Open House by Charles D’Ambrosio, 1994
The magic trick:
Focusing the story on one night spent between father and son
Day 2 of our Charles D’Amrbosio double. “Open House” is a father-son story, and a cozy, little 40 pages of relentless depression at that.
Maybe it’s the Pacific Northwest setting, but this feels like a story told from the perspective of the son of a Raymond Carver protagonist. Maybe it’s the setting, yes; but also, maybe it’s the alcoholism, maybe it’s the dubious mental health; maybe it’s the narcistic male. Maybe it’s all those things.
What it is not is told in the fashion of a Raymond Carver story. This story is long and inefficient. Wonderfully so, mind you.
Also whereas Carver characters typically reveal themselves in what isn’t said, D’Ambrosio’s cast here speak their minds. The heart of the story is the father and youngest son (I think about 20 years old here) spending a night together at their old home just before it’s set to go on the market.
I’m not sure what else to identify about how this story works. It’s truly an unwieldy beast in many ways. I guess that’s really the thing right there: the setup. The son returning home to get a couple items of his brothers before the house is sold, and have a long, strange night of drinking and pigeon shooting with his father.
You pull a story into focus with a setup like that, good things will likely happen.
And that’s quite a trick on D’Ambrosio’s part.
The selection:
The last time I’d seen my father he behaved like one of those wolf-boys, those kids suckled and reared in the wild by animals, and I was never sure, during the ten confusing minutes I stood on the lawn outside the house, whether or not he recognized me. The security chain on the back door remained slotted. Inside, through the crack, he asked me when I was going to relinquish my disease, which made me think either he was speaking rhetorically or confusing me with my brother Miles, who is schizophrenic and lives in a halfway.
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