Serious books about fatherhood are hard to come by; indeed, next to distinguished literary mothers such as Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jacqueline Rose, and Elena Ferrante, the male sex is beginning to look decidedly inarticulate. In his new, genre-blurring work Childish Literature, the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra seeks to right this imbalance. In doing so, he aims to correct the failings of prior male generations, who may have ‘tried, in their own ways, to teach us to be men’, but never quite ‘taught us to be fathers’.
Before he became one of Latin America’s most inventive prose writers, Zambra was an acclaimed poet and, like many poet-novelists, he treats narrative unities with healthy suspicion. The result is, like his last effort in prose, My Documents, a miscellany, whose first section veers from a second-person ‘diary’ addressed to his infant son, to verse, to lockdown memoir, to literary criticism, in a way that requires a good deal of patience of the reader. (A long passage about the French translation of a children’s picture book about a mole with a turd on its head proved particularly testing). But there is, Zambra assures us, a unifying reason for this formlessness. Our author claims to be writing in ‘a state of attachment’, moved to a dreamy receptivity by the encounter with new life. Sure enough, this is a book which, when it works, does so mysteriously, by faithfully relaying the unpredictable wanderings of a young father’s mind.
Still, Childish Literature works best when this free association abates slightly, when the vignettes grow longer and Zambra’s talents as a storyteller are allowed to breathe. Pleasingly, this is exactly what happens in the book’s second half, beginning with a marvellous piece about a schoolmate raised by a young single mother which manages to be comic and poignant without any interfering commentary. The late chapters, where Zambra remembers his own father, are similarly assured, precisely because of what the author does not say. Father and son remain gruffly uncommunicative, but their love for each other is unmistakable, poured into football matches, fishing trips, a fight with some would-be muggers and, most movingly of all, Zambra’s own son, with whom the ageing patriarch spends hours on the phone every week. Not once does Zambra express explicitly what, if anything, his father means to him.
Perhaps this oblique method is the only way to write about fatherhood with the force of a Cusk, a Heti, a Rose or a Ferrante without sinking into mawkishness. Perhaps other father-writers will one day find success with a more direct approach. But whatever the future of the fatherhood book, Childish Literature is a welcome addition to this fledgeling genre, and a useful reminder, in an age when the languages of literary criticism and therapy are drawing ever closer, that many important features of a man’s inner life can only be parsed in the most roundabout of ways.
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