A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

October 5, 2020
Davies (The Fortunes) delves into fatherhood in his thoughtful latest, intertwining musings on pregnancy, marriage, family life, and work. The unnamed narrator, a writer and creative writing professor, makes the difficult decision with his wife to terminate their pregnancy after the fetus tests positive for mosaicism and their doctor gives them a long list of potential birth defects. A subsequent successful pregnancy brings new fears over their son’s development, as the couple processes their internalized shame over the abortion and their son’s potential autism (“Abortion is shameful, because pregnancy is shameful, because sex is shameful, because periods are shameful. It almost makes me relieved we had a boy,” the wife says). Davies explores their emotions in unflinching honesty, as the narrator contends with lingering fears over getting their son tested for autism. Davies’s smooth prose and ruminations on language (a synonym for “imagine,” the narrator considers, is also “to conceive”) are the stars of this work. While an anticlimactic, philosophical conclusion somewhat undermines the narrator’s character development after he embraces his role as a father, it resonates with the key theme of paradoxes. Davies’s meditation on the complexities of parenthood is at once celebration and absolution, finding truth in human contradictions. Agent: Maria Massie, Massie & McQuilkin Literary.

Starred review from November 1, 2020
Davies' rigorously truthful examination of fatherhood explores the fallout from an abortion and the difficulties that follow a second pregnancy. Prenatal tests suggest--but not conclusively--that something is very wrong with their unborn child, and an unnamed couple decides on an abortion. The next pregnancy proceeds normally until the baby turns blue on the delivery table and is whisked off to intensive care. Everything seems to be fine; their son comes home after four days, and they settle down to the sleep-deprived routine of life with an infant. But they panic when he cries, and when he does fall asleep, they stand outside his door listening to make sure he's breathing. In a third-person narrative from the father's point of view, Davies unsentimentally captures the mind-numbing tedium coupled with blinding love that new parents feel in prose as spare as it is emotionally resonant. When the boy's preschool teacher "has concerns" even readers without children are likely to share the parents' dread and anguish. The narrative moves briskly through key episodes: The son gets all kinds of physical and occupational therapy, the spouses go back to work (she's at a university press, he's a writer and teacher), their marriage is strained, the boy's kindergarten teacher hints he might be autistic. His parents can't bear to get him tested: "They've been afraid of tests for so long. All his life." Their uncertainty over the abortion will never be resolved (references to Schr�dinger's cat abound), and the husband's decision to volunteer as an escort at an abortion clinic infuriates his wife, who snarls, "You act like it happened to you!" It's a tribute to Davies' skill and sensitivity that we feel how much they still love each other despite bad sex, jealousies, and endless worry over their son. When they finally have him tested, the results are once again ambiguous, but they are learning to accept "his normal." A radiant conclusion affirms the daunting cost and overwhelming rewards of raising a child. Perfectly observed and tremendously moving: This will strike a resonant chord with parents everywhere.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from December 1, 2020
Once upon a time, when the father was a young boy--the same age as his young son now--he wanted to be a crossing guard. After that, he wanted to be a writer. "'And now you are one!'" the son gleefully remarks. What the father doesn't reveal to his precious child is that "he's also grown up to be a man who aborts babies, puts his own father in a home." What might seem to be actions too easy to judge, even by this grown man himself, is, of course, not; the decisions we make shape and are shaped by the li(v)es we live. That never-knowing haunts Ho Davies' (The Fortunes, 2016) brief, admittedly autobiographical new novel, a raw, intimate look at a couple's journey into parenthood, from the choice to abort their first pregnancy after a diagnosis of mosaicism to the arrival of a son after a difficult birth to the many tests his delayed development requires to the milestones of mundanity and triumph both. What began as a short story, "Chance," published in 2012, has since matured into a resonant treatise on identity, family, grieving, writing, and "the taking and telling of other people's stories."

COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.