Stories of Father Obsession and Betrayal

Bliss Broyard is the daughter of the late Anatole Broyard, a noted literary critic. Anatole Broyard was also a noted New York City hipster and, not incidentally, an insistently seductive womanizer. In a New Yorker magazine profile, Henry Louis Gates Jr. described Broyard as a man of “distance and denials and half-denials and cunning half-truths . . . a virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation.” Bliss Broyard’s stories are, in many ways, just what you’d expect from the daughter of such a virtuoso. Her young women narrators are obsessed with their fathers, and filled with longing, muted anger, bewilderment and love.

Dancing has often been seen as a metaphor for human relations: Think, for instance, of the furious, controlled passion of the tango, or the graceful, ebullient romanticism of the waltz. But the dance in which most of Broyard’s characters seem to excel is the cha-cha of tentative approach and withdrawal.

The title story of this debut collection is narrated by a young woman whose father is dying of cancer (as did Anatole Broyard, in 1990). She recalls how her father began giving her dance--that is, emotional--lessons in their kitchen when she was a small child, and how those lessons continued in a variety of bars as she got older: “On those dance floors over the years, we told each other more about ourselves than in any conversation.” Father, the girl tells us, “was my first male audience, and I used him as a mirror to understand what I looked like to the world. . . . Once my father told me that he wanted to be the first man to break my heart, because then he could ensure that at least it would be done gently.” Yet she finds, not surprisingly, that his death is not gentle at all.

In “Mr. Sweetly Indecent,” a young woman catches her father kissing, and presumably having an affair with, someone who is decidedly not her mother or his wife. The girl confronts her father, who calmly, infuriatingly suggests: “We can pretend that it didn’t even happen if that’s what you want.” Perhaps not quite coincidentally, the narrator has just spent a wonderful night with a young man who refuses to see her again. He calmly, infuriatingly explains: “I just want to preserve that memory of you standing in my living room, alone, without any other images cluttering it. . . . Listen, it was a perfect night. Let’s just both remember it that way.” The girl goes to a fortuneteller, “who told me that she saw a man betraying me. ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ I said, but that would have cost another 10 dollars.”

None of the fathers here are bad men; they are just weak men, with a disturbing propensity for casual betrayal and self-deception, and excellent powers of self-protection. They are vain, too: In the comical “The Trouble With Mr. Leopold,” a professional writer composes a film review for his teenage daughter, who is struggling with a school assignment; he is then enraged when her teacher--the odious Mr. Leopold--rates it only a C-plus.

Broyard can be an acute observer of human behavior. In “Ugliest Faces” and “Loose Talk,” she limns the duplicitous power plays between lovers; in “A Day in the Country” and “Snowed In,” she explores the puzzling, terrifying emergence of adolescent sexual longing through the eyes of a smart, sensitive girl named Lily.

But there is an odd, disturbing and perhaps anachronistic passivity to many of these young women. (The older women don’t fare much better: For the most part, Broyard portrays adult wives and mothers as patient helpmates to the far-more-interesting husband-dads.) And a tonal monotony pervades these stories; Broyard conjures essentially one girl with one perspective on the world. There is nothing wrong with this girl’s take on her father or her life or herself. But “My Father, Dancing” suffers from a narrowness of vision, a constriction of boundaries, a somewhat suffocated imagination. One wishes that the narrators of these stories would break free, and begin to really dance.