Memories of My Father Watching TV

by Curtis White

"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.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, 20th Century

158 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1998

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since the 1950s countless children have lost their fathers to the television set. At the beginning, I'm sure nobody ever dreamed the question would prove quite so binary: 'Do you want to have children or do you want to watch television?' But it turns out that these two hobbies, seemingly unrelated, rarely intersect. So many evenings, he (my own father) splayed in that fucking brown leather recliner—at first, shockingly cold to the touch but later intimately, disgustingly warm from the dim energy radiating from his back and buttocks. There, in the darkness of the finished basement, the television—luminous and spectral—trysted with my invertebrate father. The way he lay there, limp and spent, sometimes had the air of the postcoital about it and, at other times, the posthumous. Mother, Sister, and I could hear him downstairs with that slatternly Other Woman, manipulating all the pixels at her disposal only to bring him pleasure.

Oh. Haven't you heard about the patriarch? He's got a right to this. He works hard everyday, breaking his goddamn back, so you kids can have a roof over your head, clothes on your back, some food to stuff in your traps. And what? He can't come home from a long day and watch a little fucking M*A*S*H, for Chrissake? My father still thought Eisenhower was president, I think. And by the way, he wasn't a bricklayer or an ironworker or a coal miner. He was an accountant. The breaking of his back consisted of sitting at an oversized desk, puffing cigarettes all day, and fiddling with his adding machine. He counted money, and then he collected it. He needed to come home and not be bothered with any of your crap. He needed to relax.

But hey. What was so goddamn unrelaxing about spending time with your children anyway? (Did that sound too earnest? Too needy?) This is one of the reasons why I get so mad when I hear about people watching TV all the time, in case you wanted to know. I don't really want to hear about the Real Housewives of Where-the-fuck-ever. You may not have children even, but maybe you should be curing cancer, visiting shut-ins, or tending to lepers instead. (Do people still tend to lepers? You don't hear about leper-tending much anymore.) You get my point. I have a history. There's a father—my father—and there's a television over there and me over here. Which way do you think he looks?

Anyway, you can plainly see that I'm onboard with Curtis White's premise in Memories of My Father Watching TV. He situates the (I want to say innate) conflict between father and son in the battleground of the TV room. This novel is actually a collection of thematically related stories in which the son reconfigures his relationship with his unloving, depressive father through the medium of old television shows, like Bonanza, Highway Patrol, and Combat. The hybrid of television fiction and emotional fact yields a surreal and often downright bizarre kaleidoscope of hang-ups and resentment. Besides that, it's extremely funny, but the humor is probably more Charlie Kaufman than Charlie Callas, so if you're locked into the easy and the straightforward, then do a drive-by on this one. It won't hit the spot.

Don't worry if you're not familiar with the old shows that the book references. I have never seen any of them and was only really aware of maybe half of them. The humor and insight isn't reliant upon inside jokes so much as upon the tweaking of the usually stodgy, old school male archetypes of the early days of television. Still, this isn't light reading. Realize what you're in for and meet it head-on, and you'll be rewarded for the effort. (Oh. And David Foster Wallace apparently loved the heck out of this book. So there's that too.)

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a novel in any real sense. I truly do not understand why it has that designation in all caps on the cover. It reads like a series of very distinct short stories. In any case, each one is rather unusual. I felt deeply disoriented much of the time while reading this--wondering things more or less like "What is this? Who is viewing this? Where is this story taking place? In the mind of a child watching TV with their father? Is it just a story?" Et cetera.

Perspectives are blurred with great gusto. Viewpoints are mashed and juxtaposed with a seeming abandon. But it all works rather well at creating vivid (strange and disorienting as they are) and often jarring portraits of fathers and sons, passive audiences and creative and imaginative entities, and an implicit story of a thoroughly televisualized culture in between its lines and pixelations.

It also doesn't hurt to notice the prominent David Foster Wallace blurb on the front cover that reads: "Witheringly smart, grotesquely funny, grimly comprehensive, and so moving as to be wrenching."

