The stories in Marcus Pactor's Begat Who Begat Who Begat (Astrophil Press) situate themselves in the domain of domestic realism--family responsibility, particularly on the father's part, underscored by the book's title--but they are realistic only in their underlying emotional fidelity to the complications and anxieties induced in both parents and children by ordinary family life. They are fantasias of familial unease, transformations of recognizable family dramas into askew parables of parental confusion. Although there is certainly a palpable sense of urgency connected to the various characters' attempts to cope with the attendant obligations of their circumstances, ultimately these situations seem to serve more as the sources of the stories' narrative flights of fancy and formal variations than of novel insights into prevailing family dynamics.
The fathers in these stories are engaged in the most mundane sort of fatherly activities: installing toilets, mowing lawns, sorting screws in the garage. But the toilet somehow starts flushing up toys, jewelry, and other favors, the lawn mower begins speaking to its rider, and the screws, it turns out, are for a box inside of which the narrator is attempting to preserve the family's dead dachshund. Several of the fathers construct elaborate defenses against thinking directly about their parental fears. One engages in a disquisition on artificial intelligence (especially android bodies) as a way of displacing his anxiety about his daughter's budding sexuality. Another thinks constantly about food as a distraction from thinking about the loss of his family through a divorce. One is obsessed with bugs and other vermin after moving in to a new home, which seems a manifestation of insecurity in his masculinity (his wife appears to be the sexual aggressor in the relationship, and his neighbor, Dave, treats his lack of household handiness with some condescension). Some such implicit apprehension, in fact, seems to beset most of the protagonists in Begat, which Pactor adeptly exploits throughout the book for its comic effects.
Quite a few of the stories conspicuously employ unconventional structures and adventurous formal devices, although a focus on family dynamics and paternal equivocation remains prominent. "Archeology of Dad"--in this case recounted by the son about the father--departs from a present-day setting and relates the story of the narrator's father, a lesser-known neoconservative writer and intellectual of the Reagan-Bush era. The story of the father's rise and fall from grace as an influence at the Reagan White House is punctuated with textual "holes," which the narrator son uses to, in effect, spy on the otherwise unspoken "backstory" of the recollected narrative he is assembling. In "My Assets," a college-age daughter takes stock of her life by toting up her "assets" while reading her Econ 101 textbook. In an equally indirect manner, a father in "Do the Fish" considers his own rather confounding circumstances: his daughter has forsaken him for the mothering of a trans woman, Olive, who until recently had been the father's lover. The story is coaxed out of the father as responses to a questionnaire of sorts, although it remains uncertain just who is directing him to respond--quite likely himself. In a story that combines the graphical insertions of "Archeology of Dad" with the question-answer format of "Do the Fish," "Remainder" presents a dialogue between two men, Q and P, who discuss "American daughters" (as well as their recently deceased neighbor) in a less than fatherly way.
The father in "Sponsors" is also somewhat less than fatherly. "While his daughter was out on a date," it begins, "Berg went to her apartment, slept with her roommate, and left with his head shaved to skin." We don't really get much in the way of follow-up to Berg's introductory transgression, as the story depicts his generally aimless activities in its wake--related by a friend, who by the end of the story actually usurps attention away from Berg to his own concerns. "More Fish than Man" is not the only story in the book to hint at same-sex attraction on the father character's part (in one story, more than just a hint), in this case seeming to directly link it to the doubts about the performance of masculinity expressed to a greater or lesser degree in numerous stories in Begat. The final story in the book, "Known and Unknown Records of Kip Winger," appropriately enough recapitulates some of the more prominent motifs employed throughout Begat Who Begat Who Begat: a protagonist uncertain about his masculine libido in contrast to his more sexually adventurous wife, a problematic relationship between the protagonist and his own father, a father anxious about his own parenting skills. At the story's conclusion. the protagonist (here named Bergen) envisions three scenarios for his future, in each of which his wife leaves him. "He understood that Eva would leave no matter [how much he endeavored to keep the marriage intact]", leaving perhaps a final, sobering impression of the fragility of family.
By the time we have reached this concluding story and its concluding flourish, the book's title has come into clearer focus: the biblical chronicles of family lineage serve as elemental testimony to the ancient human imperative to create families, an imperative that has had as a secondary effect the creation of literature to register the influence of family life on human experience. Marcus Pactor's book both exemplifies the perennial relevance of stories about familial complications and demonstrates that such stories can be told in inventive and unexpected ways.
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