My Father's Footprints
Cooper, Rand Richards & McEnroe, Colin
My Father's Footprints Colin McEnroe Warner Books, $23.95, 198 pp. Rand Richards Cooper here's a short story by Ethan Canin in which a young man complains about how hard his father is to get to...
...Moody and mordantly funny on the air, McEnroe has a restless mind that seems never to stop turning...
...It is anything but...
...A novel his father labored endlessly over turns out to contain an encoded attempt to refute Godel's incompleteness theo-rem...
...Rand Richards Cooper here's a short story by Ethan Canin in which a young man complains about how hard his father is to get to know...
...It's an evocative glance back at how ethnic group ritual afforded an emboldening horselaugh in the face of death...
...These are men, he writes, who "didn't anticipate the lists of unspoken truths and unanswered questions that would sprout, fast as June radishes, in the space where their fathers once stood...
...coordinates afterachool tutoring p agrrw for ez'tit/ native American children...
...and so is his view of human nature...
...I've seen the type before," he says afterward...
...Years later this is confirmed by a priest who visits the dying Bob McEnroe...
...Eventually, carelessness about money put his family at risk, a semisecret alcoholism sapped his health, and mental illness culminated in a suicide attempt and lengthy institutionalization...
...WESTON JESUIT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY Rita George • Master of Theological Studies • 1997 1997 Gradwates from Weston yesuit School of Theology's Master of theological Studies Program: specialization in Catho3k-Mtlilint relations...
...A researcher at United Aircraft in Hart-ford, later an ineffectual real estate agent, Bob McEnroe dreamed of being a writer...
...the embarrassments occasioned by his father's eccentricity...
...For years he cranked out plays nonstop, and got two of them produced in New York, but further success eluded him...
...A longtime journalist, humorist, and contributor to national magazines, Colin McEnroe co-hosts a Connecticut AM radio talk show that dispenses his signature mix of manic-depressive standup comedy and left-liberal political insurrection...
...Colin McEnroe'smemoir charts his initiation into what he calls the Dead Fathers Society—that cohort of men "clobbered in their for-ties when their fathers died...
...McEnroe recalls his father regaling him with legendary Irish-American wakes of yore: one group getting so drunk, they hauled the deceased out of his casket and propped him up in a chair, placing a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other ("The whole idea," his father told him, "was to make sure the son of a bitch was really dead...
...Having repudiated his own Catholicism, Bob McEnroe accommodated his son's interest in religion by taking him around to various churches—then barging in to argue theology with the ministers...
...Commonweal 2 7 January 30, 2004...
...Bob McEnroe left a big paper trail, one that assists his son's project of getting to know him posthumously...
...I am Bob McEnroe...
...Memoirs such as this one are almost inevitably marketed as feel-good books, and indeed, My Father's Footprints comes advertised as the new Tuesdays with Morrie...
...My Father's Footprints aims high above the platitudes of dysfunction that mar much of what passes for memoir these days...
...With mixed laughter and shudders of old dread, McEnroe recounts the impact his father had on his childhood: the sudden moves caused by financial setbacks...
...Paging through his father's old date books, McEnroe fils finds descriptions of dinner alternating with ontological ruminations, pasted-in clippings about Tennessee Williams, geographical notes, and jotted facts of a Supreme Court case...
...We may expect an account like this to come to terms with Dad and emerge with a misty, warm appreciation...
...And you know why...
...My Father's Footprints provides a deeply engrossing answer...
...1994 Jesuit Volunteer Corps...
...It's an unsettling picture of an obsessive mind, crowded with junk, prone to mania and delusion, perpetually busy "assembling some kind of Grand McEnroe Unified Theory of Everything...
...My Father's Footprints is a son's searching look back at a brilliant, troubled man who never fit in—"a polymath, a voracious reader, and a grandiose dabbler with crackpot tendencies...
...Love ought to show itself in deeds more than in words...
...You don't have to get to know me," the father retorts...
...Though My Father's Footprints is anything but a political manifesto, it carries an implicit liberal, even Christian political subtext...
...Rand Richards Cooper reviews movies for Commonweal...
