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Summary
Summary
From the bestselling author of The Girls comes a "brilliant" ( The New York Times ) story collection exploring the dark corners of human experience.
" Daddy 's ten masterful, provocative stories confirm that Cline is a staggering talent."-- Esquire
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
An absentee father collects his son from boarding school after a shocking act of violence. A nanny to a celebrity family hides out in Laurel Canyon in the aftermath of a tabloid scandal. A young woman sells her underwear to strangers. A notorious guest arrives at a placid, not-quite rehab in the Southwest.
In ten remarkable stories, Emma Cline portrays moments when the ordinary is disturbed, when daily life buckles, revealing the perversity and violence pulsing under the surface. She explores characters navigating the edge, the limits of themselves and those around them: power dynamics in families, in relationships, the distance between their true and false selves. They want connection, but what they provoke is often closer to self-sabotage. What are the costs of one's choices? Of the moments when we act, or fail to act? These complexities are at the heart of Daddy , Emma Cline's sharp-eyed illumination of the contrary impulses that animate our inner lives.
Author Notes
Emma Cline is the writer of the novel,The Girls and was the recipient of the Paris Review Plimpton Prize. In 2017, she was one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Cline follows up her bestselling The Girls with a probing, low-key collection that speaks to the raw nerves of everyday people as they struggle against pressures both personal and perennial. Families torn apart by secrecy and regret feature in "What Can You Do with a General," in which a family's Christmas Eve is darkened by the prospect of euthanizing their dog, and "Northeast Regional," where a father facing his missteps in life is summoned to the boarding school where his son was expelled after a violent incident. A woman caring for a child of celebrities becomes thrust into a scandal in "The Nanny," and retreats to a family friend's house in the canyons north of Los Angeles. Two adolescent girls undertake a disastrous attempt to get the attention of a near-stranger in "Marion." Cline's ability to peer into the darker corners of her characters' lives and discern desolation is also on display in "A/S/L," which follows a young girl in and out of rehab, while a son living in his film producer father's shadow debuts his terrible movie in "Son of Friedman." The subtlety of these 10 stories may surprise readers expecting the same luridness Cline brought to The Girls, but the payoffs are as gratifying as they are shattering. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. (Sept.)
Guardian Review
Emma Cline's debut, The Girls, came wrapped in notoriety. It was a novel about a Manson-like cult, seen through the eyes of a teenager: a heady evocation of girlhood going bad in the heat of a long California summer. It was also a novel that won an unknown 26-year-old a reported $2m advance and a heap of hype. The reviews - perhaps inevitably - both recognised the talent that prompted it and occasionally turned their noses up. Cline used the Manson murders as a high-stakes backdrop against which to display her real themes: female relationships and the fraught forging of female identity under a male gaze. She also proved herself a distinctive stylist - The Girls was ripe with descriptive writing (air "candied with silence", spaghetti "mossed with cheese"). It could be brilliant; it could also be overcooked. She's largely curtailed those excesses in her new short story collection, Daddy, aside from Marion, first published in the Paris Review in 2013, which occupies the same universe as The Girls. Two teenage friends are given free rein by weed-selling parents. An erotic charge develops between them, culminating in a disturbing scene of invited mutilation that will have you clenching your thighs as you read, breath held. Elsewhere, however, a coolness of observation replaces such fervid, fetid atmospheres. But neglectful or narcissistic parents are everywhere, especially, as the title suggests, fathers. Cline is reckoning with a post-#Me Too landscape: burrowing inside the minds of the sort of privileged men who assumed they'd always get away with it. Who believe they couldn't possibly be one of the "bad" ones. Who perhaps haven't, technically, done anything wrong, but whose attitude to women, and controlling impulses towards their offspring, speaks volumes. There are stories about a disgraced magazine editor, a nanny who had an affair with her Hollywood boss, a scriptwriter with a much younger girlfriend. In the final story, A/S/L, a woman in not-quite-rehab tries to attract the attention of a bloated, Weinsteinian figure. Perhaps surprisingly, Cline often chooses to inhabit these ageing men rather than their screwed-up offspring. But throughout, she is exploring something her own millennial generation is often accused of: entitlement. And the grown-up children we see through the judgmental eyes of their fathers are often wildly entitled - it's just that Cline makes clear they learned this from the boomers and Gen Xers who raised them. Whether confronted with failures at work, with women or as parents, these men are usually defensive, self-deluding and numb with pills and drink. I'll be interested in how convinced middle-aged male reviewers are, but I found Cline's insights persuasive, even if the territory does become repetitive. The relentless privilege on display ultimately flattens out the reading experience, interest waning as a story introduces another rich old man or media player, another private school or house in the hills. But Cline tracks shifts in power and influence - the desire to hold on to and wield them and the pathetic "whiff of insecurity" in those that have lost them - very well. Son of Friedman, in which a fading movie director meets a more famous friend before his son's film screening, is painfully perfect in this regard, the father internally scorning his child for the very insecurity the reader sees in him. Several stories do offer the perspectives of ennui-ridden young women and prove that men don't have a monopoly on compulsive, ill-advised behaviour. Here we have women actively pursuing more powerful men. The stickier, trickier reaches of sexual desire can't be divided into female victims and male perpetrators as simply as we might now wish, Cline seems to suggest. Still, there's also always an awareness of economic imbalance in these interactions and the pressure put on women to be sexually available and "not waste [their] prettiness". As in The Girls, Cline is acute at exposing how women internalise the expectations of men. There's an uneasy ambiguity and a jittery, hollow anxiety running through Daddy that reflects a certain modern malaise, a vacuum in understanding how to live in the world, created by its vacuity. The internet, and the way it fractures and fragments desire, doesn't help. The woman at the rehab centre became addicted to chatroom sex; a shop assistant sells her used panties to men she finds online. "It seemed insane at first. And then, like other jokes, it became curiously more tolerable," she observes. Cline is also adept at swirling little eddies of unease into motion. In the opening story, a father is astounded at his children's selfishness when they gather for Christmas, but ominous details soon tug at his happy-family narrative. In Arcadia, a sibling relationship intersects with a romantic one in a way that thrums unnervingly. Occasionally, Cline is too coy, refusing us gory details of what, exactly, a son did to get expelled from school in Northeast Regional. But mostly, the undercurrents of the unspoken, the unspeakable, carry you along.
Kirkus Review
Tales of coastal malaise from the author of The Girls (2016). Several of the stories in this collection are about the failures and disappointments of older men. In "What Can You Do With a General," a father tries to understand his adult children when they come home for Christmas. In "Son of Friedman," a washed-up writer who has left California for New York endures the premier of his son's terrible film and makes an awkward attempt to interest a more successful friend in a new screenplay. Cline's voice is understated; her pace is slow and steady. The reader arrives at the central conflict of the story obliquely--or, in some cases, not at all. The details of the misdeeds at the heart of "Menlo Park" and "Northeast Regional" are never revealed. There's a sameness to these stories, and a few read as if the moments in time they depict were chosen at random. The selections that have young female protagonists are more engaging. The main character in "Los Angeles" endures the atmosphere of sexual harassment that's just part of the job for women in service industries; her attempt to reclaim some agency has its own risks. Twenty-four-year-old Kayla is hiding out from the paparazzi in "The Nanny." She has no remorse for her sexual dalliance with the famous-actor father of the child in her care. Her feelings about the affair are primarily shaped by how the scandal is playing out on social media. "She came across a new photo--she looked only okay. A certain pair of jeans she loved was not, she saw, as flattering as she'd imagined it to be. She saved the photo to her phone so she could zoom in on it later." The old men in the other stories gathered here would no doubt find this reaction cynical and self-absorbed--an example of the superficiality inherent in growing up online. Kayla's peers, however, might note that these old men grew up shaped by the privilege of thinking that the world owed them something. Well-crafted depictions of people at crisis points in their lives. Some crises depicted are more compelling than others. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Cline follows The Girls (2016) with a nuanced story collection portraying a variety of characters navigating uneasy transitions in their lives. In "What Can You Do With a General," John and Linda await the return of their young adult children prior to Christmas; while John reflects on the stagnancy of his existence as well as his self-prescribed altruism, gritty familial perspectives are revealed. "The Nanny" follows the titular Kayla amidst the fallout from the revelation that she had an affair with her charge's celebrity father; as Kayla hides from the media frenzy with her mother's college roommate, she is forced to confront her complicated realities. Cline explores her characters' tricky connections, new and old, to those around them. In "Los Angeles," as transplant Alice struggles to find her footing, her relationship with a young co-worker leads her to an unexpected side job. In the punchy "A/S/L," Thora's turn in rehab becomes heightened after the arrival of a well-known guest. Cline's 10 stories constitute a riveting, timely tapestry of realizations, motivations, and desires.
