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Fathers and Sons (Magill Book Reviews)

For the twenty-three contributors to this volume, the terrain of father/son relations is clearly treacherous ground, but they doggedly survey this prickly territory, in spite of the pain. As John Skow’s introduction suggests, a melancholy haunts these autobiographical stories, a desperation over articulating the emotions that mothers and daughters are somehow able to convey to each other. Between men there remains only an awkward silence.

Many stories describe this problem of using language to express and disguise feelings by focusing on that moment when a father and son’s struggle with words collapses into an ambiguous gesture—a gruff, drunken hug, a reluctant spanking, a tender but tense game of catch. Intimacy is implied, affection displaced into oblique physical action. As Charles Gaines puts it in “Cooking the Rat,” the father can’t say it, he can only keep serving himself up to the boy, hoping that the son will someday be able to read the text of this inarticulate behavior.

Another recurrent theme is the search for the lost father: lost to war (Stratis Haviaris’ “Every Time I Spill Red Wine I Panic”), to divorce (Kent Nelson’s “The Middle of Nowhere”), to suicide (Keith Barret’s “Promises”), to early death (David Seybold’s “In the Company of Demons,” Nick Lyons’ “Finding Father” and Jim Fergus’ “My Father’s Son”). The father’s absence becomes the defining feature of the young man’s life and the key to his search for an identity. And what about a father’s legacy to his son? Is it a gift or a curse to be a chip off the old block? Does it help or hurt when it comes to initiating the next generation of sons into manhood? Does it affect the crucial and, in these stories, the central contest for a father’s approval?

Nowhere is this business of living up to a father’s expectations more wrenchingly described than in Laton McCartney’s “Buck Fever,” the story of a vaguely aesthetic son’s failure to perform with grace under pressure for his Hemingwayesque father. He is humiliated when he inexpertly applies his father’s lessons in the mystique of fighting, flyfishing, hunting, drinking. With its focus on blood sports, this story is typical of the anthology. Perhaps because most of the writers are from the West or rural New England, the fathers here are largely outdoorsmen; they fish and hunt, smoke endless Viceroys and drink seas of bourbon, drive fast cars and ride tall horses. But even if this is not an urban landscape, the dominating image has a universal feel: It is of two men signaling to each other across generations and vast emotional spaces, each uncertain of the gestures and how they should be read. It is an image of frustration and isolation, of truth and disillusion, and yet of an odd, persistent hope as well. They do keep signaling, keep searching for the connection.