Five Marks

Front Cover
AuthorHouse, Jun 23, 2003 - Biography & Autobiography - 232 pages

It is a long and often painful tale. Don't read it if you are leading a normal, happy life in a functional family, unless you want to know about places where you would never choose to go places where you wouldn't want anybody to go. Apart from its most obvious intention, as a message from a father to his estranged teenage daughter, this book is directed toward the millions of men (and their families, friends and relatives) who have journeyed through the terrain the story attempts to depict. It is a landscape of America at the beginning of the 21st century, the heart of the greatest empire the world has ever known, which is inhabited by a population living in a culture of hypocrisy and denial, in a society littered with fatherless children and the corpses of broken families. The book attempts to reach out to all men who have ever been defamed as Deadbeat Dads, as the lowliest of social scum in the popular culture, and to all people who have found their strange childhood origins transformed into troubled adult relationships, and who then have sojourned through various levels of hell, in the world of difficult marriages, divorces, child-custody battles, and paternity suits. The message of the book to all such people is that you are not alone, and that there are ways to resist being destroyed.

The story is told as the chronologically straightforward memoir of an anonymous man who thinks he might speak for many other people. The narrative is highly subjective and full of closely detailed experience and psychological analysis. Beneath its surface presentation, the individually unique story seeks to validate the pedagogy of "single case-study analysis." That which is unique attempts to elucidate an entire class (or two) of cases, in description of several developments that have become major features of the American social landscape. These developments include the explosion of divorces initiated by women, the concomitant expansion of non-custodial fathers' ranks, and the untold escalation of paternity suits, all of which have unfolded in relation to wide-scale defamation of men in general and fathers in particular, under the onerous institutions of the American government and court system. Because it is told as an experiential and psychoanalytical memoir, the story attempts to capture the crises and emotions of fathers who lose their children, children who lose their fathers, men entrapped in child-support servitude, and women whose control of family relations is rooted in the heart of militant feminism.

There are many stories related between the covers of this book. The reader is challenged to suspend judgment of the author's character until the main story is told out. The author does expect to be judged severely in the end, but the reader's biggest challenge will be to decide if the story should ever have been told at all. The author was trained as an artist and presents this work as a large canvas. Paragraphs can be compared to brush-strokes and stories and themes flow in patterns that cannot be understood in their full dimensions until the book finally ends. Look at the work as a painting, and allow the inter-related stories to unfold in their own way, blending into and out of one another, conforming only to the messiness of life's spiraling path. Don't try to comprehend all the patterns along the way; instead, rest assured that eventually all loose strings will be tied together. Think of the work as a New Age soap opera, and as a father's protest against militant feminism, especially as the second half unfolds. Understand the long letters, when you get to them, as words that changed the world. Finally, don't expect to find no light at all in the dark tones of painful experience, because there eventually is some brightness in the gloom, and that is a big part of the message.

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