*3-3.5 stars.

I may not be the right audience for a collection of short stories because, although I thought these stories were interesting and well written, I also found them frustrating, as if the author just skirted around what I wanted her to confront in the human experiences she was depicting. I often thought That's it?? when I finished a story.

I received an arc of this new book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the opportunity.

Emma Cline follows up on her first novel and bestseller, “The Girls”, with this book of short stories. Each story could easily fold (like origami) into an intricate and enjoyable novel. I’m not normally a fan of short stories, but I enjoyed “The Girls” so much, I had to read this. Emma’s captivating writing style is addictive; she dances all around the ugly truth and makes you work to read between the lines. Her characters are both shallow and deep, and you’ll usually either love or detest them.
I would very much enjoy seeing Emma spin some full-blown novels out of these slightly dark twisty stories.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an ARC copy in exchange for an honest review. The release date is September 1, 2020.

Emma Cline has created a short story collection that explores in detail the many ways that we fail our fathers and the many ways that they fail us. Absent fathers, drunken fathers, angry fathers, and disappointing children punctuate this well-written, if depressing, collection. Similar in tone if not in content to her novel "The Girls," "Daddy" is an interesting and emotional short story collection that I am likely to recommend to others.

This was a great collection of stories. I felt completely absorbed in each one the only negative is that they end so quickly, but that is the nature of stories. I'm generally a novel person because I like to be in the world of the story for an extended time, but I read these stories while we were camping and it was perfect to read one each night next to the campfire. I liked that the stories made me see things from men's point of view or at least how a woman imagines a man's poi t of view anyway. I found myself thinking about my own father and my husband as I was reading.

These are stories mostly featuring, as the title suggests, "daddies" - the term "fathers" is more accurate, I would say. Every story is plotted in a crafty manner, bobbing gracefully around suppressed things and secretive allusions. Some people read for the end, but I like things left unsaid, skeletons that make you scrutinize their bones for evidence of their provenance. My favorites were "What Can You Do with a General,"Northeast Regional, "Marion," and "A/S/L."

Thoughtful commentary on a variety of shifting power dynamics and the men that often cannot see them.

A former magazine editor, Ben reflects on how women used to find him charming, punctuate their sentences with little touches on his arm. It had all been so easy. But that was before his abrupt termination and the public fallout that left him unhirable. His fall from grace is summed up by a call to a suicide hotline where he faces “humiliation so great that he tried to hang up but found he could not, found himself robotically explaining the situation to a man who asked increasingly prurient questions about what exactly Ben had done and to whom.”

Following his son’s violent attack on a fellow student, Richard spends the meeting with the school’s headmaster surreptitiously checking his phone under his desk. Faced with the obscene details, he apologizes, careful to arrange his words to discourage a potential lawsuit. “This was his son, Richard kept reminding himself, and that fact had to be bigger than anything else.”

John, a disgruntled patriarch, misses the days when the family would happily curl up with old movies—“movies where the fathers were basically Jesus.”

These men, and others like them, populate the pages of Emma Cline’s Daddy. Unlike Cline’s Manson-inspired novel The Girls, Daddy explores the hard angles of contemporary life from an overwhelmingly male perspective—from men grappling with a shifting sense of authority as their status dissolves to the young women who sell their panties to strangers online. As a title, Daddy is particularly apt, capturing the way the collection exposes the underbelly of masculinity, ranging from the loss of innocence within familial dynamics to sexual transgressions.

While a majority of the stories center masculinity, these men and their almost painful subjectivity are viewed with a cold eye. They require pills to dull their edges, view women as sexual objects, and demand the utmost respect from those around them—few of whom they perceive as equals. Rather than offer a consensus on how we should view these disgraced men, we follow them as they wade through the wreckage of their former lives.

Exposing the consequences of gendered power dynamics, toxic masculinity, and their inevitable fallouts, Cline shies away from detailing her characters’ lurid infractions. Instead, her protagonists dance along the edges of these gaping sinkholes, telling the reader just enough for us to imagine their depths. Arguably, removing this information alludes to the way these revelations have become ubiquitous. Of course, he did, we find ourselves thinking as the headlines roll out. Of course. The monster remains a monster, but he still has to make it through the day. That is where Cline’s stories pick up.

