This Week in Books: The Rare Novel With a Happy Parent

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When my children were very young, friends standing on the precipice of parenthood would ask me to reveal what it was like, what I could report from a country that was still exotic to them. I’d look through eyes rimmed red from sleep deprivation and utter some well-worn cliché. The drudgery of it all was easy enough to explain, I’d say, understandable even to someone who didn’t have children: You repeat a million little tasks in service of a tiny, ungrateful human being, and then the next day you have to do it all over again. You feel slightly obliterated by this. But—and here my eyes would widen as much as they could—it’s harder to convey the joy. Novels about parenting seem to agree; in book after book, raising children seems akin to living in a “penal colony of toy-straightening and carrot-steaming,” Hillary Kelly writes in an essay this week. What a relief, then—a joy, even—to discover a novel that tries to describe the other side of it.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

How do you portray the pleasurable parts of being a parent? And how do you do so in writing that avoids curdling into the self-indulgent, the boring, the treacly? Maybe this is why many books, such as Rachel Cusk’s genre-establishing A Life’s Work, have opted to explore the discordant feelings that come along with motherhood: Because expressing anything less than bliss is generally considered taboo, there’s a strong artistic and feminist case for diving into the hard parts. But this turn away from joy has left out an emotion that any parent would have to admit exists alongside the tedium. After picking up the British writer Susie Boyt’s new novel, Loved and Missed, Kelly was shocked to learn that the book practically luxuriates in the many gratifications of child-rearing. Nor does it suffer as a result; in fact, it’s quite good.

Loved and Missed is Boyt’s seventh novel but her first to be published in the United States. In it, the narrator, Ruth, decides to raise her granddaughter, Lily; Ruth’s own daughter is suffering from drug addiction, so at Lily’s christening, Ruth offers her £4,000 in an envelope to hand over the baby. What follows, Kelly writes, is a novel in which happiness is “the predominant mode.” Ruth doesn’t just trudge through this responsibility she’s given herself—she savors it. We get many scenes of Ruth and Lily as they “amble through their small existence, one filled with homemade cornflower-blue cardigans and shared lemon sorbet.” Nothing particularly dramatic seems to happen besides an exquisite rendering of what it’s like to love a child.

Not every novel needs to depict parenting as “a hit of rapture so potent that we might overdose,” Kelly writes. But there is a good reason that Ruth, filled with regret and guilt about her own daughter, might be so willing to give herself over to this second chance. “I was a professional gambler on a lucky streak,” Ruth says. “I loved the simple rubbing-along with another person, friendliness, a calm and busy rhythm, lustre and life cheer.” This is a book I wish I could have put in the hands of my childless friends when they asked what parenting was really like—because it’s terrible, but also amazing.

Tolstoy Was Wrong About Happy Families

What to Read

Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss

After years of inconsistent employment, Biss, a writer and college professor, secures a stable job and is able to buy a house. Having and Being Had deploys memoir, research, and criticism to explore what happens after you get what you want—or what you have been told to want. Biss is ambivalent about her newly purchased home, perhaps the ultimate cultural symbol of prosperity: “After years of looking, I was no longer convinced that I wanted a house,” she writes. Her savings account once represented “hours banked, to be spent on writing, not working”; now she has no choice but to work full-time to pay the mortgage. Her discomfort also comes from being a gentrifier in her new Evanston, Illinois, neighborhood. Biss reminds us that private property is an idea, not an individual accomplishment, that sits at the center of a complex network of affluence and power. She redirects the reader’s attention from the white picket fence to exactly what gets bought—or bought into—with that down payment. —Tajja Isen

From our list: What to read when you’re feeling ambitious

Out Next Week

📚 The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism, by Adam Nagourney

📚 Devil Makes Three, by Ben Fountain

Your Weekend Read

The ‘Whiteboy Brooklyn Novelist’ Grows Up

I was raised in Brooklyn too, some 15 years after Lethem, and he remains, among my childhood friends and I, somewhat of a literary patron saint: the Brooklyn boy who did us proud by immortalizing our borough in contemporary fiction. He was given a hero’s welcome by the literary establishment after publishing Motherless Brooklyn, in 1999, and again after Fortress of Solitude. But I say “somewhat” because after that, he left town. Both literally—he relocated to Maine and eventually to the West Coast—and in his literature. We old Brooklynites have a high tolerance for crimes, but we consider desertion one of the most egregious. Though he’s written six novels since Fortress, he has not set another in Brooklyn—until now.

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