Life, Orange to Pear by John Brantingham
Bamboo Dart Press, 2020
Shelves of books have been written about how to be the best father, all with conflicting advice and messages. John Brantingham’s Life, Orange to Pear is a collection of flash fiction about fatherhood: the relationship between a man and his daughter, Cyndi. The collection is written in the second person, as a form of distant first. Each vignette offers a glimmer of insight into the candid, but otherwise mundane moments of their relationship. The father fights against his worst impulses, struggles to impart life-lesson wisdom, and desperately wants to know he’s done okay.
This book helped me reflect, through another lens, about my own father and our relationship. The father in this collection knows he is not doing the best possible, and in moments, we see him wrestle with terrible impulses: “There is probably something you could say here that is wise and wonderful, but given your track record, you know that you’re more likely to make a stupid joke that makes everything just a little bit worse, so you say instead, ‘What would you like to do?’” These moments make him real, relatable. I understand my own father better through these vignettes.
Another strong cultural aspect of fatherhood is the idea of teaching life lessons. Earth-shattering life lessons. My own dad often rails that he is only trying to teach me. And in his way, he has never taught with the words, but with the very lessons he never intended to teach at all. In the collection, the father here does the same. In the story “Basic Dignity,” this passage shows the father learning: “She hugs you. ‘Life seems to be a minefield of existential crises.’/‘And it doesn’t get any easier,’ you say. You don’t tell her that it only gets harder. Let that part be a surprise.” Even though he does his best to teach lessons, Cyndi comes away with her own ideas and experiences.
As she grows older, the stories jump time in larger chunks, as if he is no longer alive until she appears in his life. In these stories the father hasn’t really seen Cyndi as an adult. This struck me in my relationship with my dad, as I feel he often sees me as an errant child, willful and unteachable, needing protection from the world. However, the father in this work comes to an understanding: “… the memories that your daughter Cyndi has of you are fixed, solid. What you will be to her, you will always be and little that you do now will change that memory of you.” The father understanding this as his life is coming to an end is powerful and reminds me that fathers are fallible people, often in the most devastating ways.
From these stories, a life is built around the relationship of father and child, the vague in-between life that is blurry. The moments of clarity in story are mundane, everyday events that have serious impact on lived experience, those lasting memories that when we look back, were so ordinary in their extraordinariness. Brantingham captures these slices with grace and empathy for the father, showing me that even though fathers can unintentionally hurt their children, I can now understand my own father’s struggle to do better and fight his own demons—even if he lost.
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K. Andrew Turner writes literary and speculative fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He teaches and mentors creative writers near Los Angeles, where he lives, works, and writes in the San Gabriel Valley. He is the publisher of East Jasmine Review and a freelance editor.