When I read the first few pages of Ashton Politanoff’s new novel, Dad Had a Bad Day, I projected unkind assumptions onto his clipped, repetitive syntax; his fragmented, vignette-driven plotting; his aimless, aloof protagonist, a suburban father and former collegiate tennis star named Ned. Politanoff was showing trademarks of the style-over-substance alt-lit crowd; I feared I was in for something emotionally withholding, narratively flat.
But I kept reading. As much as I had reservations about the novel, I also could not put it down, and after a while I had to admit that Politanoff was at least a solid craftsman. His atmospheric descriptions were spare but sensuous. The characters he’d imagined—not only Ned but also his young son, Freddy, and his friends at the tennis club he joined without his wife’s knowledge—were spirited and peculiar, their actions and motivations “perceived rather than assembled,” to remix a Richard Brody dictum. And his dialogue was perfectly rhythmic, to the point of being hypnotic. Until it was electrified by frenetic, Tim Robinson-style outbursts—then I was wide awake; then I was cracking the f up.
Soon I was halfway through, and I found myself surrendering to the illusion of first-person fiction: that I had merged with the narrative I. I—Ned—was crazy! As the newly-appointed captain of my club’s men’s tennis team, I would do anything for my squad—even stalk the captain of a rival club whom I suspected of colluding with league officials. I was wild! There I was, a married man, playing footsie with Carlin, a married woman, in the club’s jacuzzi. Poor me! One flashback showed me enduring my step-father’s neck-throttling abuse, triggered by disappointing match results, with eerie detachment. Another surfaced a junior training academy helmed by sadistic Russians, “the brothers Bortnik;” they teased me, no older than 11, for playing “like a real pussy,” then ran me until I puked.
By the end of my reading, by the time I’d disentangled my I from Ned’s, there was no doubt that I had really enjoyed the novel and gravely underestimated its writer. I empathized with its unraveling protagonist, a man defenseless against his repetition compulsion. I delighted in its chiseled prose, and the suspense and surprise of its plot, even if its ending left me churning, unnerved. But I still had questions. What was up with those epistolary interludes—the cryptic, seemingly-unsent letters addressed to Ned’s wife that popped up every 30 or so pages? Why was there a disembodied, omniscient force (“the voice”) lurking in the club’s steam room, encouraging Ned’s re-immersion in tennis, a sport he hadn’t played in 14 years? Why that ending?
When I sat down to interview Politanoff, I wanted to know what motivated these and other curious creative choices. Could he make them intelligible within a larger narrative logic? Could that logic unify the story’s terrific parts, justify its oddities?
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
BD: I want to start by relating Dad Had a Bad Day, your second novel, to your first, You’ll Like It Here, which was avant-garde historical fiction, a bricolage about Redondo Beach, California in the early 20th century. You used news clippings, ads, and other textual artifacts to capture life in the South Bay in that era. In this novel, geography is largely an afterthought. The reader knows that Ned lives in a suburb of a city with skyscrapers and palm trees, but not much else. Can you explain why you chose not to root your reader firmly in place?
AP: I think it has to do with creative novelty. I didn’t want to feel like I was doing the same exact thing with Dad Had a Bad Day as I had done with You’ll Like It Here. I think working in a fictional realm adjacent to Redondo Beach, without spelling it out, allowed me to focus on crafting a character-driven story about obsession. And my own complicated relationship to tennis. Formally, there are similarities between the two books, in that in both, I work with tight little bursts of text. But I was interested in building a more traditional narrative with this second book.
BD: The central interpersonal dynamic in this novel is the relationship between fathers and sons. As a kid, Ned was abused by his step-father. As a father, he can’t quite break the cycle of intergenerational trauma; he’s an alternately neglectful and corrupting influence on his six-year-old son, Freddy. Ned either leaves Freddy home alone at night to go hit serves at the club—or when he’s forced to drag him along to interclub matchplay, he enlists him to cut the strings of rivals. What do fathers project onto their sons, on and off the tennis court?
AP: I think as a father now—I have two young boys—learning how to separate my own daily frustrations from contaminating my interactions with them is really important. I feel like that’s my responsibility as a good parent. Also, not to sound really new-agey, but I try to be in the moment and enjoy time with my kids while they’re still kids. I think Ned really struggles with that—compartmentalizing and being present. He struggles with shame, and the feeling that he’s not an agent of his own life, and I think he finds that agency temporarily by captaining this men’s team at his club, but it makes him a less attentive dad.
BD: I want to stay on this for a moment, because fathers really haunt this novel. Ned encounters them on nearly every court he plays on or passes by. Sometimes they’re exacting hitting partners to talented but imperfect sons. Sometimes they’re more like henchmen, watching from the stands and affirming obviously incorrect line calls. Either way, they’re everywhere, and they pretty uniformly piss Ned off. He tells them to fuck off, he ultimately gets violent with one. From a craft perspective, what motivated you to make that motif so ubiquitous?
AP: I was interested in the masculine notion of not being expressive. I liked that there was this tension throughout: we identify Ned’s fixation on fathers and father figures, but we can’t place why, or what it stems from. When I was writing the novel, I had a sense of what I was building towards, which was a lighter ending, and then I jettisoned that. And I let Ned lead me to darker territory.
