June 18–25, 1998

book quarterly

Family Viewing

Growing up under the picture tube.

reviewed by Justin Coffin

Memories of My Father Watching TV

By Curtis White

Dalkey Archive Press, 157 p., $12.50

The cover of Memories of My Father Watching TV describes it as "A Novel by Curtis White." But, it's just not that easy. This fictionalized autobiography is an expressionist rendering of the White family household and the effect television had on it during the late '50s and early '60s. The chapters are arranged around TV epi-sodes and slide between fact and fiction, narrative and expositional writing.

The scene is the TV room. The children, who sit around their near-catatonic father who's sprawled before the TV, vie for his attention or avoid it. "And the TV? It is an oracle. It is speaking to us. It has something very important to say. Tonight it is presenting… Our Shows."

But the evening's lineup of "Our Shows" is not a salutary dip in the benevolent radiation of TV. This is not Nick at Nite or the mewling of a Douglas Coup-land. It is a night overrun by mutilated renditions of Bonanza, Sea Hunt and Maverick, among others, as well as a game show scandal and a screening of The Third Man.

The boundary between the White family and lives on TV is permeable. "Dad" is a presence in every show. In the episode of Combat, for instance, the White father is a Nazi pontoon bridge that must be destroyed.

Giving new meaning to the term "psychotic episode," the long, dark night of "Our Shows" is a submersion in the rationalized violence of early television that reveals the repressed id—the slavering desire for consumption and annihilation.

As an example of a literal exhibition of the id, we pause during an episode of Highway Patrol to learn the scatological details of what the show's star, Broderick Crawford, revealed in analysis.

Some episodes read like fairy tales, or in the case of the "Manic Maverick" chapter, like a mixture of Western and Hindu myth. Maverick, glowing eerily blue on a black-and-white TV, is the Krishna, son of Vishnu and/or Ward Harper, back to save the Rocking H Ranch which Maverick apparently vomited up 800 years earlier. And then it gets weird.

Adhering to the structure of television, the narrative pauses and we go to a commercial for Open Mouth Pharmaceuticals. The commercial is really just a plea for hygiene in which a Dr. Entirety warns against the dangers of parasitic infestation. As the narrative moves back and forth between the show and the commercial breaks (a progressively more distraught and graphic Dr. En-tirety), it be-comes unclear which is the story and which is the interruption.

Parasitic infestation makes a fitting metaphor for a book about TV: a parasitic form about a parasitic force. And parasites and flesh-eaters are everywhere. They are central to the narrative, summed up nicely by Dr. Entirety himself: "'Let me put it this way, there are things out there, with their own genetic story to tell, that wish to inhabit you and live your life for you.'"

The author sees the TV burrowing into our brains, providing a night's entertainment to feed—and feed off—the desire for violence, sex and power, slowly taking over our unconscious. It is another refraction, a further suburbanizing and isolating force set out to divide and conquer us and make happy little consumers of us all.

Dad is the subdued viewer, and these stories could be seen as his own self-destructive dreams: they are what the television has told him he wants.

Beneath the absurdist tropes and gymnastic prose, Memories of My Father Watching TV is a book written out of a fury and a howling pain. It is about the splintering of America into isolated homes, all plugged into the Big Dream. Within its few pages lies a funny and disturbing description for what it is be in America at the end of the millennium.