"Fans of David Foster Wallace will rejoice."
—Wisconsin Review
"Edgy, funny, and heartfelt, with a smidgen of George Saunders and a touch of Aimee Bender, Barringer's American Home Life is an original American confection: bittersweet, satisfying and true."
—Dave Housely, Barrelhouse
"A literary force to be reckoned with. Barringer's work reminds me of the offspring of Larry Brown and George Saunders, with more pathos."
—Nathan Leslie, The Pedestal Magazine
Honest, funny, and smart, David Barringer makes brilliant comic work of contemporary suburban fatherhood.
Henry Doran stays home while his wife, Tina, works as a family doctor, but the real stars are the kids, Lilly ("tall and lean, a second-grader, all limbs and a Broadway ego") and Lance ("a solid sensitive first-grader who loves facts about animals").
The literary equivalent of a TV sitcom, American Home Life tackles the domestic, the tragicomic, and the imminently futuristic (talking appliances, chore cards, implantable I.D. chips, corporate schools, kids who refuse to pay taxes, gay guinea pigs, drunk pollsters who spend the night, and shock bracelets that force you to lose weight).
The prose is clean and sharp, the family issues are urgent, and the observations are timeless. As in any family sitcom, though, it’s the kids who steal the show.
David Barringer has written for Emigre, I.D. Magazine, Eye Magazine, Playboy, Details, The American Prospect, Nerve, AIGA’s Voice, Epoch, The Detroit Free Press, The ABA Journal, Men’s Journal, and others. In 2005, he published his first novel, Johnny Red, and his first book of design criticism, American Mutt Barks in the Yard.
Some chapters of American Home Life were published as stories (often in much edited forms) in literary journals.
"Charity" and "Form," Monkeybicycle
"Bore" and "Fortune," Opium Magazine
"Crash," Wisconsin Review
"Cool" and "MeChip," Barrelhouse
"Solicitor," Del Sol Review
"Honeymoon" and "Superheroes," Quick Fiction
"Poll," Hobart Magazine (also a Notable Story in Best American Non-Required Reading, 2005)
"Cuff," Ballyhoo
"Buster," Words Words Words
"Wasp," Flak Magazine
READERS
"A great pleasure with boffo laughs." _Mike Topp
"I thoroughly enjoyed reading American Home Life not only because it was witty, funny and satirical, but because of the way you wrote about your regular life."_Ghazaleh Etezal
"American Home Life was well worth the wait. It takes me back with fond memories (and laughs) to when my now teenage daughters were younger. Thanks again for the great read."_Kristina Moriconi
"Finally got a chance to read American Home Life. Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed its well crafted, vivid sentences, its whispers of science fiction and the humor and humanness of the narrator whose voice keeps the book alive from start to finish."_Alison M.
"I got American Home Life yesterday and I am almost 1/2 through the damn thing!! It is really funny!! . . . Alright, I am done with the book, it was hilarious :) Loved it!!"_Kristin Reddin
STEVEN HIMMER, writing about American Home Life on his blog, Tawny Grammar:
I expected David Barringer's novel American Home Life (So New Publishing) to be a "brilliant comic work of contemporary suburban fatherhood" (as the cover describes it), and it certainly was. What surprised me, though, was how crucial imagination and the need for it are to the story. Maybe it's because I'm only a few weeks from fatherhood myself and was looking for reassurance, but after reading AHL I feel like parenting well is as much art as composing a symphony or writing a book.
Henry Doran, narrator and father in the novel, relies on his own imagination to keep daughter Lilly and son Lance engaged with the world, as when he motivates them to eat breakfast by declaring:
"Our enemy is Fatigue in the Face of Daily Life. Our objective is to transform Chores into Games, Work into Play. The few and the proud are, today, going to eat whatever we can find in the yard." (page 11)
Henry makes his own life more interesting by imagining, in one case, the inner lives of the family's pet hamsters (p. 22). His daydreams (and Henry's dreams are both physically and figuratively placed at the novel's center) aren't of the escapist, Walter Mitty variety, but an insistence on finding mysteries where others might miss them. Thus the monotony of a long drive is countered by picturing roadside troops of gorillas replacing the more familiar sight of deer, and wondering how that would change the response of drivers to roadkill (187). At other times, Henry's imagination keeps him from self-pity or desperation, as he worries about money and struggles not to see himself as a failure—the semi-employed, stay-at-home Dad who is turning into his father—by picturing his everyday quests to serve breakfast and order the house as epic feats. "Imagination," he decides, "is a camel: a little water goes a long way" (56).
In the ambiguous near-future setting of the novel, the school Henry's children attend and the novels he writes both have corporate sponsors, and young bodies are implanted with monitoring devices as their minds are implanted with the need to be "Junior Achievers," all threatening a droning monotony. So Henry works to instill imagination in his children, worrying, "teach your children how to work through their boredom, Dad, or someone else will get rich off their lack of imagination" (59). Meanwhile, corporate entities sell devices meant to keep kids safer, devices that lead concerned parents to picture ever more horrible events that might occur thereby selling ever-improved devices. It's an escalation of anti-imagination, imagination replaced with paranoid, terrified fantasies. Tension emerges between knowing enough about the world to see it clearly and safely, and maintaining enough mystery to keep life exciting without artificial stimuli. It's a hard struggle to resolve, as when Henry forces his family to butcher their own meat so they know where it comes from and makes them sick in the process: how much knowledge is too much, and how much do his kids need to live their best possible lives? In this regard, American Home Life is reminiscent of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle and Roald Dahl's Danny, The Champion of the World — bittersweet novels of childhoods alternately sheltered and disrupted.
It is also, finally, a novel about how to be an artist and a father at once, as Henry struggles to balance his own writing and creativity with paying bills and washing dishes and taking care of sick children. And that may be why I've focused on the parenting aspects of the novel myself, since for obvious reasons I've been worrying lately about how I'm going to get any artistic work done myself once there's a baby in the house to take care of. Reviewing a novel as a parenting manual isn’t the most critically astute approach, but all the same I hope I can be as imaginative a father as Henry Doran, and perhaps write about it half as well as David Barringer has.
American Home Life
Novel
Paper | 200 pp | 6x9 | $12
So New Publishing | 2007
BOOKS YOU'LL LOVE, by Stacy Cottrell
San Diego AIGA
It's not every day that I find a book I love. David Barringer, a designer and author featured in Emigre, AIGA Voice, and countless other publications, explores the challenges of postmodern society with his novel, American Home Life. Through snappy prose and schizophrenic wit, Barringer examines a couple's playful attempt to raise two well-rounded children, while preventing them from being trapped by greed, envy and the monotony of suburban life. The book jacket calls it the "literary equivalent of a TV sitcom," which would make sense if sitcoms were smart, funny and addictive.
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For information, contact David Barringer at dlbarringer AT gmail DOT com.
David Barringer is an author, freelance writer, graphic designer, artist,
and father of two future inventors of the iCradle and iGrave.
All work copyrighted David Barringer 2000-2008.