Excerpts
Excerpts
What Can You Do with a General Linda was inside, on her phone--to who, this early? From the hot tub, John watched her pace in her robe and an old swimsuit in a faded tropical print that probably belonged to one of the girls. It was nice to drift a little in the water, to glide to the other side of the tub, holding his coffee above the waterline, the jets churning away. The fig tree was bare, had been for a month now, but the persimmon trees were full. The kids should bake cookies when they get here, he thought, persimmon cookies. Wasn't that what Linda used to make, when the kids were little? Or what else--jam, maybe? All this fruit going to waste, it was disgusting. He'd get the yard guy to pick a few crates of persimmons before the kids came, so that all they'd have to do was bake them. Linda would know where to find the recipe. The screen door banged. Linda folded her robe, climbed into the hot tub. "Sasha's flight's delayed." "Till?" "Probably won't land until four or five." Holiday traffic would be a nightmare then, coming back from the airport--an hour there, then two hours back, if not more. Sasha didn't have her license, couldn't rent a car, not that she would think to offer. "And she said Andrew's not coming," Linda said, making a face. Linda was convinced that Sasha's boyfriend was married, though she'd never brought it up with Sasha. Linda fished a leaf out of the water and flicked it into the yard, then settled in with the book she'd brought. Linda read a lot: She read books about angels and saints and rich white women from the past with eccentric habits. She read books by the mothers of school shooters and books by healers who said that cancer was really a self-love problem. Now it was a memoir by a girl who'd been kidnapped at the age of eleven. Held in a backyard shed for almost ten years. "Her teeth were in good shape," Linda said. "Considering. She says she scraped her teeth every night with her fingernails. Then he finally gave her a toothbrush." "Jesus," John said, what seemed like the right response, but Linda was already back to her book, bobbing peacefully. When the jets turned off, John waded over in silence to turn them on again. Sam was the first of the kids to arrive, driving up from Milpitas in the certified pre-owned sedan he had purchased the summer before. He had called multiple times before buying the car to weigh the pros and cons--the mileage on this used model versus leasing a newer one and how soon Audis needed servicing--and it amazed John that Linda had time for this, their thirty-year-old son's car frettings, but she always took his calls, going into the other room and leaving John wherever he was, alone with whatever he was doing. Lately John had started watching a television show about two older women living together, one uptight, the other a free spirit. The good thing was that there seemed to be an infinite number of episodes, an endless accounting of their mild travails in an unnamed beach town. Time didn't seem to apply to these women, as if they were already dead, though he supposed the show was meant to take place in Santa Barbara. Chloe arrived next, down from Sacramento, and she had driven, she said, at least half an hour with the gas light on. Maybe longer. She was doing an internship. Unpaid, naturally. They still covered her rent; she was the youngest. "Where'd you fill up?" "I didn't yet," she said. "I'll do it later." "You should've stopped," John said. "It's dangerous to drive on empty. And your front tire is almost flat," he went on, but Chloe wasn't listening. She was already on her knees in the gravel driveway, clutching tight to the dog. "Oh, my little honey," she said, her glasses fogged up, holding Zero to her chest. "Little dear." Zero was always shivering, which one of the kids had looked up and said was normal for Jack Russells, but it still unnerved John. Linda went to pick up Sasha because John wasn't supposed to drive long distances with his back--sitting made it spasm--and, anyway, Linda said she was happy to do it. Happy to get a little time alone with Sasha. Zero tried to follow Linda to the