Go with the flow

“Go with the flow” is a family catchphrase that Conrad Hensley hears as a lesson in abdication rather than acceptance. His father invokes it to make disorder sound inevitable; Conrad’s memory turns the phrase into an indictment of adults who dress weakness and appetite in the language of wisdom.

Family Use and Meaning

Conrad’s father offers the phrase when Conrad, still a child, discovers his parents in bed with another man and woman. The four adults are naked on a mattress on the floor, without sheets, and the scene leaves Conrad feeling shamed and dishonored. His father responds, “Well, Conrad, sometimes you just gotta go with the flow.” The casual reassurance does not explain what Conrad has seen; in his recollection, it attempts to place a mystical gloss over surrender to the lowest animal appetites.

The phrase belongs to a broader pattern of instability at home. Conrad remembers his mother forgetting a school conference, dishes sliding from the sink, and a dirty Band-Aid remaining on the floor for a month. His father had abandoned heavy drugs but became a drunk who smoked pot, disappeared for days, and eventually left the family. Against this background, “go with the flow” sounds less like a considered principle than a ready-made excuse for failing to provide order, care, or reliability.

Conrad’s Rejection of the Phrase

Conrad’s response is not simply embarrassment at his parents’ unconventional life. He interprets the phrase as an attempt to sanctify passivity: his father’s words make giving in appear mystical, while the scene itself leaves Conrad feeling betrayed. When Conrad later hears people speak blithely of the sexual revolution, the memory returns as a reason for despair at how little supposedly intelligent people understand about the world around them.

That rejection helps explain Conrad’s attraction to a life organized around responsibility. As a young student, he comes to regard order, moral rectitude, courtesy, education, financial success, respectability, pride in one’s children, and domestic tranquillity as a kind of heaven. The remembered phrase thus marks the negative example against which his ideal of a stable family life takes shape: it names the surrender he fears, while his aspirations gather around deliberate obligations.

Contrasts Across the Novel

Other scenes place bodily impulse and masculine self-command in tension without repeating the phrase. Charlie Croker, for example, takes pride in his strength and in a local legend that calls him a man in full; at a financial meeting, he turns a question about his company’s troubles into a display of his imposing physique. During a quail shoot, he experiences the women’s mockery as a challenge to a traditional order in which men hunt and women affirm their role. These episodes show how readily physical power and inherited gender expectations can be treated as evidence of authority.

At Turpmtine, the forceful breeding of a mare is described in terms of surrender and animal lust, giving bodily appetite a literal, public spectacle. Conrad’s childhood memory makes a sharper moral distinction: his father’s appeal to instinct is precisely what he refuses to accept as an adequate guide to living. Later, amid the dangerous, chaotic work of the freezer unit, Conrad catches himself letting “No” enter his heart, takes a deep breath, and returns to the job with “Yes” in his heart. That choice is not a direct repetition of the family phrase, but it forms its counterpoint: where “go with the flow” had excused yielding, Conrad tries to meet hardship through deliberate resolve.

Narrative Significance

The phrase condenses the difference between acquiescence and chosen conduct. It first reaches Conrad as his father’s explanation for a scene that wounds him; its force comes from the gap between the elevated sound of the advice and the disorder it is used to excuse. The recollection also links Conrad’s private family history to his adult insistence on responsibility, making the phrase a compact expression of the life he rejects and the stable, respectful life he hopes to build.