Is That You, Father?: Steven Wingate’s Of Fathers and Fire

Is That You, Father?: Steven Wingate’s Of Fathers and Fire
University of Nebraska Press, 2019; 320 pp., $19.95

Always on the cusp of becoming what we are, we search, wail for some form to approach, some authority to confirm us. Or at least, to confirm the choices we have made in blindness. So stands fatherless Tommy, expending himself on his saxophone through the night in a dilapidated, empty church. He sighs and resigns himself to the myth of fatherhood, to the lies he has been told about his father. And seemingly prepared to become this myth, he encounters another: a convict with a smashed face, his real father, who has come back to rebuild the church where Tommy wails.

In this new form of life, the reader is primed to find the redemption absent in newly shattered ones. It is not so easy. The reader questions whether truth or lies will do more harm. Tommy’s father arrives with a complex group of religious zealots. They care for the abandoned, help the needy, feed the poor, and live simply. But in their giving they seem to lack charity. In their certainty, they seem to lack understanding. They pass stinging judgment on others, taunting them in the same breath that they profess love and godliness. They single out Tommy’s mother for public spectacle, eventually surrounding her house in prayer in a way that feels like condemnation. They, too, seem to be lost among the myths of fathers and forms. Tommy, who wants faith as badly as he wants a father, finds himself pulled apart.

Of Fathers and Fire challenges the reader. It counterpoints poignant metaphorical settings and language with deeply troubling dialogue and relationships. While sounding the depths of his own past, Tommy unknowingly discovers the place where he was conceived, a child’s treehouse, a broken innocence, and a series of events that led to his father’s incarceration. While he once hoped to find his imagined father on the streets of Alphabet City, New York, he instead wanders across the plains of the West, down roads so lonely they have only letters for names. As Tommy searches, he loses himself. The identities he tried on throughout his youth fall away, and he does not know who he will become. And, of course, all these searches turn upon the fulcrum of a lost and rebuilt church. But rebuilt how?

The book’s troubled relationships, especially between Tommy and his mother, are hard. Other relationships have been lost altogether: Tommy’s selfish romances, or his best boyhood friend who was killed by a suicidal father. The candor of the book is sometimes cringeworthy. But it seeks to meet its characters in their search, in their own flaws. Their communication fails repeatedly, maddeningly. At first blush this is a reason to be angry with the book, but ultimately it is another dose of authenticity concerning the broken relationships that shape what we become and may be part of our blindness.

Though titled for fathers, the book is equally about motherhood, perhaps the purifying fire to which the title refers. Tommy’s relationship to his mother is the most critical one directing the outcome of the book. She is the one parent he might cherish, but both their lives are intrinsically hurt by their sense of lack. She is in her own way flawed and fatherless—hers died running into a fire in the family store, losing his life to save only things. She lives with pain and loss, and also loneliness as Tommy grows and their family of two changes. She was Tommy’s age when she became pregnant and gave up her young hopes, even her identity, for Tommy as she fled his real father. But identity is also something she denies her son, when she conceals his past. Now both of them seem broken upon directionless possibilities. Tommy’s mother is the one to bring the book to its stunning, fiery conclusion, while Tommy and his father sit within a pretend prison cell drawn in the sand of a dry river.

Of Fathers and Fire is a book that burns away the myths of fathers and their failures, to leave us unsettled and unsatisfied, rawly aware that we must look deeper, farther back, for the form of our selves. Tommy has built his life around an absence. Finally, he is left with the music that was always his conversation with creation. It came to him as a relic of truth among a sea of uncertainty. And like the faith that Tommy genuinely wishes to find, “the song wants you. It’s out there, and it wants to be born in you.”