be a real monster. In fact he could very easily have become a one-dimensional stereotype of the controlling, mean alcoholic which he is. But Ms. King would not allow that stereotype. This is a very real human being, deeply flawed but also with traces of humaneness. I won't say any more than that because only the novel does justice to the skill with which this character is treated. To say that the author knows a lot about alcoholism and its profound effects upon others would be an understatement. This is well researched.
But the novel is so much more than one about alcoholism. Racism is another theme that cuts a wide swath as Daley deals with her love for Jonathan. And as many of us progressives know, the election of a black president and a Great Recession that has put people out of work have allowed racism/anti-immigration to implode like a huge gushing of oil from a mile-down well in the Gulf of Mexico.
So let me tell you how it all turns out. Okay, I won't. But I can assure you this: you will be experiencing what a real artist can do with words.
The second part of the book finds Daley as a young woman about to embark on a hard earned, successful career as an academic, with the tender support of her boyfriend, who is black. This crossing of the race-line does not feel coincidental. Daley's father, not surprisingly, is a horrible bigot and chauvinist. Daley's impressive ambition and drive to succeed, her inability to relax and have fun, her choice of a man who is the antithesis of her father, all represent a need to conquer and dispel old hurts, and distance herself from her disgust for her father and her past. The reader shudders when she sabotages the future she so diligently built and richly deserves. When she goes back to her childhood home to rescue her father, we know it won't stick, but we do understand that its her life she is trying to rescue, as much as his. The ending of the book does not deliver the kind of vindication we hope for, but it is believable. Where King may feel she has got a triumphant epiphany out of the old boy, we, the dear reader know this is about the best one could hope for from the sod, and nod our head with grudging approval.
There are a few passages in this book which confused and disturbed me. Dear old Dad has a tendency toward an inappropriately sexualized relationship with his young daughter. He reads pornography to her at the dinner table to elicit a few chuckles, strips himself and her down for a streaking romp in front of a pool full of young children who are forced to spectate, and occasionally makes comments to her about her generally "appealing" body. Daley the child is confused and disturbed, but in Part Two, Daley the adult is too, long after she should have gotten clear about it. For example, as a 30 year old, Dad "dresses her up" in a cute tennis skirt in order to play a game at the club, where he can show her off and use her to deflect some of the club gossip. She is cynical enough to take umbrage, but then finds that she likes wearing the uniform of the rich and protected daughter, and that her game has never been better. Though she remembers being repelled by his casual nudity when she was a child, her favorite memory of him is the day they ran naked together through the yard, because it made her feel so carefree, and made him seem fun and uncomplicated. This sentiment does not seem consistent with a character who insists on the title Ms., even with strangers and who chastises her father for objectifying her.
King also has a way of writing about the human body in unnecessarily lurid ways, and it intruded on an otherwise skillful read. Daley's experience of her childhood friend nursing a child is rather grossly eroticized. And Daley the youngster has a penchant for stumbling into people who are having sex, not once, not twice, but three times!! Quite an education. One hopes that Lily King is trying to say that once a child is exposed(Hah!) to inappropriate sexual contact with adults, there will be no normalizing the subject for even the healthiest of them. But, dear reader, you will have to answer this question for yourself. I am left to wonder if it was just gratuitous voyeurism, or worse, confusion on the part of the author who wants to write about sexuality with honesty, and can't quite nail her point of view down.
Top reviews from other countries
Anyway the book charts a young girl who goes through her parents break up and the subsequent relationship with her parents - focusing on her Father. I obviuosly won't tell the end but the book spans a number of years, taking the main character into adulthood.
I absolutely loved reading this book and it kept me gripped whilst on my sun lounger on holiday. Thoughtfully written it really did make make me feel the emotions that were being described.