Suffice it to say, Daddy is not a joy to read. These are not lives I want to live or people I wish to know even in an imaginary context, but Cline’s talent on the page makes it a collection worth our consideration. Throughout, Cline’s precise use of language and adept characterization illuminates nuanced portrayals of men who could be rendered cliché cutouts of Bad Men in the hands of a less skillful writer. Her stories defy our longing for satisfying resolutions and likable characters, offering us disconcerting reflections of our current status quo instead.

Should we have sympathy for these men? I certainly hope not.

https://lauren.paris/emma-cline-exposes-the-underbelly-of-masculinity-in-daddy/

Emma Cline presents 10 short stories that have two commonalities. They are written well, and they have characters that you want to know more about. As each story ends, readers will find themselves wanting more - more chapters, more information, more to the story.

I read and loved Ms Cline's prior novel The Girls(really- check it out).

The short stories in this novel are fairly clever and more than a bit edgy and dark. In a nutshell- Daddy is filled with horrible horrible men and overall I didn't care for any of the other characters in this book.But that's okay- it made for some interesting reading for sure.

The stories were mostly a miss for me rather than a hit and my favorite of them all was The Nanny.

All my reviews live at https://deedispeaking.com/reads/.

TL;DR REVIEW:

The stories in Daddy is certainly well crafted. But I think I’m in the minority in that these stories just didn’t really compel me through them.

For you if: You like a dark, squirmy, drugs and sex vibe.

FULL REVIEW:

Big thanks to Random House for granting me an advanced copy of this book via NetGalley! With a big name Emma Cline (author of The Girls), it’s always great to be able to participate in the discussion early on.

This collection contains ten short stories, and it’s themed. Each story has a dark, sex, drugs, toxic masculinity, uncomfortable kind of vibe. I think I’m in the minority of early reviewers in that I didn’t really love it.

Don’t get me wrong: These stories are so well-written. There’s something Emma Cline can do that no one else can, which is peer into the feeling that sits in your stomach when you want to squirm, and almost name it. But for me, it was just a lot to have ten stories in a row with this vibe. I had to drag myself through it. I didn’t want to read any more stories about gross old guys doing drugs and having sex with younger women that almost but not quite made them feel better about themselves.

But I really do think that’s a me thing, a preference thing. I think other readers might love it, especially if that vibe is your thing. After some distance, I was in a similar “appreciate more than enjoy” camp on The Girls. But if you loved The Girls, you’ll probably love this one too.



TRIGGER WARNINGS:
Drug use/addiction (especially pills); Eating disorders (alluded to)

Emma Cline can WRITE.

Anyone who read her debut, 2016’s excellent “The Girls,” knows all about Cline’s prose gifts. She has a compelling, captivating voice and a real knack for crafting engaging narratives. But while that novel is undeniably excellent, the earliest recognition of her talents came in connection with her short fiction.

Cline’s new book “Daddy” celebrates her aptitude for shorter work, 10 stories that delve beneath the surface of the American experience. Each tale is a snapshot of the shadows cast by the outsized and unbalanced power dynamics between friends and colleagues and family members. There’s a palpable hurt at the core of these stories, a recognition of the pain that is seemingly always a heartbeat away.

The people at the center of these stories are all struggling with the grim realities of their situations. Even when the veneer of respectability is still intact, there’s a fundamental and inescapable ugliness there. Sadness and anger are abundant – everyone strives for connection, they find themselves cast adrift, spiraling away from one another even as they yearn for proximity.

That search for closeness takes many forms in “Daddy.” A young woman and aspiring actress starts trying to make ends meet by selling her used underwear on the internet in “Los Angeles.” Life on a farm proves complicated in weird and unexpected ways, thanks to an unsettling brother/sister dynamic and the new husband in the middle – that’s “Arcadia.” Violence implied and implicit floats through many of these stories, though none lean into both so fully as “Northeast Regional.”

In these stories, anger and/or self-involvement interfere with any good faith efforts to engage honestly with the world around us; mistakes are constantly made, though not always recognized as such. Refusal to examine one’s motivations leads to an unwillingness to make the hard choices necessary to move forward, emotionally or otherwise.

