The Writer in the Family

One night, when I was 16 years old, my father surprised me with a knock on my bedroom door. He lingered in the hallway a moment, staring down at a worn paperback as he turned it over in his hands, before he stepped into the room and presented it to me. “Here, I thought you might like this,” he said. I saw the words Loon Lake printed on the book’s front cover. The author—E. L. Doctorow—was no one I’d heard of, though the name certainly sounded like that of a writer. “The young man reminds me of you,” my father said. “The narrator, there’s something about him that makes me think of you.” He shrugged, perhaps a little embarrassed, and allowed me to accept or reject the offer.

Of course I accepted it. This was a rare, startling flash of intimacy from my father. He was a cardiologist who spent long hours at the hospital and routinely missed my Little League games and wrestling matches. The fact that he had considered me enough to make such a comparison—even to a fictional character—was an acknowledgment I found deeply moving.

No matter that my life barely resembled that of Loon Lake’s protagonist, Joe of Paterson. Joe is a hardscrabble young man who cheats, fights, cons a living, flees his New Jersey home for a brief stint in New York City, then finds his way to an industrialist’s secluded resort in the Adirondacks. The setting is one of beautiful women, gangsters, and forlorn poets. It is also a place where Joe’s dreams begin to merge with his reality. Though Loon Lake doesn’t dwell very long in Manhattan, Doctorow’s writing about the city still lingers for me. Joe describes New York before glass-and-steel high-rises dominated its skyline: “It had size it had magnitude, it gave life magnitude it was one of the great cities of the world. And it went on, it was colossal, miles of streets of grand famous stores and miles of streetcar tracks, great ships bassoing in the harbor and gulls gliding lazily over the docks.”

My father may have seen me in this character, but I saw just as much of my dad in him. My father had no greater passion—and showed no quicker nostalgia—than for the New York City of his childhood. In moments only semi-related, his mind would hook onto some totem of his youthful days, and next thing, he’d be recounting stories about the city’s elevated subway lines, its former baseball players, which movies he’d seen in which movie houses, which famous buildings and landmarks he’d visited—and exactly how old he’d been on each occasion. Animated by memory, his words would take on a stream of consciousness that matched both the tone and the enthusiasm of Doctorow’s protagonist.

I found Loon Lake to be a stirring novel, albeit with several bumps along the way. The book shifts point of view relentlessly, offers cryptic flashbacks, even contains long passages of verse. And yet the story always circles back to Joe of Paterson, the resilient young man who bears himself—by wit and instinct—through an increasingly suspenseful plot. After finishing the novel, I would hurry through several more of Doctorow’s books over the next few years: Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, World’s Fair, Welcome to Hard Times, The Waterworks, and Lives of the Poets. It was in this last book—which contains a novella and six short stories—that I read what would become my favorite work of short fiction, “The Writer in the Family.”

The story takes place in 1950s New York, where a teenage boy (coincidentally named Jonathan) has recently lost his father, Jack. To spare his grandmother the tragic news, Jonathan’s Aunt Frances makes up a story about Jack’s family moving to Arizona, and she enlists her nephew to write letters describing their new life in the desert. Jonathan obliges her. He talks about the unexpected beauty of the barren landscape, the great health benefits of the dry air, and the bright future he sees for himself—all in the voice of his deceased father. The authenticity moves his aunt to tears. “You’re so right, he loved to go places, he loved life, he loved everything,” she exclaims by telephone.

Each time I read that passage, I tear up as well. Part of this is due to Aunt Frances’s reaction, which makes it forgivable—or nearly forgivable—that she would demand her nephew write such a letter in the first place. But the real clincher is that Jonathan, still mourning with the rest of his family, somehow pulls it off. Jonathan looks back on Jack’s life in New York City—from his exploration of old neighborhoods to his exciting discoveries of   “ships’ chandlers” and “exotic foreign vegetables”—and out of these memories constructs a living portrait on the page. Long before I’d ever read Doctorow’s story, I had already anticipated a similar role for myself, imagining a day when I would sift through my father’s past, arrange his life into a meaningful narrative, and try to perpetuate his voice after he was gone.

By the time I read that story, I’d already formed a strong connection to the author. Doctorow provided a point of contact between me and my father, an attachment made deeper by the many similarities they shared. These included New York City childhoods at roughly the same time (Doctorow was born in 1931, my father in 1936); families that consisted, at least in part, of Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side; a public education in the outer boroughs (Bronx High School of Science and Forest Hills High School, respectively); and—encapsulating all of the above—an abiding interest in the history and lore of New York. This last point was evident in much of Doctorow’s writing, which portrays a romantic sweep of the city in an era that bleeds into my father’s own awakening there.