Overview
It was the eve of the fifties, a time of McCarthyism and the fear of godless communism, but also a time of cautious hope for the future. Across America, homes were being built. Dreams took shape in frames, windows, and ridgepoles. The dream was so strong in one young husband and father that he uprooted his family and built the dream house himself. But at what cost? Why did his life seem to go so wrong afterward - why the restlessness, the string of jobs, the endless moves that culminated in what became known as the Great Family Saga? And why, forty years later, does the house still exert such power over the imagination of his son, who was still a child when the family left the house behind? In this frank, soul-searching, and broadly appealing memoir, Tom Froncek goes home again - to pay tribute to his dream-struck father, and to try to make sense of the past. Reconstructing the building of the house that he witnessed with a child's awe, he finds again the hero his father was, but also more difficult truths. From the memory of that dream house emerges a many-layered book: recounting the adventure of a fifties childhood, the conflicted relationship of a father and son, and the odyssey of a family in America's age of promise.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
This gracefully written and moving account by Froncek (Take Away One) focuses on his very ambivalent relationship with his father, Walter. On a visit home, the author is drawn to the Wisconsin house Walter designed and built with his own hands in the late 1940s. The construction required extraordinary sacrifices from Froncek's mother, which included housekeeping for a year in a one-room cabin without running water; she submitted to this arrangement because she felt her husband should have the chance to pursue his dream, notes the author. Unfortunately, shortly after the house was completed, Walter's lifelong discontent led him to move his family back and forth across the country as he frequently changed jobs. Although Froncek admired his father's self-reliance, he bitterly resented changing neighborhoods and schools, and admits to being emotionally damaged by his father's cold, critical manner. With Walter now bedridden in a nursing home, Froncek looks back on the love, however qualified, that they shared. Photos not seen by PW. (June)Ilene Cooper
It should have been a perfect example of the American Dream, postWorld War II version. Midwestern working-class man aspires to better himself and to own his own home, so he goes to night school and builds his dream house. Yet it's not enough: the scaled-down dream house is never quite finished, and the jobs are never quite good enough, launching Walter Froncek and his family, including young son Tom, on a seemingly endless succession of new jobs and relocations. Standing behind Tom's increasing frustration with his father and their nomadic life in search of something more is the elusive stability symbolized by that hand-built house, the dream abandoned. Froncek tells the painful story of his youth with a complex mix of still-unresolved anger toward and growing tenderness for his father, a man whose dreams both defined and damned him. With echoes of "Death of a Salesman" and Tobias Wolff's "This Boy's Life" (1989), Froncek's powerful memoir is both a blue-collar tragedy and a bitterly ironic prequel to Tracy Kidder's "House", that 1985 ode to yuppie homeownership.Kirkus Reviews
Anger and resentment fuel this memoir by journalist Froncek (Take Away One, 1985)—his emotions directed toward his father, once stern and powerful, now disabled by Alzheimer's and multiple strokes.The book grows out of a visit during which Froncek realizes that he may never see his father, Walter, alive again. During the weekend he mulls over the past: Driven by an apparent restlessness beyond his son's understanding, Walter moved his family countless times both in and around Wisconsin, and even as far as Detroit and California. He seemed to be searching for the perfect home, though, as his son remembers it, they had the perfect home—one that Walter built by a small Wisconsin woods in 1949, when Thomas was six; the family lived there for three years. As Thomas reviews his life, he recalls the joy of playing cowboys and Indians in the woods, the perplexity of growing up Catholic, the rise of McCarthyism, the pain of constantly moving, and the desire to please a father who never encouraged or praised. Finally, with help from his mother, he succeeds in comprehending this driven being—the key lies in grasping the grandeur of ordinary dreams. His mother also reveals the money troubles and private agonies of those uprooted years. The constant moving left a lasting impression on Froncek: As a journalist, he happily took on far-away assignments until the stability of a wife and child settled him down to living in one place.
Although Froncek's feelings run deep and his portrayal of a strong man laid low is affecting, his flat, unsophisticated writing slows down the narrative and detracts from its potential power.