Cline also has something of a fascination with fame and those who exist on its fringes. In “The Nanny,” Cline offers up a different sort of perspective on celebrity scandal, taking us inside the head of a nanny whose indiscretions with her movie star employer have become tabloid fodder. “Menlo Park” sees a disgraced writer tasked with telling the story of a mercurial captain of industry even as he comes to terms with his own failings. We get a faded film producer and his once-close movie star pal coming together in a sad approximation of what they used to have in “Son of Friedman.”

“Marion,” a story of a young teen living in a communal situation in a vaguely-defined capacity that is far and away the piece here that most closely resembles “The Girls,” is tightly and specifically structured even as it deftly employs ambiguity with regard to the narrative. It is perhaps the most unlike the others in the collection, yet it feels the most vital to its sense of completion. All of these stories are energetic, but this one is particularly crackling with the kind of desire that Cline is so good at portraying.

There’s a real disconnect between what we believe we want and what we’re willing to do to get it; Cline’s understanding of the fundamental contrarianism that comes with these warring impulses is one of her most significant gifts as a storyteller. From the somewhat unspecified but ever-present anger and angst of an entitled and unapologetic father in the opening story – “What Can You Do with a General” – to the #MeToo flavored anxiety and self-loathing of a high-end rehab center in the closing “A/S/L,” Cline finds myriad ways to bring forth that counterintuitive warts-and-all examination of the human condition.

These stories are unsettling and engrossing, packed with character complexity and dark, cutting wit. Each piece bears up under its own weight even as it serves as part of the larger whole of the collection, though the steady drumbeat of Cline’s tone and thematic choices throughout can border on overwhelming. The preponderance of twisted and hateful men is obvious, but so too is Cline’s reason for displaying them – monsters can only be exposed upon being dragged into the light, their toxicity made public while they struggle to slither back into the shadows. Time and again, it’s made clear – power corrupts … and there are many different kinds of power.

It’s bleak, to be sure; there are glimmers of hope, but the writer has little interest in letting us off the hook, choosing instead to be relentless in her deconstruction of societal and cultural anger. This is not a single-sitting book; instead, it rewards the careful consumption and consideration of its contents one or two at a time, rather than all at once.

“Daddy” is an assemblage of exceptional work from a truly gifted artist. These stories are crafted with razor-sharp care and fueled by emotional challenge; they prove an apt opportunity for Cline to display not just her considerable prose gifts, but a beyond-her-years wisdom regarding the sad truths of the human condition. A worthy and worthwhile collection from a writer for whom the sky really is the limit.

Thoughtful and perceptive short stories. Even a person like me who is not drawn to short storied appreciated these. She had me at the end of the first story. It stopped so abruptly and I was left to ponder what was going to happen next. In fact, they all end abruptly, which gave my brain a lot of exercise in thinking after I finished each story.

I generally like short stories but I was disappointed with this collection. The writing is good, the characters seem well-written, but the stories seemed to go nowhere. Just when I was getting interested and wondering what would happen next, it was over! It felt like they could have been great stories - but to me, they just weren't.

The description of Daddy says that its stories explore the balance of power between the sexes. I did not find that to be the theme of every story, although it is for some. The book does explore the psyche of some unlikable people, many of whom are privileged and belong to show business or to the edges of the business. This is a world I’m not much interested in, so I felt little connection to these stories.

In “What Can You Do with a General,” John, who used to have anger issues, struggles to connect with his grown children over the holidays. In “Los Angeles,” Alice, a sales girl for a small store that plays up sexy women in the dress of its employees and its decor, begins selling her own underwear to men. In “Menlo Park,” Ben, who was fired from his job in disgrace, runs into trouble again while editing the autobiography of a controlling millionaire. In “Son of Friedman,” a once-famous director attends the opening of his son’s abysmal film with his old best friend, a still-famous actor. In “Nanny,” Kayla deals with the fall-out of having been caught having an affair with her married employer, a movie star.

And so on. I can see that the stated theme works for most of these stories except “Son of Friedman,” which, as with some other stories, is about the relationship between fathers and children. I found this collection disappointing after Cline’s excellent novel, The Girls.

The underlying connection to her stories is people at their breaking point and what happens afterwards. Engrossing. If you're looking for a well written collection of stories pick this up. The variety of characters will have you coming back for more. Happy reading!