car, bumping against her legs. "He can't be out without a leash," Linda said. "Be gentle with him, okay?" John found the leash, careful, when he clipped it to the harness, to avoid touching Zero's raised stitches. They looked spidery, sinister. Zero was breathing hard. For another five weeks, they were supposed to make sure he didn't roll over, didn't jump, didn't run. He had to be on a leash whenever he went outside, had to be accompanied at all times. Otherwise the pacemaker might get knocked loose. John hadn't known dogs could get pacemakers, didn't even like dogs inside the house. Now here he was, shuffling after Zero while he sniffed one tree, then another. Zero limped slowly to the fence line, stood still for a moment, then kept going. It was two acres, the backyard, big enough that you felt insulated from the neighbors, though one of them had called the police once, because of the dog's barking. These people, up in one another's business, trying to control barking dogs. Zero stopped to consider a deflated soccer ball, so old it looked fossilized, then kept moving. Finally he squatted, miserable, looking back at John as he took a creamy little shit. It was a startling, unnatural green. Inside the animal was some unseen machinery keeping him alive, keeping his animal heart pumping. Robot dog, John crooned to himself, kicking dirt over the shit. Four o'clock. Sasha's plane would just be landing, Linda circling arrivals. It was not too early for a glass of wine. "Chloe? Are you interested?" She was not. "I'm applying to jobs," she said, cross-legged on her bed. "See?" She turned the laptop toward him for a moment, some document up on the screen, though he heard a TV show playing in the background. She still seemed like a teenager, though she'd graduated college almost two years ago. At her age, John had already been working for Mike, had his own crew by the time he was thirty. He was thirty when Sam was born. Now kids got a whole extra decade to do--what? Float around, do these internships. He tried again. "Are you sure? We can sit outside, it's not bad." Chloe didn't look up from the laptop. "Can you close the door," she said, tonelessly. Sometimes their rudeness left him breathless. He put together a snack for himself. Shards of cheese, cutting around the mold. Salami. The last of the olives, shriveled in their brine. He took his paper plate outside and sat in one of the patio chairs. The cushions felt damp, probably rotting from the inside. He wore his jeans, his white socks, his white sneakers, a knitted sweater--Linda's--that seemed laughably and obviously a woman's. He didn't worry about that anymore, how silly he might look. Who would care? Zero came to sniff his hand; he fed him a piece of salami. When the dog was calm, quiet, he wasn't so bad. He should put Zero's leash on, but it was inside, and, anyway, Zero seemed mellow, no danger of him running around. The backyard was green, winter green. There was a fire pit under the big oak tree which one of the kids had dug in high school and ringed with rocks, but now it was filled with leaves and trash. Probably Sam, he thought, and shouldn't Sam clean it up, clean all this up? Anger lit him up suddenly, then passed just as quickly. What was he going to do, yell at him? The kids just laughed now if he got angry. Another piece of salami for Zero, a piece for himself. It was cold and tasted like the refrigerator, like the plastic tray it had come on. Zero stared at him with those marble eyes, exhaling his hungry, meaty breath until John shooed him away. Even accounting for holiday traffic, Linda and Sasha got back later than he expected. He went out onto the porch when he heard their car. He'd had the yard guy put up holiday lights along the fence, along the roof, around the windows. They were these new LED ones, chilly strands of white light dripping off the eaves. It looked nice now, in the first blue dark, but he missed the colored lights of his childhood, those cartoonish bulbs. Red, blue, orange, green. Probably they were toxic. Excerpted from Daddy: Stories by Emma Cline All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.