Dad Had a Bad Day

“Ashton Politanoff’s Dad Had a Bad Day is probably the funniest book I’ve read this decade – an inheritor of the flame of greats like Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, Robert Coover.”
—Luke Kennard, The Guardian

“In his last book, You’ll Like It Here, Politanoff created a portrait of the town of Redondo Beach, California, using a fragmentary, polyvocal style composed of fictional news clippings, vignettes, and photographs. While Dad Had a Bad Day has a single point of view and tells a single story, it also relies on a fragmentary style of brief moments and scattered reflections, none longer a than a few pages and most clocking in at two or fewer. This abrupt, laconic style, heavy on white space and understatement, fits the characters perfectly.”
—Wilson McBee, Southwest Review

“[A] brilliant pitch-black comedy novel . . . ferociously compelling . . . A highlight of Dad Had a Bad Day is its unique structure, which keeps everything off-kilter, toying with the reader’s mind a bit, almost like a sludgy bad-weather match where the underdog aims to muck up every shot to throw every game out of whack.”
—Patrick J. Sauer, The Second Serve

“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.”
—Beau Dealey, Racquet Magazine

“Dad Had a Bad Day is a breezy, funny, occasionally cringe-inducing ride. Politanoff traces the strange gravity tennis can exert when the rest of life feels uncertain. Beneath the energetic writing and hyperbole lies a sharper question: In an age defined by social isolation, do the rituals and minor solidarities of adult rec tennis function as a kind of antidote? And if they do—what happens when you exceed the recommended dosage?”
—Tyler Pell, Portland Tennis Courterly

“In the dearth of ‘manosphere’ books, Dad Had a Bad Day cuts through the noise. A bleak, often troubling look at what happens when we follow our worst impulses, Politanoff has created a man motivated by both pompousness and deep insecurity.”
—Sam Franzini, Our Culture

“Politanoff has created a tense, funny, and fascinating depiction of contemporary masculinity and fatherhood.”
—Alexander Moran, Booklist

“Arresting . . . Politanoff parlays his own experience as a former D1 tennis player into brisk and technical descriptions of the sport . . . there’s plenty here to enjoy.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Ned’s reckoning with midlife disillusionment and the bifurcation of identity that accompanies parenthood is aptly rendered and darkly funny.”
—Katia Savchuk, The Believer

“An excellent tennis book that embodies the agony of the sport itself. Obsessive, competitive, psychologically damaged, the manic energy that runs through Ashton Politanoff’s novel is a high-wire act sustained by his prickly sentences and imagination for interior madness. Dad Had a Bad Day is deranged and also a really good time.”
—Kevin Nguyen, author of My Documents

“Call it tennis court noir. Politanoff is one of my favorite writers working today, and he applies maximum spin to every sentence of this nervy, funny, heartbreaking novel. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go practice my serve.”
—Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

“One dark thing I love about sports: the cost of goodness is often some other badness. Dad Had a Bad Day is perhaps the best novel I’ve ever read on that theme. At turns hilarious, acrid, haunted, and sweet—yet none of those notes landed where I expected. This novel wrong-footed me. It left me stumbling on the hard court, and I can’t stop thinking about it.”
—Giri Nathan, author of Changeover

“This book is a triumph. Dripping in masculinity and self pity, Ned, college tennis star of yore, is thrillingly unhinged and now mooching off his hard-working, capable, professionally employed wife while he spirals in and out of old beefs and a renewed pursuit of on-court glory. Impeccably, propulsively, and hilariously rendered, Politanoff writes about tennis like Barry Hannah wrote about alcohol–something swift, addictive, fun, life-giving and also totally filthy. I gulped this book whole in a single sitting. Nobody writes like Ashton Politanoff.”
—Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

“Dad Had a Bad Day is a funny, moving, often disturbing portrait of men—alone and in groups, as sons and fathers—filled with strange detail, bold swerves, and the idiosyncratic language of sport.”
—Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch

“A compelling examination of destructive fatherhoods and their replication across generations.”
—David Hayden, author of Darker With the Lights On