Fatherhood Doesn’t Have to Be a Private Endeavor
8 min read
American literature is full of books about fathers. Philip Roth, John Updike, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, David Gilbert, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, and many, many more have written, in fiction or memoir, about father-son relationships—for the most part, from the perspective of the son. In many of these works, the father figure becomes a representative of masculinity, or old values, or an adult world that bemuses the young son. It’s much less frequent to see a bemused young father on the page. It’s intriguing, then, to see two contemporary male authors, Charles Bock and Alejandro Zambra, write in great detail about their transformations into fathers, in a pair of recent books that reflect two very different approaches to parenthood.
Bock is the author of two novels, Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver, the latter of which is drawn from real events: It chronicles a couple dealing with the wife’s leukemia, which is diagnosed shortly after she has their first baby. This happened to Bock’s first wife, Diana Colbert, who died in 2011, leaving him to raise their 3-year-old, Lily. His new memoir, I Will Do Better, chronicles his early years of single parenting and, like its fictional counterpart, has a skidding urgency, a tangible need to relay detail. Zambra’s new mixed-genre collection, Childish Literature, rendered into English by his longtime translator, Megan McDowell, is quite different. It’s an expansive, relaxed meander through fatherhood, a 360-degree tour: In essays and the occasional short story, he examines not just his own experience raising his son, Silvestre, but also the effects of fatherhood on his friendships, his reading and writing, his soccer fandom, and more.
I Will Do Better, in contrast to Childish Literature, is so inwardly focused that even Lily, Bock’s daughter, feels incompletely present, a moral obligation or chaotic blur of toddlerhood rather than a fully described entity. In many scenes, she’s in her stroller, along for the literal and figurative ride but facing away from the main character. I Will Do Better is all about Bock: Its underlying chant is me, me, me. It represents fatherhood as a crushing responsibility, one that, rather than expanding the father’s life and perspective, compresses it as small as it can get. Childish Literature’s whispered refrain, by contrast, is you, you, you, in both singular and plural. It represents fatherhood as an emotional and intellectual relationship not just to a child but also to childhood, with all of the growth and exploration and confusion that entails.
Both Bock and Zambra are conscious of the rarity of fatherhood books and, indeed, of men who are and discuss being primary parents in any capacity. Bock begins his memoir by admitting that he never wanted to be one. Indeed, he was never especially interested in having a baby at all; he describes himself as “one of those fathers who sometimes, despite himself, referred to his infant as ‘it’” and relates an anecdote about Diana, pre-cancer diagnosis, hiring an undergraduate to push Lily’s stroller in the hall outside the classroom where she taught rather than leaving the baby with Bock. After Diana’s death, Bock found himself awash in not only grief but also resentment. He hadn’t even meant to do half of the work involved in raising a child; now he had to do it all? He loves his daughter, and yet, in that moment, he describes any father who takes on all of the duties of parenting as “giv[ing] up their manhood.”
Bock is a canny writer, and he intentionally renders his earlier self—the self who became a parent, and then a single parent—as a jerk. It’s right there in the title: I Will Do Better follows his transformation from callow, callous man-boy to stable, devoted, trying-his-hardest dad. He traces that arc successfully, showing his negotiations with babysitters and family members, his reckonings with a changed career and transformed romantic life. He also writes movingly about his struggles to help Lily manage her grief and make time to grieve himself. Yet a sense of unpleasant self-pity remains in the present-day Bock, largely in his persistent sense that, as a father, he was entitled to do far less child-rearing than he wound up having to do. At the end of the book, he writes, “By most of the traditional standards of manhood, I guess I haven’t fared so well.” Still, he notes, “there’s consolation in not meeting such standards, but refashioning them.” It’s a nice thought, but not one that the text bears out.
Throughout I Will Do Better, Bock writes himself as isolated and reluctant to ask for help. He presents this as a form of macho pride that he regrets having, writing: “Men separate themselves, alienate themselves.” Of course he knows, in the abstract, that this isn’t true of all men, but as I read his memoir, I wondered, over and over, if he knew any other men. The only one who appears on the page at any length is his therapist. He depicts himself as the only dad on the playground and the only involved dad in his literary circles. During a chapter in which he debates sending Lily to live with her grandmother in Memphis so that he can write and date more freely, he thinks, “Any mother of small children who writes learns guerrilla warfare; they have to. Dads, no: Philip Roth wasn’t about to lose a minute at the desk taking care of Little Bubbie.” Setting aside the sweeping assumption about writer mothers (and, by implication, their partners) here, notice that Bock’s chosen example is Roth, who never had children, rather than, say, Michael Chabon, a father of four who’s written a book about parenthood. It’s a small moment, but it reflects an incuriosity about paternal experience—or, perhaps, about any experience but his own—that suffuses the whole memoir.
