Misgivings
My Mother, My Father, Myself
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An intense, refractory memoir by a major poet
Misgivings is C. K. Williams's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics and of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, and inner conflict. Like Kafka's self-revealing Letter to His Father, Misgivings is full of doubt, both philosophical and personal, but as a work of art it is sure and true.
Williams's father was an "ordinary businessman"--angry, demanding, addicted to the tension he created with the people he loved; a man who could read the Greek myths aloud to his son yet vowed never to apologize to anybody. His mother was a housewife, a woman with a great capacity for pleasure, who was stoical about the family's dire early poverty yet remained affected by it even when they became well-off. Together, these two formed what Williams calls the "conspiracy that made me who I am." His account of their life together and their deaths--his father's with suicidal despair, and his mother's with calm resignation--is a literary form of the reconciliation the family achieved at the end of his parents' lives. And as literary form it is novel, a series of brilliant short takes, a double helix of experience and recollection. Few contemporary writers have understood their origins so acutely, or so eloquently.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Award-winning poet Williams (Repair; The Vigil) forays into nonfiction with this meditative, tense memoir about family hurt, disappointment and rage. The book starts off promisingly with a philosophical, authorial distance, suggesting Williams's signature intelligence and concern: standing over his dead father, he exclaims, "What a war we had!" and then muses, both detached and pained, about why a son would think primarily of war instead of love at his father's death. But the narrative soon turns tedious as Williams lists the grievances he holds against his dead parents. His father, a successful salesman, was unpredictably angry, loving, cruel and generous; he "treated his children like employees" but gave away cars to relatives and friends (though he did finance his son's dream of becoming a writer). His erratic behavior was clearly disruptive and confusing, but Williams, taking the stance of the righteous son, seems more interested in defending himself than providing readers any real insight into his father. Similarly, he draws a vague outline of his mother, characterizing her as "essentially a child" who, having grown up poor, loved nothing more than shopping and acquiring material goods. These grievances come off as both petty and inflated. Although the author makes faint attempts to be sympathetic to his parents, detailing some happy childhood memories and wondering what went wrong, he seems obsessed with his father's failures, repeatedly speculating about the older man's questionable morality, his unhappy marriage and his Faustian bargains. In the end, all justification for his father's behavior fall away and what's left is the son's attempts to express his hurt. Williams's fans will have a difficult time watching such a characteristically direct and honest poet complain about a decades-old wound that clearly remains unhealed.
