Vancouver Sun

Grady novel examines a relationsh­ip in ruins

Grady's new novel examines a father-daughter relationsh­ip in ruins

- JAMIE PORTMAN

I think that the relationsh­ip between humans is what art is all about. Because we keep getting our relationsh­ips wrong, we need to keep thinking about them and how they're meant to work ... Wayne Grady

“She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still.”

You encounter these lines of verse by William Butler Yeats at a crucial turning point in Wayne Grady's new novel, The Good Father. They come from one of the Irish master's great poems, and for Grady they help explain his reasons for embarking on this powerful story about a tortured relationsh­ip between father and child.

“In his poem A Prayer For My Daughter, Yeats is praying that no matter how many terrible things are going to happen, and they will, that she will one day find happiness,” Grady says. In the present novel, that is the hope of fumbling, well-meaning Harry Bowes even as he seems incapable of saving his estranged daughter Daphne from a spiral into self-destructio­n.

“What I wanted was to deliver an honest and accurate portrayal of a father-daughter relationsh­ip that has gone off the rails.” Grady is speaking from Kingston, Ont., where he and his wife, fellow writer Merilyn Simonds, have lived for many years. The new book reflects his continuing interest in family dynamics — “in how families work.”

With his two previous novels, the award-winning Emancipati­on Day and Up From Freedom, Grady was reaching into his own family history and his discovery in adulthood of a Black ancestry. “But this a contempora­ry novel,” he says. “It is totally a work of the imaginatio­n.”

Still, when it comes to Grady's vision as a writer, the book is inextricab­ly linked to its two critically acclaimed predecesso­rs. For him, personal relationsh­ips are perhaps the most important thing one can write about.

“I think that the relationsh­ip between humans is what art is all about,” he says. “Because we keep getting our relationsh­ips wrong, we need to keep thinking about them and how they're meant to work — and how we can make them better.”

That's the ultimate challenge faced in the novel by the loving but ineffectua­l Harry and the angry, alienated Daphne. And the odds against their reconcilia­tion seem dangerousl­y high. She's in Vancouver — ostensibly in university but in reality a coke-snorting travesty of her former self, caught up in disastrous relationsh­ips and trapped in what seems to be a determined downward path. Meanwhile back in Toronto, Harry, as much of a procrastin­ator as ever, dithers endlessly about what to do — until, dangerousl­y late, he makes the effort.

The Good Father is ultimately a character study — its focus on a father and daughter and their often conflictin­g perspectiv­es on what has brought them to such a precarious place. There is, of course, a starting point to all this, and it happens in a small Ontario community when Daphne is a bright, sensitive 10-year-old whose father one day tells her to take care of her mother before leaving the family home for good.

Even though father and daughter continue to see each other in the years ahead, Daphne's festering sense of abandonmen­t does not cease. And even when she's going through rehab 10 years later, resentfull­y occupying a basement suite in her father's home, it's still touch and go as to what will happen to her.

Crucially, however, she is allowing her emotional turmoil to pour out in a journal she's started keeping on the advice of her therapist.

Daphne's account of her descent into hell has an emotional rawness and documentar­y immediacy so lacerating that you wonder how Grady, 73, managed to get into this young woman's skull so persuasive­ly.

“I have two daughters, but neither of them is anywhere near Daphne,” he says cheerfully. But in writing about this fictional character, he did draw on emotional fears he believes most parents share.

“They imagine that the worst thing that can possibly happen to their child has happened,” he says. It may be kidnapping, a terrible illness or, in Daphne's case, drugs.

“I don't think I went too far here,” Grady says. “I think one of the things you do as a novelist is to push things to that ultimate crisis moment in order to find out how your characters will behave in crisis.”

Grady began his career as a writer of non-fiction, much of it dealing with natural history, be it the life of a tree or the era of the dinosaur. “I see my career as one of gradually writing my way toward writing fiction,” he says, citing the narrative techniques he can apply to his non-fiction output. Now with his third novel in the shops, he's found a particular pleasure in exploring the subtleties and contradict­ions of character.

Grady's working title for the book was The Catastroph­e because at the time he felt it summed up the essence of a parent seemingly incapable of acting decisively at critical times, his innate defeatism inviting him to always expect the worst. But that early title didn't do justice to the complexity of the troubled human being he had created.

“Harry doesn't know how to be a good person,” Grady says. “He doesn't know what he has to do. He has good intentions, but the things that he too often does have a negative effect on the people he loves, the people he thinks he's benefiting. Yet he certainly wants to be a good father and certainly wants to think of himself as a good father — and he wants Daphne to think of him as a good father. So the book's current title is not ironic. I think by the end of the novel Daphne has come to think of him as a `good' father.”

But the question lingers. What does this mean? What constitute­s a good father?

Grady is still pondering this question. Meanwhile, he knows what he wants readers to take away from this book.

“I hope that people will understand that both Daphne and Harry love each other and that what they're really trying to do is find a way for that love to flower,” he says. “I don't want to sound soppy about it, but that's what I think.”

 ?? GERRY KINGSLEY ?? Wayne Grady's working title for his new novel was The Catastroph­e. But as he proceeded writing it, he realized the father-daughter relationsh­ip at its heart needed a title with a more optimistic tone.
GERRY KINGSLEY Wayne Grady's working title for his new novel was The Catastroph­e. But as he proceeded writing it, he realized the father-daughter relationsh­ip at its heart needed a title with a more optimistic tone.
 ?? ?? The Good Father Wayne Grady Doubleday
The Good Father Wayne Grady Doubleday

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