Father of the Rain

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More About This Book

Overview

Winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Lily King’s masterful third novel received glowing critical praise upon its initial publication and is poised to make an even bigger splash in paperback.

Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who’s beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when they divorce, and Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed, the chasm quickly widens and Daley is stretched thinly across it.

As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father’s fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own life—until he hits rock bottom. Lured home by the dream of getting her father sober, Daley risks everything she’s found beyond him, including her new love, Jonathan, in an attempt to repair a trust broken years ago.

Editorial Reviews

Liesl Schillinger
King is a beautiful writer, with equally strong gifts for dialogue and internal monologue. Silently or aloud, her characters betray the inner tumult they conceal as they try to keep themselves together, wanting others to see them as whole. Whether they're children, teenagers or adults in their 40s, 50s and older, they demonstrate through their confusions that what we like to call coming-of-age is a process that doesn't always end. Like people in real life, King's characters alter their behavior each time they interact with someone different—parent, sibling, friend, lover, student, boss—exposing the protean nature of personality. Context controls character.
—The New York Times
Ron Charles
Surprising and wise…From the first page, we're caught in the tangled lines of affection and menace that will hold Daley in thrall to her father for the rest of her life…It's an absorbing, insightful story written in cool, polished prose right to the last conflicted line.
—The Washington Post
More Reviews (4) Fewer Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Whiting Award-winner King (The English Teacher) captures with easy strokes the bold and dangerous personalities lurking inside the mundane frame of domestic drama. Her third novel, narrated by the clear-eyed daughter of an alcoholic father, follows their evolving relationship. The opening scene-- with 11-year-old Daley and her father wreaking delirious havoc by streaking naked at a martini-fueled pool party in the sleepy Boston suburbs-- brims with Daley's love for her father and desire for connection with him, but is also tinged with the repercussions of a charismatic man divorced from the role of parenthood, unlike Daley's socially responsible mother. Daley watches her father's continued degradation, but after years of self-imposed cultural and emotional distance from him--she flourishes at Berkeley and builds a loving, stable relationship with an African-American man she knows her Waspish father will despise--she eventually returns to her father's side after he is no longer capable of living alone. While Daley's perfect romance with her strapping, intelligent suitor is simplistic though sensual, King's latest is original and deftly drawn, the work of a master psychological portraitist. (July)
Booklist
A riveting portrait of a father so spectacularly dysfunctional that he rivals Alfred Lambert, in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. . . . Readers will be thoroughly taken by King's exceptionally fluid prose and razor-sharp depiction of the East Coast country-club set.
Library Journal
This powerful family study from King (The English Teacher) begins in the 1970s, when 11-year-old Daley endures the cruel and wildly sexualized behavior of her boorish, alcoholic father while trying to protect her mother. Daley has learned early how to walk the tightrope of misery that stretches between her battling divorcing parents. Fast-forward to Daley as a 29-year-old adult on the brink of living her dream: a professorship at Berkeley and a life with her beloved Jonathan. When her brother calls her home, expecting her to care for her father, who is drowning in the bottle when his second marriage implodes, Daley is faced with impossible choices: save herself or stay with her father while he settles into his shaky sobriety. VERDICT Daley is so beautifully portrayed that readers will clench their fists and protectively rail against her actions, only to be taken breathtakingly by surprise when her complicated, determined strength to do the right thing for both her father and herself replaces her losses with a wondrous resolution. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/10.]—Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
The Barnes & Noble Review

You know you're in for some heavy weather when a novel takes its title from the Book of Job: "Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?" Lily King's third novel, Father of the Rain, is a moving, impeccably written drama about a daughter's attachment to a destructive but often disarmingly charming father, and how that bond is pelted by the storms of divorce and alcoholism.

We meet her narrator, Daley Amory, in 1974, on her way back from buying a puppy, an eleventh birthday surprise from her father. King packs phenomenal depth into this tightly composed opening scene. Daley's description of her father singing in the car puts us on immediate notice how closely, vividly observed her tale will be: "He has a low voice scraped out by cigarettes and all the yelling he does." Against her father's wishes, Daley rejects a full-breed Newfoundland in favor of the ugliest mutt in the shop, a choice Gardiner Amory accepts only reluctantly: "'Well, it's her birthday,' he said slowly, with all the bitterness of a boy whose birthday it was not." We soon learn the reason for Daley's odd choice: her mother has told her, confidentially, that she is leaving her father the next day and hopes Daley will go with her. With remarkable maturity, Daley realizes that a beautiful dog "would make leaving even harder."

So, from page one, we are pulled into this vulnerable child's dilemma: a tug-of-war between her parents, and her inability to please them both at once. It's an old story, but King manages to keep it fresh with resonant details, from Gardiner's oft repeated, elitist twist on a refrain from Camelot, "I wonder what the poor people are doing today," to another, all-too-frequent twist: "cracking the paper on a new bottle of vodka."

