Fill a highball glass with ice. Add two fingers of Archie Bunker, a splash of Homer Simpson, and serve with a twist of Jack Nicholson. That could be the cocktail recipe for Gardiner Amory, the volatile, imperious, babyish, alcoholic, and impossibly beguiling character at the heart of Lily King’s third novel, “Father of the Rain.” The narrator and nominal protagonist is his daughter, Daley. But it says as much about King’s judicious portrait of the intricately flawed patriarch as it does about the gravitational pull exerted by certain addicts that Gardiner is the character most likely to linger in readers’ thoughts.
Daddy dearest
A daughter’s painful but amusing saga of growing up with an alcoholic and bigoted but still beguiling father
Growing up in the 1970s in the fictional North Shore town of Ashing, a world of country clubs, private schools, and “generous housewives in Lilly Pulitzer dresses,” Daley Amory is divided in her loyalties to her parents and their very different values. Her mother, a budding social activist, works with Project Genesis, an outreach program designed to “heal the wounds” of underserved children (a goal that translates in practical terms as having them over to frolic in the Amorys’ pool and eat hamburgers in their backyard a few evenings every summer). She’s critical of Nixon, fond of literature, and eventually winds up working for a child-advocacy lawyer.
Her father, on the other hand, is the sort of person who polishes off his second poolside martini and smugly remarks, “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.” The only literature he’s fond of is Penthouse. He affects a Fat Albert accent whenever talking about black people, refers to the Project Genesis kids as “monkeys,” and casually assumes they urinate in the pool.
Although Daley attempts to distance herself from his most repugnant views (“They’re not peeing in it,” she meekly submits), she cannot help adoring her father. In fact she loves both parents with a kind of hopeless futility. We meet her at age 11, on the eve of the marriage’s dissolution, and from the earliest pages she conveys weary resignation. “I don’t say no to my father’s ideas, just as I don’t say no to my mother’s.” It’s as though Daley understands her role in life to be that of passive bystander: witness to a long, inexorable train wreck. Whether she will ever be able to imagine a new role for herself becomes the novel’s central question, but it plays out (over the course of some 30 years) less as her story alone than as an intricate drama between her adult self and her father, and we never care quite as much about Daley — will she or won’t she wrench herself free from codependency? — as we do about the riveting Gardiner.
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