Daley Amory is barely into her teenage years when her parents separate, and the veneer image of the perfect family life is shattered and what is revealed beneath it is that her father is a drunken, selfish and ignorant man. Whilst she can change, and develop and become a better person her father can only remain the same as he falls quickly into an unhealthy relationship and seems to have no care in the world for what he is doing to his children. In spite of this there are sporadic bursts of hope, that she can make him a better man and that she can erase the years of neglect. At the heart of the story is the relationship between father and daughter, and whilst they spend most of their lives shunning each other, they both want and need each other in equal measure.
As a piece of literature this novel is near perfect and has been wonderfully written. At times things are portrayed as being a little bit too perfect, the relationship Daley has with Jonathan is so seemingly perfect that it came across from time to time as rather kitsch, though otherwise an almost faultless novel.
We start in Daley's early teens, when her mother leaves her father; this is a very painful period for Daley, adjusting to life with her mother and fitting in with her father's new family. We get a clear picture of her father and stepmother, both drunks, neither very good at child care; and of how hard it is for Daley to keep moving between weekends/holidays with them and weeks alone with her mother.
The second part of the book moves on to Daley's late 20's, when she has completed her PhD, has a warm and loving relationship, and is about to move to a prestigious job at Berkeley and a new life in California with her partner, Jonathan. Just at this point her brother calls; her father is in crisis. She rushes home intending to stay only a few days, but finds that her father needs her and she is unwilling to leave so quickly. But to stay would mean losing her new job, and maybe even sacrificing her relationship.
The third part of the book moves on several years, but I won't say too much for fear of introducing spoilers.
I enjoyed this book a great deal more than I expected. I chose it off Vine with some reservations (best of a selection I was lukewarm about, rather than with a "must have" feeling), but I am really glad that I did.
I loved the writing style; it is fluid and easy to read and the characters are mostly believable. More importantly, I was carried along by the story (and, indeed, sat up late into the night reading it!). I felt I was sharing Daley's concerns about her relationships with her father, her brother and her lover (this is very much a book about how a woman comes to terms with herself and her interactions with the men in her life - the female characters are more lightly drawn), and I even felt I could sympathise with her decisions, though I am pretty sure I wouldn't have made the same choices!
A 4½* read for me. Amazon won't let me have half stars, and I hold back from the full 5*s because I felt it was slightly "rose-tinted" in places; Jonathan, for instance, is just a little too nice to be true (but then, maybe I'm just jealous!). However, warmly recommended to anyone who likes reading about family relationships and the choices and compromises we all have to make.
Gardiner's alcoholism has always been a "fact of life" for Daley. He could be huge fun one minute and a raging, malignant fool the next. So when Daley has the opportunity to go away to college, she doesn't hesitate to take it. She excels academically and discovers the stability of a warm and loving relationship with her boyfriend Jonathan. They are on the brink of moving to the West Coast of America where Daley has gained a professorship in anthropology...the pinnacle of her career. When everything looks as if it is going right for them, the spectre of her father looms again when Daley receives the news of his descent into deep depression. His second wife has left him and he has lost the will to live. Against her better judgement, Daley makes a detour to New England to try and pick up the pieces of her father's shattered life, before meeting up with Jonathan at Berkeley.
I found this book truly absorbing. The author manages to convey the desperation and conflict of trying to maintain a bond with an alcoholic parent. Daley wants to do the best she can for Gardiner, but there is only so much one human being can take and the voice of reason in her head urges her to flee and turn her back on her father. In truth, Gardiner seems beyond help.. Her friends and her lover want her to walk away, but the family tie is strong. Daley believes she can help her father to recover and sacrifices her new job and her relationship with Jonathan to stay and care for him. This part of the novel is heart breaking and very well written.
"Father of the Rain" is a very accomplished novel which beautifully illustrates the emotional rollercoaster of living with alcoholism and the strong pull of family duty. Is Gardiner a lost cause? Can Daley succeed in her endeavours? From the first quote at the beginning of the book to the quiet last page I was completely hooked!