Book review: A Wolf at the Table

Here's another bildungsroman.

Augusten Burroughs: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father



This one deals with a darker subject matter. A Wolf at the Table is a prequel of sorts to Augusten Burroughs's autobiographical Running With Scissors, and like it, this is billed as a memoir. It is the story of a young child brought up by a mother whose mental health is failing, and a psychopathic father. It's a very powerful, dark story that I can't in good faith recommend to any sensitive readers.

There's a fundamental problem with writing all fiction. If I recall correctly, it was Russian playwright Chekov who said that if a pair of pistols is seen above the mantlepiece in Act 1, they must be used in Act 3. The problem is familiar to anyone who has ever read a detective story: the murderer must be one of the people we're introduced to at the beginning of the story. This forces the narrative to be, in a sense, predictable.

Burroughs's memoir suffers from a form of this. It is so dark, so miserable, so psychotic, that the reader very quickly becomes inured to the darkness and lunacy of it all. From the beginning, all of the young protagonist's attempts to win his father's heart fail, and all the pets he has meet unfortunate ends of some kind. To be blunt, by the time he gets a guinea pig, you know it's going to end up dead. I think this is a terrible shame, because it really detracts from a well-written book, but it is its major weakness. The author paints a powerful picture of living with a psychotic father, but trivializes it by heaping misery upon misery, fear upon fear and disappointment upon disappointment until it all becomes predictable and, frankly, boring.

On the other hand, the last chapters of the book, set in the protagonist's youth and later days, seem strangely detached from the whole. It's as if they were pinned on as an afterthought, as forced closure to create a "story arc" worthy of Hollywood. They don't really seem to add anything to the story.

In between the rather formulaic recitation of family misery are excellent moments of storytelling. At times, Burroughs (an assumed name) creates a very convincing, engrossing narrative that one can't help but be immersed in. These flashes of brilliance are too few for me to really recommend this book to anyone unless the subject particularly interests them, but they're there. It's a strangely dual book: on the other hand, the power of personal experience shines through it, but on the other hand, it seems to be so rigidly welded to the conventions of storytelling, story arcs and literature in general that much of that power is wasted. This combination makes the book memorable and forgettable at the same time, which is an odd experience.

In short, A Wolf at the Table is memorable, powerful, tragic, and forgettable, conventional and trivial at the same time. Technically, I suppose that makes it a very accurate memoir of life, but at the same time, a strangely split reading experience.

My recommendation is sadly banal: if the subject of a boy growing up with a psychotic father fascinates you, give it a shot; otherwise, don't bother.