BD: Ned is an active character, consumed by this growing obsession with tennis, but he’s not very introspective. Did you present these external symbols of his inner turmoil so the reader could better understand his motivations?
AP: Yes, absolutely. Ned is haunted by his past, and these figures he comes across—whether it’s the father of an old childhood rival, or an anonymous father feeding balls to his son—trigger his downward spiral. They catalyze something unresolved within him that he’s not even aware of, that he’s still harboring.
BD: I want to talk about your literary influences. I saw a lot of John Cheever in this novel. Especially his classic story, “The Swimmer.” Your Ned shares a name with Cheever’s protagonist, Neddy Merrill, who pool-hops across his suburban paradise increasingly dissociatively until he realizes that he’s lost the life he thought he had. Your Ned suffers a similar final fate. How conscious of Cheever’s influence were you when writing?
AP: Cheever, I just love. His short stories are the best. I have his book by my bedside. I probably should get another copy because the paperback is so tattered. The way he writes about men and masculinity is so perceptive and timeless, and the language is so beautiful. Even though he was of a different era and social norms are different now, I still feel those stories really resonate when I read them. He’s definitely someone I was thinking about when approaching certain subject matter, especially the suburban setting. In terms of other influences, I love Michael Ondaatje, especially Coming Through Slaughter, which straddles the avant-garde. There are two main storylines in that novel, about a barber and a photographer, and the barber is not a very good father. I was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea while I was writing the book; that was the only book I was reading at the time, and I was reading it very slowly. Her dark humor appealed to me. I also drew from the satirical elements of Bret Easton Ellis, specifically American Psycho’s business card oneupsmanship. That was something I was thinking about in relation to the absurdity of tennis club culture. Even just being around it as an adult now, I see so much perseveration on USTA, or UTR, ratings. And I saw it all the time as a junior. I would get asked about my rating all the time. My friends would get asked that question all the time.
BD: I always enjoyed your writing about Ned’s matchplay. The language there is economical, as it always is with you, but it’s also very vivid, emotionally and visually. What was your approach to crafting those scenes?
AP: It was really hard for me to write point play. I don’t like most tennis films, because they get it wrong. It looks phony. So I’m a really harsh critic of myself when trying to write about it. I think approaching it with some resistance, an internal tension, helped me write the way I wanted to: I wanted it to be precise, but I wanted it to be vivid, too. I didn’t want to dumb it down for somebody who doesn’t know the game. I think that goes back to Michael Ondaatje, and his notion of the language of the expert. Even if he isn’t an expert on a subject he’s writing about, he tries to learn as much as he can about it and draw from its vernacular, which lends authority to the prose.
BD: Tennis is a complicated metaphor in Ned’s life. On the one hand, it’s a civilizing force. Ned joins a moderately fancy tennis club, where he makes friends and improves his physical well-being—he’s working out for what seems like the first time in a long time. But on the other hand, tennis brings out some pretty dangerous instincts in him: anger, lust, self-absorption. What is it about the sport—the culture surrounding it, the actual playing of it—that creates this moral interplay?
AP: Tennis represents a second chance to Ned, initially. A second chance to what, though? To correct the past? He’s living in the past. The past is gone. There’s a gladiatorial element to tennis. When I was growing up, there was this fixation on perfection: perfect technique, perfect results. I played at Robert Lansdorp’s academy from about eight years old, off and on, until about 12 or 13. Robert gave me my foundation as a tennis player. I had excellent technique, excellent ground strokes, but his academy was a really tough environment. It was unforgiving. This book features a junior tennis academy, which is obviously a fictional exaggeration—that is not what I experienced or what others experienced at Lansdorp’s. But it could be brutal.
BD: Lansdorp coached Pete Sampras, Maria Sharapova, Lindsay Davenport, and Tracy Austin. Did your relationship with him continue after you were his student?
AP: If my memory serves me correctly, I stopped taking lessons from him when he moved his operation from the South Bay to the San Fernando Valley. But I would see him around later on. He coached some of my friends. I have vivid memories of his academy. I remember watching Justin and Russell Gimmelstob on the top court. They were amazing players. Lansdorp’s students played a certain way: they hit through the ball. I remember being on the other side of a Lansdorp student—the way the ball would just penetrate the court. Robert had this old racquet and he’d make you swing it with the racquet cover on. You’d swing it repeatedly, and because of the resistance of the racquet cover, it would really create muscle memory and instill the stroke he was looking for.
BD: You seem to have a lot of reverence for Lansdorp. But you also just described the atmosphere of his academy as unforgiving. Do you forgive him for his excesses as a coach?
AP: Let me put it this way: the moments where I may have cried on his court, I remember him feeling really bad about it. There was remorse there. I don’t think it was his intention to upset me. And I will say, Robert never perseverated on my ranking. Which I appreciated, because I had other coaches who did, and I think that was potentially more harmful to my relationship to the game. As an eight-year-old, I was definitely very intimidated by Robert. He was a very imposing figure. Loud, booming voice. He was very respected and feared when he stepped onto the court.
