FATHERS AND SONS: An Anthology

An anthology of 23 stories, essays, and poems--many original, some previously published--which dramatizes an intergenerational subject that's receiving a great deal of attention because of the so-called men's movement. Here, the father-son problem is approached from a variety of angles. All of the writers are men, and selections range from perennials like Donald Hall to newcomers. Hall is represented by both a poem (""My Son My Executioner"") and an affectionate sketch (""An Arc of Generations"") about a loving father and baseball. Most of these pieces, in fact, veer toward celebration and nostalgic elegy rather than bitterness or anger. Joseph McElroy's story, ""Night Soul,"" is, predictably, postmodernist--a Proustian evocation as a father stands besides his son's crib, bonding with his son. Dan Gerber's ""Last Words"" is a deathbed scene--again, little recrimination or Eugene O'Neill anguish, only sadness. In ""Notes for a Life Not My Own,"" by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a man imagines the texture of his still-living father's life, just as Wesley McNair's poem ""After My Stepfather's Death"" does the same in verse. The best stories, because they dramatize a more complex world, include Kent Nelson's ""The Middle of Nowhere,"" in which an adolescent son moves into a trailer with his womanizing father and finds himself attracted to his dad's latest live-in lover; William Kittredge's ""Three-Dollar Dogs,"" about a Montana narrator who comes to understand how bittersweet and complicated life can be when he witnesses his grandfather's decline in a home for the aged, even as the old man fabricates tales of derring-do; and Robert Olmstead's ""Into the Cat,"" a backwoods tale set in South Georgia. ""My father taught me the boundaries and burdens...,"" a Rick Bass character says; men would do well, after the literary polemic of Iron John, to turn to this evocative collection.