Misgivings: my mother, my father, myself

The Story

Misgiving is C. K. Williams's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics & of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, & inner conflict. Like Kafka's self-revealing Letter to His Father, Misgivings is full of doubt, both philosophical & personal, but as a work of art it is sure & true. Williams's father was an 'ordinary businessman'--angry, demanding, addicted to the tension he created with the people he loved; a man who could read the Greek myths aloud to his son yet vowed never to apologize to anybody. His mother was a housewife, a woman with a great capacity for pleasure, who was stoical about the family's dire early poverty yet remained affected by it even when they became well-off. Together, these two formed what Williams calls the 'conspiracy that made me who I am.' His account of their life together & their deaths--his father's with suicidal despair, & his mother's with calm resignation--is a literary form of the reconciliation the family achieved at the end of his parents' lives. & as literary form it is novel, a series of brilliant short takes, a double helix of experience & recollection. Few contemporary writers have understood their origins so acutely, or so eloquently.