The Parent Trap

One of the more irritating aspects of literature is the continuing portrayal of parents as doddering, clueless old fools.  Sadly, this isn't a new phenomenon, but the literature of the 20th century up through today seems to take a special pleasure in creating mothers and fathers that lack all manner of comprehension or understanding of their offspring's behavior, and, if they weren't portrayed with so much seriousness, one would be hard pressed to believe these people weren't solely used for comedic purposes and a deliberate slap in the face of anyone over the age of fifty.

Taking a survey of current writers, Franzen or Eugenides for example, one encounters parents who are so out of touch with reality that they're incapable of having civil discussions with their children on all manner of topics, but the coup de grace is the topic of sex.  Parents have no concept of this and are wholly unskilled at anything resembling an adult discussion on the topic.  The lifestyle choices of their children, whether college age or young adults, present such a radical departure from the norm, that you'd think these characters had been plucked from the mid 1800s and transported to the otherworldly 21st century.

Franzen is a particularly horrible offender, and a repeat offender at that considering The Corrections and Freedom are nearly identical novels.  Parents suffering through the throes of dementia are given a free pass, but the others are so baffled by modern life that it's almost as if the author is striving to suggest that parents become their children's children much earlier in life than anyone ever anticipated.  The children are given this complex mental background steeped in coolness and dilemma that simply defies explanation and can not be summed up for anyone of an older generation.

What's even more unnerving is when one encounters a writer like Philip Roth, who portrays parents in such a revered way that it's hard not to believe that they are incapable of coming to terms with modern life.  Roth gives the fathers and grandfathers a classically educated, working class veneer that just oozes respect.  However, since the children are mostly concerned with their extramarital affairs and impending death, this type of reverence is, again, lost on the reader.  It's a shame that the older generation, who is on the verge of death and should be consumed with their impending mortality, are portrayed and gossipy busybodies and uncomprehending foils for modern life's ills.  Roth is capable of giving fathers a proper amount of respect that is in of itself timeless and old fashioned at once, but he loses any sense of credibility when writing about the fact that a son would desecrate his marriage in favor of bodily temptation.

This temptation resurfaces in Franzen's work, but it's explained away as being revolting to the character instead of titillating.  In other words, the fathers are intrigued by the idea of mistresses but choose not to act based on some antiquated moral code.  The sons, on the other hand, have no such qualms.

It's a shame that writers today can't seem to find the ability to create more independent and well rounded characters when it comes to parents.  What they're instead choosing to portray is a world without direction in the hands of a youth without any means to rely upon the history laid out before them.