[One other curious thing I noticed is that in the author bio it states his year of birth as 1951 then goes on to list his bibliography, beginning with a book called Heretical Songs (1951). Assuming Mr. White didn't pen his first novel before the age of one, I'm assuming this is some kind of odd joke. It's curious is all.]

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Curtis White’s father fixation reaches its summit in this short novel, blending parodies and shifting forms to create what David Foster Wallace calls a “witheringly smart, grotesquely funny, grimly comprehensive, and so moving as to be wrenching” piece of work. This is what Jack Green might call in reviewing terms a “boner”—quoting someone else’s words to pad out the review instead of having to formulate an opinion. But I’ve been reviewing all over the place this weekend and, I might add, on my own here in the GR offices—no one else has read one single book this weekend out of one hundred-odd friends. Is anyone reading this December? This is another digression to stop me having to speak about the book. OK. You win. Curtis White is terrific—his work runs largely on comic vignettes that pass into the “wrenching” and personal, with a style somewhere between the ironist excesses of Sorrentino and the trickery of Coover. Jack Green would call that a boner also—playing the comparison game to cover an absence of useful analysis. Ah. Who cares. What’s on TV?

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

And I thought I grew up with father issues... This book proves what Austin Powers once said to Dr Evil: "No I dadn't!"

Really interesting, angry, funny and weird. Like DFW's crazy uncle or something. A couple of the stories/chapters (it calls itself a novel, so) or episodes left me a bit cold cos I wasn't born when the TV shows they were based on were on the air, but that didn't always matter: the first one, an amalgam of the time when the narrator's father was on a corrupt quiz show and then 'debated' Kruschev, was unbelievably clever and hilarious. Even more than with other books we share here, I'd love to hear what you all make of this one if/when you read it, cos it's left me bemused, bothered and bewildered, for sure.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/6jzF-P_S4sg

[Howard · Rating 1 out of 5]

Experimental; daring; unusual; strange; weird; outrageous; not for me; deep-sixed.

[🐴 🍖]

ever wonder what it'd be like to eat a bunch of datura and then marathon some nick at nite with slavoj zizek and julia kristeva? then boy do i have the cross-genre dalkey publication for you

[Downward · Rating 4 out of 5]

there's something PROFOUNDLY uncomfortable to me in the way that white is able to access the freudian and fascistic nature of early television and then project that directly onto the american nuclear family in the 50s and 60s. it shows a recursive loop of our fathers' masculinity being defined by their own consumption and our interpretations of our fathers being defined by our consuming their consuming, generationally establishing manhood as being both fascistic and also hyper-sedentary. this is a novel only in a thematic sense, there's no plot to speak of. instead what you get are varied extended riffs on the presiding themes of popular entertainment backdropped with a reflective academic analysis of childhood in the shadow of that entertainment, which so occupied the attention of your father, whose attention you craved.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Foster Wallace said it best: "Witheringly smart, grotesquely funny, grimly comprehensive, and so moving as to be wrenching."

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Little book, lotta goodness. White flirts with profundity via absurdity. I already want to read it again.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious, irreverant, highly original, and deeply resonant, but finally a sad lament about the relationship of a father and son via the TV. Memories of My Father Watching TV has as its protagonists television shows of the 1950s and '60s, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience, veering off into whacky "memories" where what really happened is often confused with vaguely remembered television plot lines, and become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in shows like "Combat," "Highway Patrol," and "Bonanza." In the background, as children try to fit themselves into the family mythology of good and bad TV, their budding imaginations record every hurt, near hurt, or imagined hurt inflicted upon them by silent, depressed, nearly catatonic fathers. Comic in many ways, Memories of My Father Watching TV pricks at the pain lurking beneath the blue-light glow of one of our most universal experiences -- staring at the tube.

[Deana · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got this book ages ago (2012, apparently) from Paperback Swap. It looked interesting, and I certainly have a lot of memories of my own father warching TV (and even the particular shows mentioned in the blurb), so I thought this would be a nostaligia-filled walk down memory lane. It had a recommendation from David Foster Wallace on the cover, so I knew it might be a little weird but when I finally picked this up over the summer it was totally not what I expected.

