It’s too late for this year. But let’s imagine you’ve already decided to buy Dad a nice fragile something or other for next Father’s Day. The key term here is “fragile,’’ because it seems our post-literate, Internet content-provider times have rendered even a solid, old-fashioned noun like “book’’ as frangible as a Fabergé egg.
But before you buy - this being a recession and the return policies of the vendor uncertain - you should first check the packaging for signs of damage.
At the top of Michael Lewis’s “Home Game’’ we see the subtitle, “An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood,’’ the adjective “accidental’’ bouncing around the brain like a free radical, with a tad too much instability for continued good health. Does this subtitle mean to suggest a.) that Lewis “accidentally’’ became a father (three times)? b.) that when he and his wife moved to France, the setting of his first column for the online magazine Slate, he “accidentally’’ wound up writing about fatherhood, since “Paris was overshadowed by a 7-month-old baby?’’ or c.) that there’s truth in advertising, that the package called “Home Game’’ is itself an accident, having been put together after the fact, at the suggestion of Lewis’s literary agent? (Really, see the acknowledgments.)
On the back of the reviewer’s package appears the label “memoir.’’ Tobias Wolff’s “This Boy’s Life’’ is a memoir. His brother Geoffrey’s “The Duke of Deception’’ is a memoir. Mary Karr’s “The Liar’s Club’’ is a memoir. Lewis’s “Home Game’’ is not. What it is is a collection of 23 short columns that appeared in Slate, concluding with a previously unpublished piece about Lewis’s efforts to confirm (and come to terms with) the success of the procedure his 9-year-old daughter called his “bisectomy.’’ Prefacing these invariably well-turned and generally amusing adventures in fatherhood is a previously unpublished introduction that makes promises that the columns themselves can’t keep - and how could they, having been written for a different purpose and a different audience?