Memoir traces a sensitive soul’s bittersweet family history

Talk about your childhood wishes.

But “Sweet Dreams: A Family History’’ turns out to be a bittersweet sojourn. As the scion of a prosperous Philadelphia Main Line family, Henry enjoys every material advantage growing up. His family, though, is in ruins.

Henry’s father — besides being “dogmatically racist, sexist, classist, capitalistic, patriotic, Presbyterian and Republican’’ — is a devoted alcoholic who abuses his wife, and harangues her for a divorce. Henry’s mother struggles to shield the children from this strife, but eventually suffers a nervous breakdown and travels to Bermuda for six weeks to recover.

As the youngest child, Henry is spared the worst of these turbulent years. His parents reconcile, but an uneasy mood settles over the family. “My own sense of Dad involved respect for his power and fear of his disapproval. But I also sensed that he was demoted somehow at home; that he had surrendered to rules and wisdoms beyond him,’’ Henry observes. “Mom’s job and ours was to support him with domestic order and to launch him each day, if not like Achilles in armor, then like an actor going on stage.’’

While his older siblings escape into unhappy marriages, Henry seeks a refuge in literature. By fourth grade, he’s printing a newspaper (the Swiftset Rotary News) for his classmates. He ships off to Amherst, studies with Eudora Welty, writes a novella, and dreams of being a published author. At the Iowa Writers Workshop, the novelist Richard Yates mentors him. He eventually finishes a doctorate at Harvard and settles in Cambridge where, besides teaching and writing, he helps launch the venerable literary magazine Ploughshares.

All around him, the ’60s are raging. Henry pursues doomed affairs and tomcats around town with a fast-talking accomplice. He goes to see Janis Joplin in concert, though, perhaps appropriately, the speaker system is broken. (“All that crowd eager to marvel at her, and here she was nothing, nobody, only some chick doing her gyrations way off out there, in silence.’’)