Dad

...But even if you can stomach an aging hipster who tells you "I think maybe I'll try getting [Dad] into meditation or even Yoga," contrivances make the tale he narrates indigestible...

...Like other tales of obsession, Birdy demands a leap of faith into the mania of the hero...

...chicken and hailing individualism with J. L. Seagullian profundity...

...The bombshell leaves Dad a catatonic...

...It's a shame wasting it on young people...

...He must take care of his father, a retired factory worker who has become disoriented by the collapse of his domineering wife...

...Since all of Wharton's doctors are self-important icebergs-except the Laingian gerontologist, of course-Dad's surgeon scorns advice to withhold the diagnosis from his fragile patient...

...Dad takes up jogging, caressing Mom in public and blitzing her at night, and smoking grass with hippies in Santa Monica...

...Wharton putters with aging, father-son love, generation gaps, and the Middle American Family...

...I'll think the world has changed, is changing faster, that it's becoming less enjoyable . . . On the other hand, I must learn to take advantage of being old...

...these are John's scintillating conclusions after all he's been through: Each morning, I'll wake older...

...Mom gets better, but then Dad needs surgery for a tumor...

...Birdy, at least, reached for the moon and did not look back...

...It is something other than prudery that makes you squirm when a novel's hero mates with a curvaceous canary named Perta, squats on the eggs, and warbles "Become now,/Tap through the shell/Of being and taste the/Soft air of your beginning...

...I'd hate to have you be a twentieth-century dilettante...

...is so laid back that the generational and square-hippie tensions are sanitized from the start...

...I can cope with mere Communists-Russian, Chinese, or Cuban - the Nazis, the Calvinists, the Baptists, the Catholics or the KKK, any ordinary group of dogmatists, but the real enemy, for me, the dangerous ones, are the leisured, advantaged dilettantes who have dominated and clogged the machinery of creativity and invention for centuries...

...In a Pennsylvania motel, however, John delivers a historic speech to his kid: There are so many pressures to "take it easy," "cool it," "be groovy...

...Dad dallies with some weighty topics, then rambles all over the Californian clichescape, with John-the-artist preaching that plants have feelings, hippies "can be a reminder of how humans are meant to be," and natural childbirth would cure many of our hangups...

...Then one morning Dad awakens, as if kissed by a princess, as "the true John Tremont [Sr.]," the affectionate, upfront free spirit he was never allowed to be...

...But Tremont Sr., no matter how conscientiously he remembers to say ' 'niggers," is such a sweet old man and Tremont Jr...

...But beneath the gritty veneer-"the smell of age: old sweat, constipation and dried urine"- Dad is a clumsy, half-baked novel that exploits the same fantasypop psychology formula as Birdy...

...With Dad, the pseudonymous Wharton moves from flying to dying and once again confronts his subject with graphic intensity...

...Nor is there any literary device-except self-parody-that can justify dialogue the likes of Dad's droolings on dope: They ought to give this to all old folks, Johnny...

...John is living and painting in France when news of his mother's heart attack brings him back to his boyhood home in Los Angeles...

...For the leaden-spirited readers whom Birdy left on the ground, the novel is a trite celebration of madness-as-coping a la R. D. Laing, soaring with the wing-power of a Eric Goldstein is a writer living in New York City...

...If you think that's cute, Dad also turns out to be a "successful schizophrenic": For 30 years, he reveals, he has been secretly nodding out to an idyllic fantasy life in Cape May, New Jersey, complete with farm and family...

...My measuring systems will be caught in the quantum squeeze...

...I've been telling them here how they're squandering their lives away sitting inside smoking, doing nothing, with the whole world out there...

...Putting such prose into the mouth of a fictional character does not excuse it...

...For the first time since childhood, I can know something of freedom, freedom to be myself . . . . . . And I hope I can consider something of death, have some insights into its seeming abruptness, irrevocability, see it as the source, the reason for life as we know it...

...Wharton intends an element of comic fantasy in Dad's second flower childhood and in his dreamy "alternate coping system,'' but it mixes not at all with what precedes or follows...

...Birdy, which won the 1979 American Book Awards prize for best first novel, concerns a bird-obsessed teenager who is a canary in his fantasy life...

...The author of Dad hopes to communicate his themes through the observation of the Tremonts' final weeks together, paying only minimal attention to their pasts...

...If you want to know the tenor of this novel, read its final two pages...

...In Cape May, New Jersey...

...I shall spare details of the crosscountry drive John makes with his restless dropout son, which lamely counterpoints the generation gap platitudes of the main plot...

...I can drop out of the chase for dominance, women, work, power, status...

...But it certainly is nice for an old geezer like me...

...Dad is narrated mostly by John Tremont Jr., a 52-year-old artist as inarticulate as he is groovy...

...When Dad's stint as counterculture sage is squeezed of its last drop of didactic treacle, Wharton shortcir-cuits him again, no less plausibly than he resurrected him before, and Dad expires a few days later...

...Jake tries to nurse Dad at home but the task is hopeless and Dad goes back to the hospital...

...Where was William Wharton during this sermon...

...To me, that's the enemy...

...Unfortunately, the flaccid voice of his main narrator is not up to the task...