Childish Literature, in contrast, is a highly curious book. Form follows function in its mix of styles: It has memoir and fiction, ordinary linear essays and more fragmentary ones. It’s an appealing jumble—as is fatherhood itself, in Zambra’s telling. Zambra, who is Chilean, became a father at 42, after settling in Mexico City. He clearly does quite a lot of daily, hands-on parenting; he doesn’t succumb to the trend of mathematically explaining his household’s division of labor, but he does note that, unlike him, his son is growing up in a household “where no woman is at the service of any man [and] it’s his father who makes him breakfast every morning.” Just as clear is that he loves making those breakfasts. “[P]aternity,” he writes, “has been a real party for me.”
It’s an aptly chosen comparison. Although many of the essays in Childish Literature are set during pandemic lockdowns, the collection contains not a hint of isolation. Rather, it’s full of Zambra’s friends, his editors (one of whom encourages him to write for kids, a suggestion that leads him to proudly decide that he writes in a “childish style”), his mortal enemies (read: adults who have in any way slighted his son), and his faraway father, who plays complicated imaginary games with Silvestre via video chat every week. Zambra is palpably delighted by these calls and, more broadly, by getting to share his son with others. When an acquaintance asks, during a late-night, alcohol-fueled crisis, whether he should have children, Zambra reacts by inviting him to spend an afternoon with Silvestre as “field research”; when Silvestre starts school, Zambra is excited to watch him and his classmates “walk away from their parents with happy tortoise steps.”
Of course, the main form of sharing in Childish Literature is Zambra sharing Silvestre with the reader. I often sensed emanating from its pages, with their tiny, precise details, the same pride I feel when I show someone a video of my own child. (“Today,” Zambra writes in the title essay, a patchwork portrait of his son’s first year, “you learned to imitate the bread seller’s call.”) Childish Literature is full of quotidian pleasure, and of play: “Parenthood,” Zambra notes, “relegitimizes games that we gave up when our sense of the ridiculous managed to take over.”
Zambra’s book doesn’t omit the trials and complications of having children; its two short stories are very much about the difficulties of parent-child relationships, and he’s not rosy about his own anxieties—especially his tendency to use his son as an “antidepressant or a tranquilizer.” Zambra suggests that having children is a way to “test out new definitions of happiness or love or physical exhaustion,” and when he compares fatherhood to a party, he adds that “even the best parties have moments when the euphoria is mixed with unease or the unpleasant reminder that tomorrow we still have to get up early and wash the dishes.”
But no matter how much unease appears in the book, Childish Literature remains affectionate and optimistic, expansive, content at times to be corny. This last is, to return to Bock’s phrasing, its own reconsideration of manhood. Early in the collection, Zambra writes: “For ages, literature has avoided sentimentalism like the plague … And the truth is that when it comes to writing about our children, happiness and tenderness defy our old masculine idea of the communicable. What to do, then, with the joyous and necessarily dopey satisfaction of watching a child learn to stand up or say his first words?” His answer is simply to express it; to pass it around and let others get a piece of it, to choose ordinary, public pleasure over a private struggle to express his feelings accurately and without any hint of cliché.
This decision reflects the philosophical distinction between Childish Literature and I Will Do Better: The former is exterior, the latter interior. Zambra’s essays and stories contain plenty of reflection and self-analysis, but the fundamental purpose of the nonfiction that dominates the book is to show readers his son, his son’s world, and the overlapping but not identical world of fatherhood. Bock’s memoir, in contrast, is about showing readers his own experience, with an emphasis on its difficulty and his incomplete ability to rise to the occasion. It’s about being flawed, which is relatable and even reassuring but not, when you get down to it, a new way of writing about fatherhood: Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Ford’s Frank Bascombe are, first and foremost, flawed family men.
Despite—or maybe because of—its willingness to court banality, Childish Literature feels much fresher. It defies not only conventions of literary masculinity but also an entrenched, persistent vision of fatherhood as part of a man’s private rather than public life. Zambra represents fatherhood as a form of participation in society, whereas Bock writes it as an individual moral journey. Both visions contain and reflect reality, but as a member of society myself, there’s no question as to which compels me more.
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