The Winter Father by Andre Dubus

The Winter Father is told in the third person using only Peter Jackman's point of view. In my continued examination of stories that limit point of view to one character, this serves as a good example. I've read it a few times and the relationship of Peter with the children, the tension and love and that become exaggerated in divorce continue to stay with me.

When I first read The Winter Father, I thought it was the story of a divorced man trying to maintain a relationship with his children. But on a second closer reading, I realized that the story is really about Peter's relationship with himself as a father. Dubus writes this entirely in Peter's head. There is very little dialog, just sprinkles between lengthy passages spent with Peter. Because of this choice in narration, the story moves quickly over time. Also because of this the reader's view of the divorce, of the children, of Peter's new lover, of his ex-wife are limited to Peter's view of them. You are also limited to Peter's view of himself. So in this story, Dubus has created the claustrophobia of being an individual in a complex situation.

Is that good? Not sure. It serves to magnify his concern about his relationship with the kids, it makes that the focus. The divorce, the adultery, the fighting, his new relationship are all backdrop to his anxiety about being a divorced father.

"Not for Peter; the sky was grey, the time was grey, dark was coming, and all at once he felt utterly without will; all the strength he had drawn on to be with his children left him like one long spurt of arterial blood: all his time with his children was grey, with night coming; it would always be; nothing would change: like three people cursed in an old myth they would forever be thirty-three and eight and six, in this car on slick or salted roads, going from one place to another. He disapproved of but understood those divorced fathers who fled to live in a different pain far away. Beneath his despair, he saw himself and his children sledding under a lovely blue sky, heard them laughing in movies, watching in awe like love a circling blue shark in the aquarium's tank; but these seemed beyond recapture."

This passage is a good sample of the writing. Dubus uses long rambling sentences, broken up by semicolons, colons and commas to create the sensation of constant thought. This passage moves across thought quickly and without depth, but manages to give the reader a very vivid sense of Peter. And The Winter Father runs throughout in this. So from a close third person use where the author is constructing the inner world of the character this really works. And that is something that I'm striving for. But I'm not sure what the "story" of the Winter Father is, other than that account. Is Peter redeemed from his adulterous acts that resulted in the divorce? Not sure. Is his relationship with his children better than it was because they have more time together to "do" things? Not sure. No insight into the fullness of the story for me as reader means exactly that. No insight. Would it be a better story with that insight? Not sure. But the story does leave me, as reader, with those questions.