New Yorker Fiction Review #311: "Hi Daddy" by Matthew Klam
Normally I don't love "domestic" stories that take place all within the context of some character's otherwise unremarkable -- usually white, suburban, and upper middle class, for some reason -- family life or day to day life. I do not deny that domestic life can be filled with drama, struggle, conflict, and all the highs and lows of the human experience. I just feel as though its too easy to look around you and try to make fiction out of what you see. I do realize there is a word for this: autofiction.
I partly blame it on Ernest Hemingway's perhaps most famous (and in many ways poisonous) piece of writing advice: "Write what you know." Hemingway and others of his time are also famous for writing stories -- and most importantly, having success writing stories -- about his himself and his friends sitting around drinking and talking, seemingly giving every subsequent generation of writers license to just write about whatever they were doing and call it a story.
Look, not every story has to have man-eating sharks or drug-dealing former school teachers in it. But sometimes a man gets fed up of reading these kinds of "kitchen table" stories about people taking their kids to soccer practice or trying to catch-out their partner who might be having an affair, but actually is not. All that is to say, I did not have high hopes for this story.
However...I ended up truly enjoying this piece.
The main character is a middle-aged suburban white man, happily married (or at least not unhappily), who is facing the loss of two important people in his life: his father, due to dementia and old age, and his teenaged daughter, due to young adulthood and freedom.
I do not have kids. But I did have a father who I watched go through a rapidly-progressing illness that ended with his death. Much like the character in this story, I watched as a once powerful, almost larger-than-life man who watched over and loomed over me my whole life, succumbed to weakness and then departed. Something a lot of people have to go through. Which is why these types of domestic stories -- at their best -- can actually be really touching to read.
The following passage stuck with me:
"As I watched him, a terrible energy, that menacing strength he'd had all his life, coursed through me. I could imagine things: dropping him like a stone to the bottom of the ocean, or lifting him gently and carrying him to bed. My desperation to please him--or my need to get along with him, or to get away from him--had formed me, but now I was in charge."
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