Daddy: Stories by Emma Cline is a highly recommended collection of ten perceptive and thoughtful short stories that explore different facets of the human condition. The writing is quite good in this collection of universally depressing stories that explore the darkness and desperation under the surface in many lives. These stories are subtle glimpses into a character's life, past or present, and several seem to be a random slice of a moment in someone's life. Many of the stories are about the disappointments of men. The characters are complex and facing some crisis in their lives. As with all collections, some are more successful than others but all-in-all this is a very solid collection and does well to highlight Cline's talent and versatility.
Contents include:
1. What Can You Do with a General: A father reflects on his family and their interactions past and present when all his children are home for Christmas.
2. Los Angeles: A young sales woman who wants to be an actress ponders her job and what she does to make a little extra cash.
3. Menlo Park: A man works as an editor for a billionaire who has had a ghost writer pen his biography.
4. Son of Friedman: An aging director man meets an old friend and actor who is his son's godfather before they attend the premiere of his son's first movie.
5. The Nanny: A young woman (and former nanny) is hiding from the paparazzi after her affair with an actor is discovered.
6. Arcadia: A young man lives with his pregnant partner and her brother on their working orchard, but knows they should move.
7. Northeast Regional: A man has to travel up to his son's boarding school due to a serious problem.
8. Marion: A woman recalls staying with her first friend on her family's family ranch and the boundaries her older friend pushed.
9. Mack the Knife: A man meets two old friends at a restaurant where he ponders his life and thinks of his ex.
10. A/S/L: Two women are clientele at a wellness/pre-rehab clinic when a famous male celebrity arrives for a stay.
There is one wonderful description that I had to highlight from "A/S/L" that made me laugh-out-loud: "It seemed like a book for people who hated books."

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House.
The review will be posted on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Short stories can go either way for me as a reader, but this one unfortunately was just a flop. I was eager to read this as someone who doesn't have a relationship with my own father, but I just couldn't connect. I think the stories needed to be more to be impactful, and I longed for more development because when I finished I just felt completely dissatisfied...it felt almost unfinished? This wasn't for me but I appreciate having the chance to read and review it.

Thank you to Random House for the gifted copy.

The stories didn’t hook me, surprising because I like the short form, and I do like Emma Cline. There are a lot of people in and out of restaurants, people in restaurants open or close stories. There are fathers (it is, obviously, called Daddy), most seem clueless about their roles as fathers. There is disappointment. There is ennui, and I’m not in the mood for it. There is a lot of drug taking. Which is probably the most relevant, because some of these stories might have seemed more profound if I wasn’t stone cold sober.

Roxane Gay calls it dancing around unsaid things like it wasn’t the point of the story, and I agree. I’m just not sold that it was on purpose. This one was deeply disappointing.


Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC.

In 2016, Cline published the hugely successful novel, The Girls, which I read and enjoyed. When I was invited to read and review this collection of her short stories, I was sure I’d be in for a treat. Thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for the early read. This book is for sale now.

Sadly, I am not in love with this collection. First of all, I have seldom enjoyed an open ending, and whereas there are those who admire this style for its authenticity and subtlety, to me it feels as if I’ve eaten a nothing sandwich on a nothing bun. Give me a story with an ending every day of the week. So there’s that.

Then too, there’s the way she deals with sex. I’ve never used the word “tawdry” in a review before, but there’s a first time for everything. Sex, sexuality, and the human body don’t have to be a deal breaker for me, but if it’s written in such a way that I want to gargle after I’ve read it, then less is more. Of course, there are times and places when sex is ugly; in one story a working class girl is struggling and eventually finds she can subsidize her miserable wages by selling her used panties to skeevy men. Fair. It’s certainly memorable. But if we’re going there, then I’d like the next story to either avoid sex, or else have it be a positive experience. When a book gives me a sour gut without delivering a message, I’m out.

There are passages where Cline’s facility with words and her originality shine through. She is a fine writer when it comes to setting, and her character sketches are clear and believable. This is where the third star comes in.

It’s something, but it isn’t enough. If you decide to read these stories, I suggest you get the book free or cheap; don’t pony up full jacket price this time. Save your dollars for the next novel Cline writes, because likely as not, it will be terrific.

I enjoyed this collection when I read it, but a little over a month later I have to say I remember very little about most of the stories in it. None of them really stuck with me. I did like the writing style and the way Cline explores relationships between people.