King's two previous novels also involve the lasting repercussions of adolescent upheaval. The Pleasing Hour (1999) concerns a remarkably mature 17-year-old American who flees to Paris to work as an au pair after bearing a child for her sister, having failed to anticipate the distress this altruistic act would cause her. In The English Teacher (2005), a single mother, the eponymous teacher at an exclusive coastal New England boarding school, is haunted by a repressed trauma from her teens when she finally lets down her guard sixteen years later.

Father of the Rain covers 34 years, bookended by the summer of Richard Nixon's resignation and President Obama's election in 2008. The political markers are significant, spanning an age of cynical disenchantment with the Establishment to an augury of unexpected hope. The novel is set in an affluent East Coast seaside town, where the tennis club requires women to wear not just whites, but skirts. Daley attends an elite private school, and her father's life revolves around his dogs, his tennis game, his martinis, his swimming pool, his step-families, and his "New England WASP Museum" of a home. A Harvard-educated broker, Gardiner is racist, anti-Semitic, and deeply sexist. He blames his son's and daughter's liberalism and slovenly dress on their mother, whom he never forgives for leaving him.

King is skilled at zeroing in on the nitty-gritty dynamics of this intense father-daughter relationship, but it is her sympathetic ancillary characters and two strategic jumps in her narrative that add texture and save it from claustrophobia. These 18- and 15-year hiatuses, effectively accounted for with broad strokes, show how Daley gets on with her life by pulling away from her father's corrosive orbit. The breaks also serve to underscore how, just as a single drink is enough to send a recovered alcoholic reeling, an urgent phone call is enough to upset Daley's carefully constructed world and send her plunging back into the filial tangle.

The prose in Father of the Rain never soars to the heights of King's rose-tinged descriptions of Paris in The Pleasing Hour; what's on display here is her ability to capture with visceral complexity a primal yearning to be treated with care. When Daley finally achieves the distance to wonder about her father, "Was he only ever capable of feeling his own needs, his own pain?" the question highlights King's most impressive accomplishment in this beautifully structured story: she has us feeling for all of her characters.

--Heller McAlpin

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780802145345
  • Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  • Publication date: 5/10/2011
  • Pages: 368
  • Sales rank: 186,411
  • Product dimensions: 8.06 (w) x 5.50 (h) x 0.98 (d)

Meet the Author

Lily King

Lily King’s first novel, The Pleasing Hour won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second book, The English Teacher, was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award.

Lily is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Ploughshares and Glimmer Train, as well as in several anthologies. She lives with her family in Maine.

Visit Lily's website at lilykingbooks.com

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 41 )

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 41 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted July 9, 2010

    Father of The Rain

    Very well written.inspirational...makes one think and understand a father and daughter relationship..especially those who have been surrounded by alcholics in their life.a personal insightful journey that hits closer to home than many of us want to admit...I love how the book is divided into the different eras of Daylee's life....We understand so much in the conclusion and how Daylee's life with her parents has created a strong woman, mother, wife and daughter...she's a giver and her father is a giver in his own world...Daylee and her brother, Garvey, carry the bits of love they do remember and tie their hearts to those strings to propel them into functional adult lives.
    I loved it...

    4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted March 25, 2012

    Well Written

    Easy to read, grabs you quickly, charachters are well defined
    good choice for book club

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted March 3, 2012

    more from this reviewer

    LOVED THIS BOOK -- HIGHLY RECOMMEND

    I LOVED THIS BOOK, THE ENDING DID NOT DISAPPOINT ME. A DIVORCE, EVEN A FRIENDLY ONE HURTS THE FAMILY AND THE CHILDREN ALWAYS FEEL TORN BETWEEN BOTH PARENTS. DALEY'S LOYALTY TOWARDS HER FATHER WAS HEARTBREAKING, A FATHER IS ALWAYS A LITTLE GIRLS HERO.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted February 25, 2011

    Fabulous and Awesome!

    One of the best books I've read this year, It will have you wanting more, you will love this story of a daughters unconditional love for her father!

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted February 16, 2011

    Recommended

    A good read.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 19, 2010

    Wonderful

    Beautifully written, heartbreaking novel

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted November 19, 2010

    One of the Best I've Read This Year.

    This book focuses on the relationship of a Daughter and her Father...and had me reflecting on how I was raised - and how I raised my children. The main character had me so in love with her - as a young girl I wanted to wrap my arms around her and protect her; as a young woman I wanted to set her free from her emotional bonds to an abusive father. Great read from start to finish...you wont be dissappointed.

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