MEMORIES OF MY FATHER WATCHING TV
By Curtis White
Dalkey Archive, 157 pages, $12.50 paper
STORIES FROM THE TUBE
By Matthew Sharpe
Villard, 228 pages, $22
Can the experience of reading about TV really be as compelling as watching the tube? In two recent books of fiction, Matthew Sharpe and Curtis White offer bizarre views of what appears on our TV screens; as TV makes surreal our average American lives, so these books make images from TV surreal. The effect of TV on American culture is so pervasive it’s not surprising that contemporary fiction writers use this other medium, literature, to master the imagery and substance of television. What is surprising is how effectively White and Sharpe capture, and improve on, the essence of watching TV in such distinctive ways.
“Stories From the Tube,” Sharpe’s first book, collects stories loosely based on TV commercials. Each is prefaced with the description of a real ad and then gives an account of what might have happened if the sponsor could afford more than a 30-second spot and if the Federal Communications Commission wasn’t so fussy. From a commercial for cough medicine, Sharpe gives us Doctor Mom, a medical doctor who has lost her license because of a malpractice suit. Through the summer of the story, while her daughter explores her sexuality at camp and her husband tries to solve anthropological problems in Africa, Doctor Mom pokes and prods the only family member left at home, her teenage son, Rodney. She treats him for a series of complaints: first a cough, then a splinter in his buttocks, a pain in his left testicle, a possible brain tumor and more. (It’s a strength of the story that you don’t know for sure, or care, if it’s really a brain tumor, or if the mother has some deep psychological problem.) Since Doctor Mom can’t use hospital facilities, she builds the equipment she needs for brain surgery using her husband’s “woodworking equipment and some loose electronic gadgetry that happens to be lying around.” Rodney doesn’t take all of this lying down; he sees the contraption his mother has made “and he has a final tantrum before his mother enters his brain.”
This same dreamlike bizarreness is found in other stories. In “Cloud,” a woman meets the white cloud of toilet paper fame and falls in love with him (“His skin was oddly pliant.”). In “The Woman Who,” a woman turns into Marilyn Monroe and becomes a cult figure visited by needy pilgrims (Mostly this works: You believe this woman changes, repeatedly, into Marilyn Monroe.). In “A Bird Accident,” the surrealism reaches an especially cartoonish and grotesque level as Charlie Parker is run over by an ad man.
The better stories go beyond a kind of “Saturday Night Live” in-house commercial to real pathos. In “Tide,” a precocious 9-year-old asks, “When am I gonna start to bleed?” and her mother, a single parent, goes overboard in her use of graphic medical terms and diagrams.
Other stories are not as successful. Some are too long, and the tone is uneven in places or, worse, condescending to the characters. At times the surrealism is just not believable; this is especially true in “Cloud.” Likewise, “Bridesmaids” is a weak tale about two egotistical, horny and unlikable friends who have been bridesmaids 19 times.
Part of the fun of reading the book is recognizing an ad from your own TV experience and waiting for the punch line of its exposure in a story. I’m not sure this is such a strength, but finding one of those ads on a first reading is a cheap thrill.
Because TV ads are as much a part of popular culture as many shows themselves, Sharpe is clever to use them as fodder for his stories. What are TV commercials, after all, but metaphors for their products? Marshall McLuhan once claimed that they are the “greatest art forms” of this century. Sharpe makes these 30-second ads metaphors for what we see on TV and how we see it, as well as fully developed stories. His book proves what we’ve always known: TV ads are often more interesting than TV shows. And that is precisely why the premise of this collection is so ingenuous.
In an even more bizarre and often grotesque parody of TV that is ultimately more successful than Sharpe’s book, White has found a unique way to write the familiar tale of a father-son relationship. “Memories of My Father Watching TV” is a novel woven from manic descriptions (many first published as stories) of various TV-program episodes, all tied together by a young narrator desperate to get closer to his father, the ultimate couch potato. This is metafiction at its brightest. White, a literature professor at Illinois State University, is the author of several other books, including “Metaphysics in the Midwest.”
