A Time to Live and to Die

By Paul Gray

DAD by William Wharton; Knopf; 449 pages; $12.95

The drama of parents and children begins as a love story, perhaps the most engrossing one that life ever offers. The plot then thickens considerably, and happy resolutions of all the ensuing difficulties are rare. Ordinarily, death rings down the curtain in midscene, leaving the younger actors with lines unspoken and an abrupt change in casting; whatever else they may play, they can be sons and daughters no longer.

Dad portrays both the loss and the continuity in this irrevocable process of change. Author William Wharton creates a middle-aged hero who must simultaneously witness the rapid decline of his father and the growing independence of his own son. This summary may scare off droves of readers. Living through such an experience is bad enough; why borrow trouble by vicariously sharing someone else's? But Dad is more than a chronicle of pain and dissolution. It shows how stories that began with love can end that way too.

John Tremont, 52, an American-born painter living in France, flies to Los Angeles after learning of his mother's heart attack. He finds her in a serious but stable condition; his father worries him more. At age 72, Dad has sunk into a lethargy that borders on inertia. Tremont sets him some routine household chores, then coaxes him into the outside world, and the old man begins to show sparks of vitality: "You get in the habit of working and then forget how to have fun." After a minor operation, however, Dad slides into senility. Tremont brings him home from the hospital and tries caring for an incontinent adult incapable of feeding himself. The effort is heroic but doomed. Dad is sent to a nursing home, presumably to die.

Instead, the patient regains his mind as suddenly as he lost it. He becomes, for a while, an overage hippie, buying off-beat costumes at the Salvation Army and riding on the back of a motorcycle with his son. Tremont's sister and daughter, who both live near by, bask in this sunny remission; his son Billy, a college dropout, shows up and is equally delighted. After a lifetime spent working at factory jobs he hated, Dad is finally enjoying himself. The only one unhappy about all this is Mom, who fears that her husband of 50 years has become a stranger. She throws an extended tantrum. Before too long, Dad is back in the nursing home. Tremont mourns: "He's gone, totally, completely gone." Giving up at last, Tremont packs Billy into a car and drives cross-country. His destination is Philadelphia, where he grew up, and yet another sojourn with his past before going home to Paris.

Tremont's long vigil in Los Angeles and the trip back East are told in alternating chapters. Folded together this way, the two stories underscore Tremont's uneasy, mid-life situation. He cleans up for his ailing father and for his sloppy son; he sleeps, on different occasions, in the same room with both. Observing this pattern, he muses on its meaning: "I'm caught up, beached, between two tides, the old one of fathering-husbanding and the new one of aging-dying." occasionally, a third voice interrupts the narrative. It is Dad's mind, rehearsing the elaborative fantasy that has been a retreat for most of his adult life. In it, he owns the farm that he always wanted, raises a family of four (not two, as in that other place), lives in harmony with his wife, and moves to the slow dance of the seasons.

The presence of this obsessive, comforting vision links Dad to Birdy (1979), Wharton's acclaimed first novel about an adolescent boy who wants to become a canary and fly. But Dad is a rather more tenuous success than its predecessor. For one thing, it dissipates some of its power in prolixity. When Dad goes through his brief recovery, Tremont notes, within a few pages, "he's like a seventeen-year-old . . . he could have some feelings of being physically thirteen or fourteen years old . . . he has all the ego isolation and drive of a twenty-year-old." These sound like random thoughts, not the shaped statements of a narrator on top of his material. Tremont's treatment of his mother also provokes uneasiness. He seems blind to his bias against her, even though his own words reveal how eager he is to free his father by reining her in.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of Dad lies beyond logic. The novel has the feel of an intense autobiography, not recollected in tranquillity but dashed off from life, with all its uncertainties, mixed motives and false starts preserved intact. Wharton, himself an artist and an American expatriate in France, has photographed this story instead of painting it. But, like the best snapshots, Dad is touching, commemorative and candid.

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Early in the morning of the fifth night, I wake to the usual jingling of glass and metal, the main sound in a hospital. There's a pale gray light coming through the window and I listen to the early going-to-work traffic. It's the time when I usually have my most depressed thoughts. I'm lying in bed, half thinking, half in suspended animation.

I glance over at Dad. His eyes are open and he's looking at me! I mean he's looking at me, not past me, or through me or around me! He's looking into my eyes!

I slide out of bed on his side and approach carefully. At first, I think maybe he died in the night, but his eyes are live, they follow me, keeping me in focus. I come to the edge of his bed. His mouth opens twice, dry pale lips, paper-frail. But he gets out a sound, a thin, high voice almost falsetto.

'Where am I, Johnny?'

I can't believe it!"

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