Home Again, Home Again: A Son's Memoir - Hardcover

Anger and resentment fuel this memoir by journalist Froncek (Take Away One, 1985)--his emotions directed toward his father, once stern and powerful, now disabled by Alzheimer's and multiple strokes. The book grows out of a visit during which Froncek realizes that he may never see his father, Walter, alive again. During the weekend he mulls over the past: Driven by an apparent restlessness beyond his son's understanding, Walter moved his family countless times both in and around Wisconsin, and even as far as Detroit and California. He seemed to be searching for the perfect home, though, as his son remembers it, they had the perfect home--one that Walter built by a small Wisconsin woods in 1949, when Thomas was six; the family lived there for three years. As Thomas reviews his life, he recalls the joy of playing cowboys and Indians in the woods, the perplexity of growing up Catholic, the rise of McCarthyism, the pain of constantly moving, and the desire to please a father who never encouraged or praised. Finally, with help from his mother, he succeeds in comprehending this driven being--the key lies in grasping the grandeur of ordinary dreams. His mother also reveals the money troubles and private agonies of those uprooted years. The constant moving left a lasting impression on Froncek: As a journalist, he happily took on far-away assignments until the stability of a wife and child settled him down to living in one place. Although Froncek's feelings run deep and his portrayal of a strong man laid low is affecting, his flat, unsophisticated writing slows down the narrative and detracts from its potential power. (8 pages photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It should have been a perfect example of the American Dream, post^-World War II version. Midwestern working-class man aspires to better himself and to own his own home, so he goes to night school and builds his dream house. Yet it's not enough: the scaled-down dream house is never quite finished, and the jobs are never quite good enough, launching Walter Froncek and his family, including young son Tom, on a seemingly endless succession of new jobs and relocations. Standing behind Tom's increasing frustration with his father and their nomadic life in search of something more is the elusive stability symbolized by that hand-built house, the dream abandoned. Froncek tells the painful story of his youth with a complex mix of still-unresolved anger toward and growing tenderness for his father, a man whose dreams both defined and damned him. With echoes of Death of a Salesman and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life (1989), Froncek's powerful memoir is both a blue-collar tragedy and a bitterly ironic prequel to Tracy Kidder's House, that 1985 ode to yuppie homeownership. Ilene Cooper