A Wolf at the Table, by Augusten Burroughs

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A Wolf at the Table, by Augusten Burroughs

POSTED: Friday, May 23, 2008, 8:30 PM

St. Martin's Press, 242 pp., April 29

Threat of Violence

In Stephen King's novel The Shining, a mother and son are terrorized for one night by an ax-wielding dad wild with cabin fever. In Augusten Burroughs' latest memoir, a child faces 13 years in surburbia with an alcoholic philosopher-dad, who lets family pets die and emotionally abuses his mentally troubled wife. No beatings, or blood. Instead, Burroughs gives a litany of his father's sins of omission, from the baseball he never bought him, to the hugs he withheld.
Written in choppy prose that slips too often into melodrama, this grim memoir shows Burroughs from infancy through his early teens, when his parents divorced, and he and his mother escaped. Its strength is its portrait of the terror involved in living with an alcoholic man who could keep his fists to himself, but was happy to flaunt his urges and capacity to break teeth.
The lack of true aggression haunts Burroughs. Because there is none, some of the reverie is at times maudlin, as the adult looks back in hindsight to pinpoint exactly how the blow that was never struck caused such lasting pain. When his father gives him a baseball glove, young Burroughs knows he should feel grateful, but feels sad instead, "because before I had a glove, I didn't need a father to throw a ball at me." The kid surmises, "[He'd] given me a glove, but nothing to catch." This exemplifies the self-pitying tone that dominates a large part of the memoir. The writing and story improve late in the book, when he chooses a cathartic laugh over smashing his fist through the wall, and tries to become different from the father he loathed. He finds he cannot succeed, or forgive, only wish things had gone better.

Andrew Thompson

Posted 2008-05-30 16:32:14

Ugh, another dish of dysfunction by Burroughs. First we get his entire life story in one book, then we get it in chapters. I understand the desire to sublimate fuming neurosis into art, but I wish the guy would get out of himself a little bit and write about someone else's fuck-ups.

FitzWilliam

Posted 2008-06-16 14:55:58

Hey guys!!

Augusten's "A Wolf at the Table" was just picked by LOGO as a Best Summer Listen.  The list has a bunch of other cool books and we can download best-selling gay & lesbian audiobooks straight to our iPod from this site - www.audible.com/logo.  Check it out!

Posted by matt jakubowski" @ 8:30 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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