Only Sons — Kevin Moffett

Only Sons is a warm and funny new book about personal and public spaces, fatherhood and suburbia, nostalgia and stagnation and hope. With the compression and wit, Moffett examines the comforts and disillusionments of present life while reckoning with the past. In the process, he tells a moving story of family and loss, and the way memory magnifies and minimizes feelings of grief as life continues on. At the heart of Only Sons is the narrator’s relationship with his parents: his father, who died suddenly when he was a boy, and his mother, who had to figure out how to raise her son alone. Now in middle-age, the character Kevin looks back on not only what his mother endured, but the ways it shaped their relationship, and who she is now: bright and intense, full of fragile optimism and oppressive need, an unreliable conduit to the memory of a father he himself can summon only in fragments. Still, the love between mother and son is shot through with humor, vulnerability, and playfulness, and in their back-and-forth the father’s presence assembles itself. Only Sons is a book about being a parent, and all the strange and bracingly personal things family-making entails. It is also a book that contains the authentic rhythms of suburbia, especially its small joys and subtle delusions.