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DEMANDING DADS
LIKE so many, I am anxious to visit my parents — not least because I am worried my father might drive my lonely mother loopy before their lockdown ends.
It is not his fault: my father has Alzheimer’s but is, thankfully, still well enough to be at home with my mother as his carer. Despite watching the news obsessively and reading a newspaper from front-to-back each day, initially he kept on forgetting about Covid-19 (which many might regard as a blessing).
Out for a walk, he took umbrage when a wheelchair-bound man he was attempting to have a friendly chat with kept backing away from him. ‘Met the rudest old bu **** r,’ he declared disgustedly, on his return.
On Thursday evenings, when their street claps for NHS workers, he at first wondered hopefully if it was Hogmanay and whether they should invite neighbours in for a dram.
Always housework-shy (I’ve never seen him vacuum, tidy or deal with any laundry), his suggested solution to my mother’s exhaustion is that they eat out — which they cannot.
In the opening chapter of Joanna Trollope’s captivating recent novel Mum & Dad, the stubborn Gus Beacham’s stroke causes his family to reassess their current situation.
In the early 1990s, Gus and Monica moved to a vineyard in Spain, leaving behind two children at boarding schools, raising the youngest abroad. Now Gus has faltered, should they stay or go? And if they stay, who should succeed Gus?
Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss, by Rajeev Balasubramanyam, sees a peevish intellectual experiencing a late-life crisis. Upset after being overlooked for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics, the professor collides with a bicycle in Cambridge. A sabbatical is prescribed, so he heads to California to reconnect with his children … and happiness.
There is no redemption offered for Victor Tuchman, the sadistic patriarch of Jami Attenberg’s recent All This Could Be Yours. His stroke is a crisis, but also a pent-up relief for his family. It can be exhausting looking after demanding people, but the good ones are worth it.