...Although his family could be filed under such categories as alcoholism and mental illness, McEnroe never loses sight of, and in fact continually enriches and complicates, the humanity on the page, drawing a superbly nuanced portrait of a supremely difficult—and much-missed—father...
...His father's long, gradual breakdown tinges McEnroe's teen years with insecurity, and turns him toward the shelter of books and school, so that at sixteen he is "the world's foremost six-foot-tall, 128-pound French-speaking American history expert...
...in the Dead Fathers Society he has to summon his own horse-laughs...
...St...
...1ggg(* Appointed Associate Director, Office for Ecumenical and Interreiigious Affairs, Archdioce o tcChicago...
...He secretly wanted to be a heretic...
...When his father, bewildered by Alzheimer's, tells the staff at his new SHOES TO FILL T MYERS / ©PUNCH / ROTHCO Commonweal 26 January 30, 2004 convalescent home that he's Santa Claus, and a nurse asks, "Is he joking or disoriented...
...McEnroe quips: "That's sort of the basic question I've been asking myself for thirty-five years...
...McEnroe's narrative strategy is complex, skipping among multiple time frames...
...He's that brilliant, tormented, and enigmatic kind of per-son who makes you wonder, How does someone get like this...
...Be-cause one day you're going to grow up and then you're going to be me...
...And McEnroe's father planted a lot of radishes...
...He always claimed to be an atheist," writes McEnroe, "but he was way too engaged for that...
...Sept...
...Happily—to his amusement and relief—his own son steps in to correct these brooding confusions of filial identity...
...Colin McEnroe's humor can seem flippant—the result, perhaps, of years spent as a newspaper columnist, where hyperbole, wit, and noise are Darwinian adaptations designed to lure grazing readers to your pasture...
...One fears that a book this knotty, paradoxical, and intelligent will fail to find the big audience it deserves...
...I try to be nothing like him, even though I am exactly like him," McEnroe confesses...
...Though a slender book, this is not a particularly easy read...
...McEnroe himself, however, grew up amid what might be called postethnic Irish Catholic life...
...Amid this chiaroscuro, My Father's Footprints conducts a running inquiry into fatherhood and fate...
...to deepen the commitments and legacies of love to the level of blood...
...but McEnroe comes to terms with not coming to terms...
...Tenderly McEnroe describes his father's late-life devotion to an adoptive grandson, and goes on to note the ways in which Joey, "often analytical when he doesn't trust himself to be sad," seems to take after McEnroe himself...
...I am dreamy, moody, fond of alcohol, uncomfortable in my own skin, furtive about emotion...
...This is a book that resolutely keeps dark and light together...
...Like father, like son...
...Joey is "in our line," he concludes, "the only son of an only son of an only son....I will love him with every drop of my lifeblood no matter who he is...
...Instead of resolving contradictions, he embraces them...
...When Joey asks what he means by "becoming something greater" after death, and McEnroe fumblingly answers, "Well, when we're in these bodies, we suffer from sorrow, need, guilt, hunger, pain, fear," his son interrupts: "Dad, that's your life...
...Ignatius of Loyola WESTON JESUIT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AN INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL CENTER For information please contact: Office of Admissions .Weston Jesuit School of Theology 3 Phillips Place . Cambridge, MA 02138.3495 USA . Telephone (617) 492-1960 Fax (617) 492-5833 • Admissionslnfo®wjst.edu . www.wjst.edu FINANCIAL AID IS AVAILABLE May 1999 Initiates Catholic-Muslim Education P for high school students in Chicago...
...Still, levity also helps him muster the courage to con-front loss...
...the brief exaltation of success on Broad-way...
...The book's ultimate argument for nurture over nature reflects McEnroe's faith in our ability to forge voluntary bonds as powerful as the ones we are born to...
...I'm an atheist, praise be to God...
...McEnroe's meditations on nature-versus-nurture veer between a bright agenda of hopes for his son, Joey, who is adopted, and an ominous sense of inheritance from the late Bob McEnroe...
...He seems to know something about every-thing...
...To paraphrase A. J. Liebling, McEnroe thinks broader than anyone who thinks deeper, and deeper than anyone who thinks broader...
...I am a writer...
Vol. 131 • January 2004 • No. 2
