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.

Starred review from May 15, 2018

A well-known author once told Pulitzer Prize winner Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &Clay; Wonder Boys; Telegraph Avenue), "You can write books or you can have kids...you lose a book for every child." Yet Chabon, father of four, argues that books, unlike children, don't love you back. So begins this literary ode to parenting in which the author admires his son Abe's rare gift for doing things with panache but struggles to understand his love for fashion, stumbles over bedtime reading, and ponders how to teach his son how to treat the women in his life even as he explores his own foibles and failures in this regard. As parenting is likely to lead to self-reflection, Chabon further examines his own childhood through the looking glass, contemplating his decision not to follow in his father's footsteps and become a doctor. In the last section, Chabon writes about visiting his father, who is hospitalized for a possibly fatal infection, meditating on his own relationship with Dad. VERDICT Literary and emotionally provocative, Chabon's memoir is a quick read that will appeal to parents as well as fans of his fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/17.]

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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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Starred review from March 15, 2018
Don't have children, an established writer once cautioned Chabon, since doing so would stunt his career. So recalls the prolific, best-selling Chabon (Moonglow, 2016)?father of four?in the opener to his latest essay collection, a celebration of fatherhood. Little Man is a waggish GQ profile of his youngest son, a fashionista since kindergarten. In The Bubble People, a wait in line at a Berkeley coffee shop with his teenage daughter becomes a meditation on style, place, and feeling at home among freakazoids. Other essays relate the ways in which fatherhood has altered Chabon's relationship to certain pastimes. Adventures in Euphemism is a hilarious and sobering confession of how he handled the n-word while reading Mark Twain to his children. In The Old Ball Game, his lifelong love for baseball dissipates when his son joins a Little League team until his daughter helps reignite his interest. And in the eponymous closer, Chabon pens a paean to his father, a doctor, whom he fondly remembers as a man of impossibly varied tastes and an astounding memory. Chabon expertly weaves together past and present events, infusing them with humor, pop culture, and profound observations, lovingly portraying the inspiring individuals some thought might put an end to his brilliant, vital writing career. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Chabon is always a favorite, and this collection will have special magnetism, given the initial warm response to his GQ essay about his son.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)