Returning to the Past and Finding the Bogeyman Is Still There
When Augusten Burroughs wrote “Running With Scissors,” he regaled readers with hilarious tales of the domestic craziness he endured while growing up. Now in another family memoir Mr. Burroughs makes a crazy move of his own. “A Wolf at the Table” is a portrait of the author’s apparently maniacal and Augusten-hating father. Determinedly unfunny, awkwardly histrionic and sometimes anything but credible, it repudiates everything that put Mr. Burroughs on the map.
It’s a bad sign when a book’s cover graphic packs more of a wallop than the text does. But “A Wolf at the Table” startles from afar by depicting a demonic-looking red fork, its tines bent like evil claws, seeming to point menacingly at some hapless victim. Enter the baby Augusten: the author channels his frightened 1 ½-year-old self. He does this with a burst of psychodrama that seems to have been editor-proof.
“Through this pinprick hole I could see the world,” he writes about sitting in his high chair, peeking through the perforations in a saltine cracker. Well, at least he’s not writing in fragments. But by the next page he is. “The thick slippery feel of my bottle’s rubber nipple inside my mouth,” he recalls verblessly. “The shocking, sudden emptiness that fills me when it’s pulled away.”
Well, at least he’s not invoking his toddler years in the present tense. And at least he’s not displaying Joycean affectations. But a line or two later, he is: “High above me is my crib, my homebox, my goodcage, but it’s up, up, up.” And: “I am alone in the awake-pit with the terrible bright above my head.” In case the cause for this free-floating distress is not apparent, Mr. Burroughs soon fingers his culprit. “On the other side of the door,” he writes, “He is laughing.”
He may find twisted humor in little Augusten’s situation, but it’s hardly clear why. “A Wolf at the Table” is as vague as it is hyperbolic about whatever was wrong with the author’s wicked father. This book indicates that the father drank heavily and quarreled with Augusten’s mother (to the point that they separated, and the father was a mere psoriasis-plagued memory by the time of Running with Scissors"). He was away from home a lot and was none too glad to see Augusten when he got back, not even when Augusten greeted him in a homemade dog costume. Don’t even ask what the old man did to Ernie, Augusten’s beloved pet guinea pig. But beyond that, the nature of this book’s indictment is unclear.
A photograph of Mr. Burroughs’s father, accompanying a recent article in The New York Times, depicted a fierce-looking, hollow-eyed man. Unfortunately for “A Wolf at the Table” that image was much more disturbing than anything Mr. Burroughs has put on the page.
Sometimes the book reduces the child to cartoon-character indignation. (“My hatred for him nearly caused my skin to steam, and I was constantly plotting revenge for one thing or another,” he fumes about his older brother.) Some of it exaggerates the simplest details to make them sinister. (The belts in the father’s drawer are said to be “coiled like snakes.”) And some of it pumps heavily metaphoric importance into minor-sounding incidents, clumsily ratcheting up the drama of the boy’s early life. Why was he too filled with dread to eat red velvet cake at a birthday party? Can the answer have been interesting enough to warrant inclusion in this book?
Since it can’t, “A Wolf at the Table” plants the dangerous idea that Mr. Burroughs’s story is a life milked dry. “Dry” was another of his memoirs, detailing a history of substance abuse; “Sellevision” was about his experiences in the advertising business; “Magical Thinking” wasn’t about much of anything. “Possible Side Effects” described the writer’s experience of being on a book tour, something that is also mentioned in the epilogue to the new book.
Prose about book tours attests that Mr. Burroughs has exhausted his vein of autobiographical nonfiction, just as surely as the fate of Ernie (“rigid in his sludge, his feces-caked mouth open in a scream”) proved Mr. Burroughs’s father to be a lousy rodent custodian.
Once it escapes the high chair and begins casting about for material, the author’s recovered memory yields a few stories about his parents’ turbulent and doomed marriage; little Augusten’s crush on a workman (“I had to run away, because there existed the very real danger that I would run to him, leap right up into his arms, and smother him with kisses, like some icky girl”), a few phantasmagorically violent daydreams about the harm Augusten’s father might inflict; and scenes of wild, over-the-top action, written with an assonance (“the jabbing slash of his flashlight”) that bodes badly for a Burroughs move toward poetry. No less strained are this book’s efforts to animate the universe in ways that foreshadow the boy’s burgeoning sexuality: “There were cunning little birds in brazen colors that flashed about like wild thoughts and perverse impulses.”
By the time “A Wolf at the Table” reaches its foregone conclusion — that the father will die and leave his son in some mournful semblance of peace — there is a new kind of suspense in the air. It involves Mr. Burroughs’s literary future. He remains a writer with a large and loyal following, a fluent and funny storyteller whenever he actually has stories to tell. Maybe those stories needn’t be so personal. Maybe his range can expand beyond tales of dysfunction. And maybe some thoughts belong on the page more than others do. No matter how plagued he is by the abuses of the past, he needn’t have confessed here to having had an erotic dream about visiting a mass murderer on death row.
From: Books of The Times: By JANET MASLIN: May 1, 2008
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