Those who find themselves dismayed by the aesthetically conservative/commercial creature that fiction has often come to be identified with will appreciate Dalkey Archive's release of Curtis White's new novel, Memories of My Father Watching TV, his collection of essays, Monstrous Possibility, and an issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction featuring White. Given today's contentious literary climate, these works form one of the most balanced articulations of why aesthetic decisions in the novel matter.

The centerpiece of this triptych is the novel Memories of My Father Watching TV which, in a RCF interview with Mark America, White describes as a "poetic rendering of depression." But this characterization has the limitation of describing Sartre's Nausea as a story about dread, even if, as White reveals, it is autobiographical. Rather, as Charles B. Harris writes in the RCF, White has pulled off in his novel that "most unlikely of hybrid, the postmodernist confessional." That is, the self of Memories is more dispersed than what used to be called the individual. It is closer to the collective unconscious of families in which television is the dominant member. Families which, unlike their counterparts in less developed countries, are well-off enough to own televisions and couches to watch them from, even if they might be one personal tragedy away from the shelter, the creditor, The State. This nexus, where we enter the "sociality of money," as White characterizes it in his essay "A Literature in Opposition," is also where he finds the specifics of his resistance.

The two halves of Memories are titled "Gloom" and "Glee," the yin and yang of the human condition as formulated by White in his essays. Tellingly, both are formulated in the novel as episodes of canonical TV shows: Highway Patrol, Bonanza, Combat, Sea Hunt, Maverick as well as Saturday Night at the Movies. Patriarchal associations spin from these shows easily, intensified by the fact that in each of them, Carl White, the fictional father, plays a central role, be it as a murdered officer of the highway patrol or a Nazi pontoon bridge that his fellow Americans are trying to blow up.

 

>--thREADs     reVIEWs--<