Honestly, I have no idea what was going on. After an introduction to the family members and where they normally sat/stood in the living room, the characters (if you can call them that) were actually "inside" some TV shows, not watching them and talking about them like I expected. And they weren't in the normal shows, but some bastardized and frankly often disgusting and confusing versions of them. The chapters are more like short stories - totally unrelated as far as I can tell. During the second chapter the father-figure has some kind of fetish about being peed on by women that is acted upon many times (including by an 8-year-old girl!! ugh) and then there are three pages that just say "da" on them and one that says "dum" (which was kind of funny) and then a weird poem and ... I just said "nope" and dropped it off in the nearby Little Free Library. I almost threw it straight in the trash can instead so no one else will grab it and be subjected to the awfulness, but apparently some people like this kind of thing and maybe one of those people will find it.

[Lucas Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where did I buy this book? Was it on someone's recommendation. DFW blurbs it on the front cover, but I can't remember the story anymore.

I enjoyed this book. It reminded me quite a bit of the sole Mark Leyner book I've read, which incidentally was also published in 1998. There was a similar pacing, and vignette-ness to the "story.

This book is sadder and funnier, and less silly then I remember Leyner being. I was very unfamiliar with the references to 50s and 60s TV. I'm not sure how much this affected my reading experience. I don't believe it detracted too much. Recommend.

[Joey Lewandowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

less a novel than a collection of disparate stories, i don't understand *most* of this, but i admire the ambition and the creativeness with which curtis white tackles his narratives

come join our book club. our second episode comes out thursday, and our fourth episode is about this book. learn more: cageclub.me/lottery

[Curt Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went for this after checking to see that White's father watched some of the same garbage I'd become familiar with back then, and I thought the common experience might be good subject matter for him to play with. The older Mr. White is presented as not only watching or commenting on the TV fare but actually entering into it as various characters, hence a surreal leap. The romp is only occasionally funny or witty, and maybe the targets are too broad to challenge the writer's best faculties. I thought "Highway Patrol" and "Have Gun, Will Travel" were the most successful chapters. Flights of fancy vie with observed facts about the programs. It occurred to me that White manifests some of the earmarks of Postmodernism, but maybe his absolute best fiction has so far eluded me.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have abandoneded my opinion (after reading White's novel) that television acts merely as electronic furniture because I have now witnessed how in his deft novelistic treatment, it becomes a character, a divine, a shrink, an icon, and a drinking buddy. Each chapter in this very clever novel portrays how television and its programming becomes the genuine substitute for identity; that is, in its delusional fervor of selling back to 'my father' who watches show after show in order never to have to interact with his children, it becomes the simulation of a strained psychological balance.

White's novel is crass, clever, crude, crazy, and contagious. It is quick, queer, and quirky. I, too, grew up in a household in which the television never slept, in which my parents tried tirelessly to raise the four of us boys to be religiously scrupulous only to undermine their piety by tacitly opening up the back door or (to use another cliche) give a blank check to television programming and its presence: Combat!, The Wild, Wild West, The Rat Patrol, Kung Fu, Sea Hunt, Hawaii 5-O, Bonanza, Dragnet, Mission Impossible, and for my mother, The Lawrence Welk Show.

I think White has a written a brilliant novel. Its treatment of the material is sheer genius. And his final chapter on the film, The Third Man, crowns this novel.. A sleeper that I want to read again as well as study.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Enh, nah. Super random, very stream-of-consciousness, very postmodern, not my sort of thing. Has the energy (and the here-there-and-everywhere-ness) of Burgess, and yeah it's definitely very "trippy" in a non-drug sort of way, but I guess I just don't really get down for this sort of nonrepresentational fiction anymore. Give me characters, with names, give me dialogue, give me story. Couldn't really follow this, though I'm sure it's cohesive and intelligent.

[Brenden · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very bad. Couldn't finish. Obtuse and riddled with inside-jokes about bad 50s television shows.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wish I could apply stars for different sections of the book. I'd like to assign the "Bonanza" section to a class I don't actually teach. The final section, "The Third Man," too.

[Joseph Schlesinger]

That's right, no stars.