My Father, Dancing
by Bliss Broyard
Knopf, $22 hard
Anyone who knows the legacy of Bliss Broyard’s late father, Anatole Broyard, author and longtime critic for The New York Times Book Review, will be hard pressed not to read this debut collection of short stories as a memoir. Bliss Broyard packs this first book (which is dedicated to her father) with a plethora of fathers, and father figures, all of whom sound at least a little like the elder Broyard as he came across in his own writing — witty, clever, perhaps a bit self-absorbed. Though Broyard’s heroines in this short story collection include girls and women in each stage of life, from little girlhood to junior high school to marriage, in nearly every story the main character’s primary challenge is coming to grips with a father who is sophisticated and affectionate but often just out of reach.
The title story is told in a series of flashbacks. The narrator’s recollections of her and her father dancing — in the kitchen, at nightclubs, on the flowered garage sale rug — share time with more recent memories of her father lying in the hospital bed dying of cancer. When she was young he told her he wanted to be the first man to break her heart so he could be sure that it would be done gently, only his death breaks her heart in a far from gentle fashion. And throughout the rest of Broyard’s book, the fathers in these stories keep right on hurting their daughters, despite deep love and the best intentions. In “At the Bottom of the Lake,” Lucy loses her father to her alcoholic drama queen stepmother. In “The Trouble With Mr. Leopold,” an overbearing father’s attempts to help amount to no more than “valiant, misguided efforts.”
Granted, there is the occasional moment of preciousness (when the narrator in “Mr. Sweetly Indecent” sees her mother holding her adulterous father close so he won’t ever get away again). And yet such moments are far less frequent than the many instants of genuine epiphany. This book is full of sympathetic characters who brave storm after storm, sleight after sleight, protected by their observational prowess and the shelter of their awe-inspiring self-awareness.
There is so much deep attention and so little outright emotion in these stories that it’s as though each of the narrators were hovering over the scenes taking notes as she participates in them, yielding a faraway, alternately dreamy and icy sense of each encounter. At the same time, what could be a vindictive, thinly veiled tell-all or a cheesy assortment of coming-of-age tales becomes instead a conscientious dissection of relationships between outwardly strong men and inwardly strong women.
This article appears in October 1 • 1999.