About.com Rating



MacMillan Audio, April 2008

In A Wolf at the Table, Augusten Burroughs returns to the story of his dysfunctional family, a subject that he mastered in his bestseller, Running with Scissors (2003). Running with Scissors covers the time that Burroughs spent living in the home of his mother's therapist; A Wolf at the Table is a prequel, focusing on the period that the author lived with both of his parents prior to their divorce.

If Running with Scissors is Burroughs' family comedy of sorts, then A Wolf at the Table is its tragedy. None of the zany humor present in his earlier book surfaces in this one, which is at times heart-breakingly sad. Burroughs' insensitive father is this story's villain, a man whose minor offenses include starving a household pet to a gruesome death and using an aggressive dog to intimidate those around him. But as Burroughs narrates the tale, his father's actions seem more forgivable than his omissions.

Throughout this book, Burroughs tells story after story highlighting his father's twisted personality, but he also tells of his own attempts to connect with a man who seems to deny his son the most basic expressions of love. "Because I never hugged my father," says Burroughs, "it was his embrace I sought most of all." The book's timeframe stretches from Burroughs' first memories of his father's looming presence to the moments leading up to his father's death. Even beyond that, the book is a story about how a person such as Burroughs's father can be life-altering force even in his absence.

Burroughs constructs a void in this story where a relationship between father and son might have existed. As he sees his father from the other side of a screen door, "A trick of the light made him appear not as a man in shadow but the black absence of a man, a cut-out, a void." In this telling moment, Burroughs' description of his father indicates the physical and emotional hollow that readers will come to identify as a theme in the book.

In a story that could quickly become too dark to bear, Burroughs manages to give readers some glimmers of light. "Where there is nothing, absolutely anything is possible, and this thrilled me," he says. "It gave me hope." It is this hope, perhaps, that propels Burroughs through his childhood and enables him to take up such emotionally roiling subject matter in his writing.

This review is of the audio version, an eight-CD set, of A Wolf at the Table, which is an extremely sensory experience. The author's inflection adds drama to the plot, and additional sound effects help set the tone for the story. For example, in the book's opening scene, Burroughs is running through the woods to escape his father, and the accompanying audio includes such ambient sounds as the crackling of branches underfoot and the fast breath of a frantic youth. Throughout his reading of the story, Burroughs alters his voice so that readers will come to recognize the different speech patterns and accents of its characters.

This nine-hour unabridged audio version of A Wolf at the Table also includes author commentary and an original soundtrack written and performed by Patti Smith, Ingrid Michaelson, Sea Wolf, and Tegan Quin as a musical response to A Wolf at the Table, Burroughs explains, capturing the essence of a story told by a writer who remains tender to the tragedy it contains.