When I read the first few pages of Ashton Politanoff’s new novel, Dad Had a Bad Day, I projected unkind assumptions onto his clipped, repetitive syntax; his fragmented, vignette-driven plotting; his aimless, aloof protagonist, a suburban father and former collegiate tennis star named Ned. Politanoff was showing trademarks of the style-over-substance alt-lit crowd; I feared I was in for something emotionally withholding, narratively flat.
But I kept reading. As much as I had reservations about the novel, I also could not put it down, and after a while I had to admit that Politanoff was at least a solid craftsman. His atmospheric descriptions were spare but sensuous. The characters he’d imagined—not only Ned but also his young son, Freddy, and his friends at the tennis club he joined without his wife’s knowledge—were spirited and peculiar, their actions and motivations “perceived rather than assembled,” to remix a Richard Brody dictum. And his dialogue was perfectly rhythmic, to the point of being hypnotic. Until it was electrified by frenetic, Tim Robinson-style outbursts—then I was wide awake; then I was cracking the f up.
Soon I was halfway through, and I found myself surrendering to the illusion of first-person fiction: that I had merged with the narrative I. I—Ned—was crazy! As the newly-appointed captain of my club’s men’s tennis team, I would do anything for my squad—even stalk the captain of a rival club whom I suspected of colluding with league officials. I was wild! There I was, a married man, playing footsie with Carlin, a married woman, in the club’s jacuzzi. Poor me! One flashback showed me enduring my step-father’s neck-throttling abuse, triggered by disappointing match results, with eerie detachment. Another surfaced a junior training academy helmed by sadistic Russians, “the brothers Bortnik;” they teased me, no older than 11, for playing “like a real pussy,” then ran me until I puked.