“Memories” is nominally about a young boy, Chris, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in California, in what is now known as a dysfunctional family. His father does little but watch TV, having spent his 15 minutes of fame as part of the quiz-show scandals. After his humiliation and what he perceives to be the humiliation of Richard Nixon by Nikita Khrushchev during the “kitchen debate” of 1959, “My father wanted vengeance. If only he could debate Khrushchev,” Chris says. And, as the father explains in such detail the son is “tempted to find it credible,” Khrushchev wants to meet him too. A secretive meeting may or may not have taken place at Disneyland, and the father is branded a traitor. He retreats to his recliner in front of the family TV set, where he “has been in a cataleptic trance . . . since November of 1963.” (Chris thinks “there was something hypnotic in the Kennedy funeral procession. The clip-clop of the horse in the streets of Washington D.C. The lonely despairing echo of those hooves in our little suburban home.”) What’s a son to do? Chris attempts to commune with his catatonic father by making him a character in various TV shows they are watching. Occasionally the father comes out of his stupor and they have brief moments of total misunderstanding, before watching TV again.
Thus the stage is set for a wild, wacky and perverted wandering through TV shows, much like Alice walking through a “Green Acres”-like Wonderland, only there’s dirty stuff too. The TV is always on, the family is always watching it. Sometimes they are watching and they are on TV at the same time. A typical chapter describes a TV episode with an additional external story that reflects the action, or non-action, of Chris’ family, and this becomes an extension of the program itself. Although occasionally redundant and mechanical, or overwhelming in its richness, this literary structure most often results in entertainment as good as the best of TV.
The chapter “Bonanza,” for example, is a wanna-be plot of the TV show narrated by a character called Wild Father who lives in a gully that is torched weekly by the show’s producers so Ben and the boys can ride through the flames at the opening of each show. Wild Father’s main complaint is that the Cartwrights spend each week rescuing someone other than him. He wants the Cartwrights to save him, Hop Sing to cook for him, and Doc to clean him up. Naturally, he would then “test my benefactor’s patience by doing something savage.” Interspersed with Wild Father’s narration are dialogue with Chris as TV viewer, a scholarly paper psychoanalyzing the actual “Bonanza” episode, digressions on how to become a Wild Father, an “excerpt” from the TV script, and increasingly strange scenes (Ben excretes a cockroach-like worm from his forehead).
“Combat,” a heartbreaking chapter, is based on the TV show about an infantry squad in constant peril during World War II. The father figure, again in his traitor role, here plays the part of a German bridge that must be destroyed by the Allies (“With his feet on one bank and his fingers barely gripping the other, he is completely vulnerable. He wants to curl up in the fetal position, but that is not a posture pontoon bridges are allowed.”). Sarge swims and crawls under the bridge, “from rib to rib,” to place the plastique explosive (“It tickles my father a little . . .”). After the explosions, Sarge surprises everyone (“especially my father who pops up from his suburban recliner in awe”) by revealing, under his helmet, a garden growing out of his head.
The unifying theme of the beleaguered father-son relationship is only one way White holds together this pastiche of episodes. Recurring motifs include wormlike creatures crawling into or oozing out of body parts, bugs and bugs’ exoskeletons, and the “orgasmic” nature of gunfire.
At its best, the novel offers a not-so-subtle criticism of how we watch TV, and it asks a more compelling question than the one implied in the title (that is, “How can I get to know my father through TV?”): It asks, “How do I view TV?” which has become more important than my father. After all, the TV father is so much more interesting than the real father. The last chapter, “Saturday Night at the Movies,” is a TV showing of the movie “The Third Man,” with Joseph Cotten’s obsessive questioning of whom the third man is. That is what Chris discovers by the end.
This is wild and rousing stuff, with weird associative tangents, disjointed at times, but always entertaining. White does a fine job of using visual devices to make reading the book a virtual TV experience, including numerous tricks with narrative discourses and format. Sections read like TV scripts, or digress into discussions of Freud and mental illness (and quotes from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and even Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Cultural criticism can be blatant. Chris tells us, “I am not here to offer comfort for the lost years Americans have spent watching Highway Patrol, Dick Van Dyke, Lucy or even the noble M*A*S*H in syndication.” He rightly calls the old shows dinosaurs, but in his chosen role as oracle of television, he makes the dinosaurs not only walk but dance for us. We hear them roar.
