I’m not sure if this is a novel or a series of short stories, articles, blog posts or semi-autobiographical jottings, but whatever the hell it is, it’s funny. It’s a funny book in the same way that, say, Gulliver’s Travels, or Three Men in a Boat, or the collected articles of Fran Lebowitz are funny books. It’s a novelty, an oddity: neither a 19th-century style realist novel nor an avant-garde piece of experimentalism, but a nice little comedy squib, with just enough heft and bite.
The first chapter/entry/jotting is titled “The Great Outdoors”. It sets the tone for the others – “Philosophy”, “Romance”, “Gambling”, “The World’s Most Dangerous Spiders”, “The Importance of Good Posture and Looking After your Teeth” – and there are many, each only a couple of pages long, all beginning: “We’re teaching our sons about ... ” It continues: “We’re teaching them how to appreciate the natural world, how to understand it, how to survive in it.” And then it all goes a bit wonky, in that rather knowing McSweeney’s fashion that will be familiar to readers of short fiction and whose antecedents lie in the work of Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan. “We’re teaching them how to catch things, how to kill things, how to gut things. Out on the frozen marshes before dawn we produce hundreds of rabbits out of sacks, try to show our sons how to skin the rabbits.” And then there’s the kicker: “Our sons look over our shoulders, distracted by the beautiful sunrise. They don’t want anything to do with skinning rabbits.”
If you like the structure – setup, joke, setup, joke, setup, joke – then you’ll love What We’re Teaching Our Sons. If you don’t, well, there’s still plenty to occupy your attention, because the book is not just funny: there are tiny stories embedded throughout the endlessly repeated pattern, as if a Bridget Riley painting were populated between the lines with lots of Bruegel micro-portraits. The pattern is just the entry point, and all the little details and the insistent use of the first person plural entice the reader into a surprisingly rich fictional world.
In “Emotional Literacy”, for example – “We’re teaching our sons about emotional literacy” – “We’ve come to the park to ride on the miniature steam railway. The miniature steam railway is operated by a group of local enthusiasts who hate having to let children ride on their trains.” In “Food” there is a visit to the Greatest Restaurant in the World, miles from anywhere and high in the Pyrenees, with a 10-year waiting list for a table. In “Rites of Passage”, trans fathers and their sons, “having already negotiated more challenges on the way to manhood than most of us can imagine”, deliver a lecture on The Hero’s Journey. And in “The Wonderful Colours of the Non-Neurotypical Spectrum”, dutiful non-neurotypical fathers take their non-neurotypical sons to Games Workshop, to buy their first set of miniature role-playing figures.
Occasionally, it all gets a bit sickly sweet: “Our wonderful sons who like to do things a certain way, who always eat their dinner, for instance, one type of food at a time. Our wonderful sons who can’t do small talk. Our wonderful list-making sons. Our wonderful, beautiful, hilarious sons.” But more often, there’s still that bit of bite. In “Friendship”, one of the truly insightful pieces, “we” go away on a long weekend to a rented cottage in the country with a group of male friends, including someone called Kev: “We don’t discuss our lives, or our worries, or our hopes for the future, or our fears of what happens next. We don’t talk about our money problems or our health. At one point we invent a new version of indoor golf, briefly consider marketing it and becoming rich.”
Kev, alas, disappears, only to be discovered alone, looking at pictures of his children on his phone and crying. “Awkwardly, one by one, we all clap Kev on the shoulder, before trooping back to the house, leaving Kev to pull himself together on his own, in his own time.” Funny, sad and true.
What We’re Teaching Our Sons is Owen Booth’s first book: what makes it a truly exciting debut is that it offers no clue whatsoever to what might come next.
• What We’re Teaching Our Sons by Owen Booth (4th Estate, £10). To order a copy for £8.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