BD: I saw in a New York Times obituary that Lansdorp would feed balls out of a shopping cart. And that image appears, I counted, twice in your novel. There’s a shopping cart on the court when Ned’s college coach prescribes the drill that will eviscerate his labrum. In another moment, when Ned and Roland are adolescents, they take balls out of a shopping court on a back court of the academy and smack them into the air, as a way of expelling repressed anger toward their mean, crazy dads. So there are symbols of Lansdorp in painful moments in the novel. But what you describe of him in real life is more nuanced and forgiving: maybe he was a little too hard on kids, but he always felt bad about it. I don’t want to imply that this is a work of autofiction, but what is the relationship between the reality of memory, and fiction based loosely on, or influenced by, memory?
AP: I also resist the autofiction label and try to steer away from it as a writer. But yes, I grew up playing competitive tennis, I played college tennis, and so did Ned. So in that sense, this book is more personal than say, You’ll Like It Here, which deals with early 20th century Redondo Beach. But I did truly intend to craft the coaches at Ned’s academy, the brothers, as fictional. I didn’t view them as analogous to Robert. However, having been part of an intense tennis academy, I’m sure that some choices were made, subconsciously, that make certain elements more adjacent to memory than I had originally intended. The notion of the academy was huge when I was growing up. Rick Macci was in Florida; you had the Van Der Meer academy back east; Bollettieri’s, obviously. They were all run by these intense dudes. I haven’t read Infinite Jest—I know I should, the minimalist in me has sort of resisted it—but tapping into my version of the academy setting was something I really wanted to do. But it came in the second draft. The book had already been acquired, and I was working with my editor, Emily Bell, in expanding it, and a friend who read the book suggested I put something about a junior tennis academy in there.
BD: Ned remembers his past in lurid images. His conscious memories haven’t been sanitized by time. But he still has this strong urge to replicate that traumatic past. Is Ned’s nostalgia for his tennis-playing days about reliving them as they were? Or is it about redoing them—getting a second chance to do things differently?
AP: You’re tapping into something interesting, the sort of lurid, lucid quality of Ned’s memories. I think they’re like that for Ned because he hasn’t really confronted them until that moment. Tennis triggers their re-emergence.
BD: As he gets deeper into the memories, his obsession with tennis deepens.
AP: I think that’s the tragedy of Ned. That he thinks he can correct something that happened before. When the reality is no, you just have to turn over a new page. Obviously confront it, deal with it, but then move on.
BD: Is it important to you that your work is instructive in any way?
AP: I remember when the writer Brian Evenson interviewed my friend Kathryn Scanlan about her work, and he mentioned that the work he’s drawn to as a reader is experiential. I think that was really my ultimate motivation: to create an experience for the reader. I think there are perhaps some instructive tools in the novel, like, hey, tennis is just a game, don’t take it so seriously, just have fun. On a more serious note, I can see that fixation on correcting something that can’t be corrected as being instructive. But while I was writing, it came from instinct, a feeling. I was caught in a fever dream. I didn’t have a hard-set intention of leaving the reader with some sort of message. I think, though, that Ned’s story can be viewed in a way as a cautionary tale.
BD: Mystery is a key force in the story. There’s the capital M, classically Mysterious subplot of Ned’s investigation into Roland’s disappearance. There are also shadowy, mysterious characters: Ned’s wife, Loraine, is a largely absent figure whom Ned mostly engages through unsent letters. There’s also “the voice” in the steam room. The voice knows of Ned’s past tennis glory and encourages him to recapture it. What compelled you to inject so many question marks into this work?
AP: Tension is really important for me as a writer—infusing a text with as much tension as I can, in a judicious way. I don’t want to go overboard with it, where it impedes the quality of the narrative or the reading experience. But yes, I tried to build tension through these unresolved conflicts with his missing friend, and his wife. With the letters I was speaking to the disintegration of their marriage. They’re not talking to each other. He’s not communicating what’s bothering him, other than in these letters, which, in my mind, he’s not giving to her. Except the last one, perhaps. As it relates to “the voice,” I wanted to create a sense of star quality for Ned at the club. Whether that’s real or not is another question. It was also a way to build the world of the club. And then formally, I wanted to break the rhythm of a linear narrative. Conversations with the voice in the steam room, or the letters to Loraine, which are at first humorous and then more revealing of his fraying interiority, helped do that. I also liked approaching the letters as a different mode of writing. I think entering these different modes—whether it’s dialogue or scene description or more epistolary—is fun as a writer.
BD: Now I’m thinking differently about those two devices. The letters are self-aggrandizing and slightly disordered; they read like delusions of grandeur. And “the voice,” this thing no one else seems to hear, is most likely an imagined phenomenon symptomatic of serious mental illness. It’s funny, when I was reading, I thought those were just authorial quirks meant to put the story in a surrealist, experimental realm. Do you see your novel in that way? Or do you see it as realistic fiction told from the perspective of a mad person?
AP: I like that it plays with genre, but I see it as the latter, absolutely.
Beau Dealy is a literary scout for film and television. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs and InsideHook.