*Disclaimer: I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.


As an essay collection, this was quite hit-or-miss for me; there was one essay in particular that I absolutely loved and I really liked the final one, but the rest fell flat and were quite forgettable.

Michael Chabon has a way of evoking a sense of time and place which runs throughout these essays. The honesty with which he confronts his parenting and his own upbringing is refreshing but I honestly think that this could have been longer.

Overall, as I said, this was a mixed bag for me. I think that fathers especially will get something valuable out of this book but for me, it was lacking in some aspects. On the whole I enjoyed listening to it but I'm not sure it will be memorable.

3 out of 5 stars!

I'd saved this book as a holiday treat but ultimately was a little disappointed in the book as it turned out that I'd read well over 50% of the essays/stories contained in it.
The writing was good and Chabon is good at showing the ways that he fails as a son/father as well as the highs. The book was enjoyable but I was a bit sad that so little of it was new to me.

A short collection of essays on fatherhood, the introduction suggesting that as much as anything it's a retort to the older writer - unidentified, but probably not unidentifiable - who at the start of Chabon's career warned him he would lose a book for every child. The first piece I'd already read online, Chabon writing from the point of view of the 'minder' as his youngest son, Abe, does the round of Paris Fashion Week. On one level, the whole thing feels like a <i>Zoolander 2</i> out-take, and the kid sounds like I'd find him absolutely insufferable, as I do anyone who genuinely seems to take fashion seriously (and bear in mind I am talking here about fashion, as entirely distinct from style. Looking ridiculous is grand so long as it's your own ridiculousness, feeble if you have to change it each 'season'). And yet, the fact that Chabon senior is still happy to traipse around behind him, baffled yet still clearly proud...it's lovely, isn't it? Fatherhood as it should be done. That's followed by a short piece on handling the N-word while reading Mark Twain aloud, which would be fine as a weekly column but hardly merits book publication, and one on how much easier it is being odd in the city, which includes my favourite line of the collection, when Chabon perfectly captures the experience of being a metropolitan in a small town as feeling like "a kind of animated human scrawl moving across the ruled blue lines of this community". There's a piece about trying one's best not to be a dick to women, and not always succeeding. There's one about baseball, which given I'm British and barely understand our own stupid sports, is largely incomprehensible to me - it assumes knowledge of 'Merkle's Boner', and to me that just sounds like something from a porn parody of the Brexit negotiations. Still, the few bits I could parse were good - the regret that kids today don't get the free-range childhood earlier generations did, mingled with the regret that one has oneself become the sort of person who thinks that way about kids today. For me the most moving and insightful piece is the title essay, about being a son - though of course that may be because I have the experience which I don't for fatherhood.

So how does it stand up to that inciting warning? Well, having myself produced neither books nor kids, my unsentimental answer would be that compared to the fantastic novels of which he's capable, the well-crafted shorts, or even the more substantial non-fiction, this is very much the runt of Chabon's litter. Still, given he already has four kids, which for a 21st century first worlder is really taking the piss, much better he produced this than yet another child.

(Netgalley ARC)

I have read an enjoyed a number of Michael Chabon's novels. He is a fine writer. He writes his characters with warmth, sensitivity and not a little bit of love. It is possible to infer from his books that Chabon is a nice guy.
Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces is a short, sweet collection of essays about being both parent and child. Chabon is a good guy, an idiosyncratic parent of equally quirky children. Bringing them up in bohemian Berkeley in Southern California has allowed them to develop as equally odd and nice kids. The writer is aware, and apologetic for his white privilege, and for occasionally a ‘dickish' man. I think he protests too much.
There are two key quotes in this book that explain the author to the reader.
When Michael was 10, he read Edgar Allen Poe's poem ‘Alone.’
‘From childhood’s hour I have not been as others were, I have not seen as others saw.’ Michael is always set back from the action, an observer. One of these things is not like the others.
Later on, during an essay on following his doctor father out on his rounds:
“Some quirk in me, in the wiring of my brain or the capability of my heart, enabled me to ride the bare rails of his memory into the past... ...I knew immediately that it was my secret superpower.”
The writer has found his calling, and is among his people.

A collection of essays about being a father, a writer, a son.