In this melancholy memoir, O'Connor, an editor for the Wall Street Journal, mingles his childhood experiences growing up in a small town in central Canada with the myths and legends of the far north. Both are suffused with a strange silence. The extreme solitude of his childhood is imposed upon the family by his stern father who spends his time as a traveling salesman and, in the winter, his evenings alone in the backyard flooding a skating rink. Watching his father from the window, O'Connor "was waiting for a wink, a sidelong glance, a doff of the fedora, anything. But it didn't happen. He didn't once look up from the ice." The silence masks an extraordinary family secret that serves as a suspenseful backdrop to the quiet life of this boy and extends well into adulthood when he finally uncovers the secret. Recommended for public libraries.
Sue Samson, Univ. of Montana, Missoula
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
To estimate a parent’s character justly is a task that may take longer than a lifespan. The constraint on understanding is emotional before it is intellectual. Despite advances in science, our hearts still move at an imponderable, ancient and animal pace; a child may never come to comprehend her father or mother. The labour involved in the private work of forgiveness is perhaps one motive for studying history. History presents exemplary lives that substitute, be they humble or grand, for aspects of the lives of our unapproachable parents. History supplies figures in loco parentis whom we probe, we judge, and we may, at last, through the intercession of slowly accumulating scruple, exonerate. But a memoir of a particular parent strives within the limits of this life to gain some real objective distance. Paradoxically, the achievement of distance often licenses the exercise of mercy. If a family happens to have laboured under the weight of a heavy parental mystery, then (with the release of the secret) forgiveness may arrive with surprising speed, despite lingering ambivalences.
Larry O’Connor’s Tip of the Iceberg, originally published in 2002, centres on the figure of a father who fluctuates, in his son’s eyes, between the banal and the enigmatic. This father is a travelling salesman, a capricious man with markedly less than the mitigating tenderness of an Alice Munro parent, though he may bear a degree of family resemblance. O’Connor beautifully captures the paternal elusiveness characteristic of the era in which he was raised (he was born in 1955): “Others on my block had fathers whom I never got a strong sense of; they were like spirits who only came out at night.”
Larry O’Connor teaches journalism at Columbia University; he has certainly earned his place there by the sweet ease of his writing. Although he lives in the United States, his was an Ontario upbringing, in the vicinity of Lake Huron. He chooses an epigraph from Northrop Frye for his severe but loving account of his father and his birth family: “The real Canadian is a northerner.” Whether or not the “real Canadian is a northerner”-surely a debatable point-in the local context of O’Connor’s story the claim is convincing. In fact, O’Connor skilfully alternates throughout his memoir between significant episodes from his own life and telling anecdotes drawn from the history and exploration of the sub-arctic and polar regions. If there is a flaw in this pattern of alternation, it is less from any defect in the deftness with which it is handled than from its reliance on an outdated vocabulary. For example, the Inuit, who have clearly earned O’Connor’s fascinated respect, are referred to as “Eskimos” throughout his book. Perhaps O’Connor is attempting to recall the language of the literature by which he was influenced as a boy, decades ago. In keeping with the tenor of his story, one could say that O’Connor’s youth is cryogenically preserved in the rough and marvellous manner of Sir John Franklin’s long-refrigerated crew.
The oscillation between a consideration of events in his youth and the idiosyncrasies of boreal life and adventure generally works. Cold is a metaphor for repression, for peril, for limitless stoicism, for a mixture of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, for an astonishing resourcefulness in the face of dearth. It supplies a depot of unusual, shimmering symbols: the chill, charged metamorphoses of the Northern Lights, the singular rarity of a narwhal’s twisted horn. O’Connor captures persuasively the way a young-and for that matter an old-imagination projects its concerns onto some scene of objective grandeur, as a means of escaping mere individuality. O’Connor’s remarks are straight-faced and for that reason moving even when they are funny: “It was common that first-born sons in the north were called such names as Liquid Dog Shit (Itiktarniq) or Little No-Good Penis (Usukitat) . . . If names alone defeat you, you can’t be worth much.” We glimpse the practices of an alien culture in this surprising variety of linguistic rough-housing. O’Connor also-to venture a paradox-respectfully satirizes the curious habits of Victorian explorers: “Titus Oates, the weakest and most feverish of the company, had struggled to his feet inside a bitterly cold tent and told his comrades, ‘I am going outside and may be some time.’ He intended to walk to his death (and needed to piss), but for matters of pride and propriety withheld these intentions-an ability to go long periods of time without relieving themselves was a point of pride among Victorians.”
O’Connor excels not just at historical portraiture, but at capturing figures from his own past life-his Cousin John, a trucker, or the world of a drugstore in 1970s south-western Ontario (we learn why condoms should be shelved near shampoo). There are interesting reflections on the Queen of Canada: “Royalty . . . had become like smoking: a habit not easy to admit.” Sketching Sir John Franklin’s character, O’Connor notes that, if the explorer “were obliged to order the flogging of a malcontent, he’d break out in a cold sweat, throw up. The world is wide enough for both of us, he said of pesky flies.” O’Connor does not identify Franklin’s remark about tolerating even the most intrusive of insects as an allusion to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, another book about fathers and sons. Sterne’s wounded warrior Uncle Toby spares flies, though he once fired intrepidly on the foe: “Go-go poor devil,” says Uncle Toby, “get thee gone-why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me.” In the figure of the humane John Franklin, whom the Inuit might have rescued had they only been asked, O’Connor finds a means of reconciling and synthesizing the images of his parent and himself. Contorted inward sensitivity confronts harsh external conditions. Masculine pride forestalls requests for help, even recognition of the need for help. The frostbitten explorer, sailing to his doom on ships with the ominous names Terror and Erebus, quotes Sterne, the warm and witty exponent of 18th-century sensibility. A twenty-first-century memoir gets written; the reader takes pleasure in the sumptuous austerity of the resulting book.
Eric Miller
- Books in Canada
This is the story of a young boy growing up with a father who loves him but can't talk to him. The author, a Wall Street Journal editor, grew up in a small town in central Canada. The weather was cold, and so was his father, a quiet, serious man of few words who never spoke about his family. O'Connor weaves into his gentle memoir stories about Eskimo life and about the great arctic explorers Franklin and Shackleton. Like those men, O'Connor, too, is an explorer, journeying deep into his father's past. What emerges is a loving portrait of a boy, his family, and life in a cold Canadian town. It's about dreams and memories and secrets that can't stay secret forever. It's a slim book whose weight is in its details: precise, intimate depictions of the author's parents and of a town that springs to life in our minds as vividly as our memories of our own towns. This self-portrait of a young man with dreams too big for his small town should strike a resounding chord with readers of such memoirs as Russell Baker's Growing Up and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life.
David Pitt
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