Pops

Starred review from February 26, 2018
Pulitzer-winning novelist Chabon (Moonglow) brings together a deeply affecting collection of essays that scrutinize and celebrate the complexities of relationships between fathers and their children. Selections range from the quietly heartbreaking, as when Chabon describes the inadvertent hurt a father can impart on a child, to the hilarious, as he describes his son taking his idiosyncratic sense of style into the “heteronormative jaws of seventh grade.” Avoiding an overly sentimental tone or rose-colored perspective, Chabon doesn’t shy away from reflecting on parental failures as well as successes. In the particularly moving essay “Little Man,” he regrets missing the signs one son sends as he struggles to create his own identity (“You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you, and if you are lucky, they even on occasion manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is never enough”). Chabon is a gifted essayist whose narratives lead to unexpected and resonant conclusions. His work here packs an outsized emotional punch that will stick with readers significantly longer than it takes them to read this slim volume.

March 1, 2018
A compact collection of thematically linked essays, perfectly timed for Father's Day.Acclaimed novelist Chabon (Moonglow, 2016, etc.) takes a breezy approach in these meditations on fatherhood. The author demonstrates subtly how his own relationship with his father, whom he plainly loves but finds removed and difficult, has influenced his relationships with his children. Will his kids ever write, as he does in the powerful title essay that concludes the collection, that their father "will in other ways disappoint, disillusion, or unfavorably surprise me over the coming decades"? Not if he can help it, though he recognizes that the child-father relationship is fraught with challenges and is perhaps inherently problematic. Though he loves baseball, Chabon finds himself discouraging his son from playing for some of the same reasons his own father prevented him from playing it (pressure, failure, parents behaving like jerks). Yet he ultimately permitted his son to join--throughout, he is a very permissive parent, more permissive than his father's generation was likely to be--and his son had a miserable time. This caused the father to question his own lifelong devotion to the sport. His lament about kids no longer having sandlot pickup games is by no means original, but rarely has it been expressed so well: "I got reminded, every game, that this was the world my children live in: the world in which the wild watershed of childhood has been brought fully under control of the adult Corps of Engineers." The author combines perfect pitch of tone with an acute eye for detail, whether reporting on his 13-year-old son's unlikely emergence as a fashion savant--"where'd you get this kid?" designer John Varvatos once asked him. "I really have no idea," responded the author--or trying to navigate his way through reading Huckleberry Finn aloud to his children without repeating a word that makes him recoil.Even when he's driving at cruising speed, Chabon takes his readers for an enjoyable ride.

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May 15, 2018

At the heart of this essay collection on fatherhood from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon is his GQpiece "My Son, the Prince of Fashion," explaining how he came to appreciate his 13-year-old son's singular passion when accompanying him to Paris Men's Fashion Week. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

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