Who are the worst fathers in literature? Our experts make the tough call
- Written by: Suzy Freeman-Greene, Books + Ideas Editor, The Conversation
Literature has long portrayed messed-up families. As poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”
In honour of this rich vein of dysfunction, we asked experts to nominate the worst literary fathers and mothers. Today we delve into dads. Tomorrow, we turn to mothers.
Of course, complex characters – neither wholly good nor bad – are the best sort. Author Andrew O'Hagan has spoken eloquently about striving to humanise even his most unpleasant creations, to fully amplify a novel.
Still, some characters are awfully hard to like. My least favourite dad might be Shug Bain, a cruel, violent man who abandons his wife and kids in Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Shug is appalled by his son Shuggie’s feminine mannerisms. “Look how twisted you’ve made him,” he tells his wife.
Here are our experts’ picks.
James Mortmain, I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
Penguin Books
Zeus wakes up in book 15 of the Iliad, having been lulled to sleep by Hera with sex and potions. Poor Zeus – with his sneaky wife, bickering, divine siblings and children, all trying to manipulate the war at Troy – and he is only trying to keep the Olympian show on the road. Seriously? Who started the family games? And, if he had canned the swan costume and not raped Leda (or the dozens of other nymphs he “manifested himself” to), no Helen, no war, no problems.
He really is the paterfamilias of toxic patriarchy.
– Robert Phiddian
Reunion – John Cheever
The last time you see your father, I hope he is not drunk on Beefeater Gibsons. I hope he doesn’t clap at the wait staff or demand they speak languages they do not know. I hope he doesn’t get you removed from four restaurants in a single afternoon. Walking away as he curses at a newsstand clerk, I hope you don’t mourn his flaws as “your future and your doom”. But, were this all to occur, I hope it’s happening inside a John Cheever story, where the comic and tragic mix like flesh and blood, or gin and vermouth.
– Alex Cothren
Kev, Last Ride – Denise Young
Harper Collins
I’m not in favour of binaries of any kind, so I’m not comfortable with “best” vs “worst”. Rather, I contribute a father figure from Australian literature who may be both/and best/worst. I’m thinking of Kev, the father in Denise Young’s astonishingly moving novel, Last Ride, who takes his ten-year old son, Chook, with him on the run from the law across outback NSW after committing a brutal murder. Kev is among the worst, because: who would drag a kid into that? But Kev is simultaneously among the best, because his love for Chook, and his deep-seated impulse to protect him from another man’s abuse, is as genuine and moving as the paternal instinct gets. Kev wields fatherhood as double-edged sword. I feel for him.
– Julienne van Loon
Albion Gidley Singer, Dark Places – Kate Grenville
Text Publishing
The worst father in literature is an easy one for me, though it has been decades since I have read his story. I first encountered the incestuous father Albion Gidley Singer in Kate Grenville’s novel Lilian’s Story, in which he is a somewhat shadowy but menacing figure. But it’s in Dark Places that Albion’s evil is brought fully to bear. I can’t remember the details of the book, but I can remember all too well the feeling of suffocation that came from being too close to Albion, to his thoughts and his feelings. A tremendous book I never want to read again.
– Natalie Kon-yu
Sam Pollit, The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead
Goodreads
In Christina Stead’s exhilarating and suffocating semi-autobiographical The Man Who Loved Children, the naturalist and patriarch Sam Pollit is nicknamed by his wife Henny “the Great Mouthpiece” for his endless maxims and sickening Pollit-“fambly” patois. He claims to love his many children but mocks, cajoles, and insults them; even has them spy on each other. Family life is so bad that the novel’s heroine, the adolescent Louisa, believes her only hope of escape from the squalor and tyranny is through murder.
– Jane Messer
My pick is a towering figure in Australian fiction: Sam Pollit of Christina Stead’s 1940 masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children. Sam’s oppressive sunniness, his maniacal refusal to look reality in the face, and his demand that his family play along with his ego-fantasy force them to absorb cruelty, mockery and contempt, all the while descending into more and more perilous poverty at his hands. He is a modern day narcissist par excellence, but also a grotesquerie or travesty of optimism as a virtue in the world. In Sam, “positivity” is transformed into dangerous and delusional thinking that steamrolls everything before it and leaves destruction in its wake.
– Edwina Preston
Allie Fox, The Mosquito Coast – Paul Theroux
Charismatic, brilliant and narcissistic, Allie Fox drags his family off to live in an isolated part of Honduras’ Mosquito Coast to escape what he has persuaded himself is the impending end of the world. Like any colonist, he takes over a village and attempts to introduce Western technology and ideas. It all ends in catastrophe of course, and his wife and children barely escape with their lives. Allie is the exemplar of the charming destroyer and is at the top of my “bad dad” list.
– Jen Webb
Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Penguin Books
Herman Melville, a great American author, was a lamentable father and an erratic provider for his family, who drove his son Malcolm to shoot himself in his bedroom in his parents’ house in 1867 after a row about the 18-year-old’s late hours. Melville’s fictional character Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick behaves even more reprehensibly, abandoning his own wife and son to focus obsessively on a doomed quest for a white whale that ultimately leads his whole crew to destruction. Ahab takes his name from the worst king of Israel in the Old Testament, and the author of this epic novel trains his gaze not just on one bad father, but the whole nature of patriarchy.
– Paul Giles
Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Penguin books
The worst father in fiction has to be one of the first fathers in the horror genre, the eponymous figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Victor, of course, does not beget the monstrous creature via the conventional method of procreating with a female, and he fashions his infamous progeny out of corpses, but he is very much a horrible dad when he denies his ghastly son his love. The Swiss medical genius is the true Gothic monster here, not the hapless and unsightly creature who just wants to be loved.
– Ali Alizadeh
My dear Victor,
I should address you Father, but how can I? I do not have your own creator’s Miltonic power to throw moral injunction at you, as Satan did to God: “Did I request thee … from darkness to promote me?” Was there ever a son whose “being” (your own word) is not named but de-named as monster, dreaded spectre, fiend, vile insect, abhorred devil? I have entered literature as a hideous progeny, as an abortion and an anomaly. You never gave me love but do not forget, Father, that my form is “a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance”.
Your son.
– Vijay Mishra
The novel’s horror is set in motion not just by Victor’s transgressive hubris as a scientist, but also by his refusal to accept responsibility. Victor abandons his “monster” at almost the moment after its birth, and repeatedly rejects its appeals for compassion and empathy. Victor’s attempts to disavow his legacy are ultimately futile, as his creation relentlessly pursues his “father” to the end of his days.
– Julian Novitz
Thomas Sutpen, William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom!
Goodreads
“They feared him and they hated him because of his ruthlessness.” Thomas Sutpen is truly one of William Faulkner’s most terrifying creations: a man who arrives in Mississippi with nothing and wills a dynasty into being. Everything – his marriage, his children, his land – is subsumed by his amoral “design,” which he pursues at any cost and with no concern for those who get in his way.
When a hidden fact about his first marriage comes to light, he casts aside his wife and child, setting in motion a cycle of vengeance that consumes the Sutpen line. In Faulkner’s hands, this ghastly patriarch ultimately becomes a figure for the antebellum South itself – built on inhumanity, colonialism and slavery, unwilling to reckon with the horrors of the reality it has brought into being.
– Alexander Howard
Do you have a nomination for the worst father – or mother – in literature? If so, let us know by scrolling to the end of this article and adding your choice in the comments.
Authors: Suzy Freeman-Greene, Books + Ideas Editor, The Conversation 
