FATHER FIGURE
Most novelists have a story or two they’d like to expand into a novel, one day planning to get around to it. Many, of course, don’t get around to it, the urge dies or they do and the novel remains a story. Father Figure had as its genesis a story I published in Epoch magazine in 1998, “Casualties.” That was a story about a man who returned from World War II, minus his left leg and his generous, trusting nature. Before the war, he had been a hero to his town and returned to it to find that during the time he’d been abroad in the service his wife had given birth to a son. The son, of course, never knew his pre-war father (about whom adoring stories were told), only the powerfully driven and deeply embittered one-legged man who’d survived the Battle of the Bulge. The story, I came to understand, belonged ultimately to the son and to the people (family members and townspeople alike) around him, and almost twenty years later Father Figure was born.
"What a remarkable, evocative book. Lamar Herrin is a consummate story-teller, and Father Figure is a richly imagined American story - of patrimony and baseball and war and the inheritance of history's wounds - told with great physical immediacy and a seemingly effortless emotional intensity."
- Philip Gourevitch, author of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib
Most novelists have a story or two they’d like to expand into a novel, one day planning to get around to it. Many, of course, don’t get around to it, the urge dies or they do and the novel remains a story. Father Figure had as its genesis a story I published in Epoch magazine in 1998, “Casualties.” That was a story about a man who returned from World War II, minus his left leg and his generous, trusting nature. Before the war, he had been a hero to his town and returned to it to find that during the time he’d been abroad in the service his wife had given birth to a son. The son, of course, never knew his pre-war father (about whom adoring stories were told), only the powerfully driven and deeply embittered one-legged man who’d survived the Battle of the Bulge. The story, I came to understand, belonged ultimately to the son and to the people (family members and townspeople alike) around him, and almost twenty years later Father Figure was born.
"What a remarkable, evocative book. Lamar Herrin is a consummate story-teller, and Father Figure is a richly imagined American story - of patrimony and baseball and war and the inheritance of history's wounds - told with great physical immediacy and a seemingly effortless emotional intensity."
- Philip Gourevitch, author of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib