Dad Had a Bad Day: A Q&A with Ashton Politanoff

Ashton Politanoff’s second novel, Dad Had a Bad Day, is a mind-bending foray into one father’s descent into an all-consuming obsession with tennis. Read on for an exclusive Q&A with Ashton and B&N bookseller Apoorva Kotaru on Dad Had a Bad Day.

"This book is a triumph. Impeccably, propulsively, and hilariously rendered, Politanoff writes about tennis like Barry Hannah wrote about alcohol—something swift, addictive, fun, life-giving and also totally filthy. Nobody writes like Ashton Politanoff." —Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

 

AK: My name is Apoorva Kotaru, and I’m a bookseller here at Barnes & Noble. I am so excited to talk to Ashton Politanoff, author of Dad Had a Bad Day. Ashton, thank you so much for joining us.

AP: Thank you so much for having me.

AK: Could you please get us started by giving us a brief introduction to your book?

AP: Sure. The book follows Ned, a father and a husband who’s recently been laid off and is on daddy daycare duty with his young son. He finds an old tennis racket in his garage, and after observing a young tennis player at the park and hearing the sound of the ball again, he decides he wants to resurrect his old passion for tennis. Unbeknownst to his wife, he takes out a secret credit card and decides to join his local tennis club and ends up finding his purpose again. He decides to captain a men's rec league team, and becomes completely obsessed with his old hobby.

AK: It was such a wild ride. I had a pit in my stomach for most of it. Could you go a little bit into what inspired you to write this particular story?

AP: I grew up playing tennis, played in college, and a couple of semi-pro events. I wasn't too successful at those. But I stopped playing for 13-14 years after college and picked up other things; life happened. Then I rejoined a local tennis club, and I was sitting in the jacuzzi one night and on center court, there was a doubles match underway for a tennis tournament. I remember distinctly that there was one player on the court who was probably around 18, and you could tell he was on track to play college tennis. Just a very, very good player. And just hearing the sound of the ball again made me really want to play tennis again.

I found a couple of old rackets and called some local players that I was still in touch with and started hitting at the public courts again. Eventually, I started playing in a league. I remember I had one loss early on in the season and I was really upset. I remember I had trouble sleeping that night. I woke up the next day like, "Wow, why is this bothering me so much?” I felt like there was a seed to explore there.

Although there are a lot of similarities in Ned's background and mine, I wasn't interested in writing nonfiction. I wanted to do something more literary in nature, but sort of using the noir genre as a way of unearthing my complicated relationship with tennis.

AK: The book had such a casually haunting, but sunny tone to it, which really reminded me of L.A., and that noir aspect that you mentioned really does come through. I was wondering if you could go a little bit into your process and how you went about structuring the narrative.

AP: Sure. When I started writing the book, well, it took me three tries to really start making momentum in the novel in terms of writing it. I was sort of lost. I couldn't land on the voice. And it wasn't until I did a couple of outlines of where I thought their narrative was going to go that I was able to really lock in that voice. So that's how it all started, in terms of from a craft point of view, but also I'm drawn to a lot of avant-garde work. Textually and formally, something interesting needs to be happening for me as a writer. Interjecting the letters kept me off-balance while I was writing.

AK: I was wondering, when you said you wanted that noir element, was there another work you had in mind as you were writing?

AP: I love the noir genre because of the atmosphere. I really wanted it to have the sunny L.A. vibe. I really wanted to capture that in an off-kilter way. I remember even early on, when I was writing a scene and having the shadow of a palm tree intruding on the court, little touches that help me build that world. There’s also this element where Ned is searching for a friend that disappears, a childhood friend, and that detective work was fun for me to explore without writing about an actual detective.

I worked in TV and film for a while as a prior career before becoming a professor of English. I think in terms of tonality, I was attracted to the work of Scorsese. Although it's a dark comedy in the beginning, there's a lighter touch in my book. But I would say tonally, there's a midway shift in the book, which is something that I've long admired in a lot of the Scorsese films that I love.  

When I was working on Dad Had a Bad Day, the only book I was reading at the time was Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea.

In terms of works that influenced me, not so much genre-wise, but Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, formally, and there are these bursts, a lot of passages that are just more bursts rather than long-winded chapters. That definitely was an influence for me. The Stories of John Cheever was a big influence in terms of his writing about masculinity that appeals to me. And there's a whimsical quality to some of his writing, too, that I really enjoy.

AK: How did writing this compare to your previous book, You'll Like it Here?  I know a lot of that you had a lot of archival images and texts embedded in that book, and I was curious how the writing process was different for you this time around.

AP: In that sense, I really needed to find that tone and a rhythm that felt propulsive to me when I was writing. I wrote the book quickly over a few months— I would write every single day for a couple of hours. When I got towards the end, it was like a fever dream.

AK: It's funny, the reading experience did echo that since the sense of place was so strong, and it totally felt like a fever dream by the end. What are you reading now, and what are you excited about?

AP: I really enjoyed Tana French’s The Searcher. I hadn't read her work before. It's more of a literary mystery, I would say. Really great language, well-crafted characters. I really liked the pacing. It felt like a western almost building to something. Lately, though, I've been reading a lot of biographies of surfboard shapers in the South Bay, one about Dale Velzy, another one about Mickey Munoz, partly because that's another hobby of mine, surfing, and it's such a huge part of the South Bay, especially the history of the craftsmanship. My next book is going to revolve around surfing and surfboard shapers, so I'm just deep in the research phase, and have been working on this for a while.

AK: Thank you. This has been really great. I'm so excited about your next book and I'll be looking out for it. Thank you so much for coming.

AP: That's cool. I'm really honored and grateful, and thanks again for these amazing, thoughtful questions. It was really nice talking to you today.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.