My Late-Literary Return

Last Sunday my son Booker turned 30, and if he had any misgivings about that “milestone,” there wasn’t the slightest indication during his visit to Baltimore from Manhattan. It was a fun weekend: we watched the so-so Beverly Hills Cop 4 on Saturday, as well as two season-ending Red Sox losses, he and my wife went to breakfast at Belvedere Square and our older son Nicky (who also shrugged off “the Big 3-0” two years ago) came over and gave his brother a Joe Dirt poster. Melissa and I, on the occasion of the boys’ birthdays, like to reminisce and repeat well-worn stories about their childhood, which they generously tolerate and keep the eye-rolls to a minimum.

When Booker was a kid, he was loaded with questions—usually baseball, history and music-related—and he’d laugh and cover his ears when I used “big” words like capitulate, incorrigible and obsequious; same as when I’d help him study for a grade-school quiz and speak in a Don Corleone voice. “Presto-magic, turn back to Dad,” he’d implore but we were both cracking up so I’d keep up the Marlon Brando patter. But he loved the phrase, from my dad, “Democrats eat fried rats.”

I’ve noted in this space that I no longer read non-fiction books in the early-evening—after a day online, digesting “news” of U.S. and world events, a lot of which is fiction—preferring to “cleanse” myself with novels and short stories. It’s peaceful. This leisurely activity began 12 or 13 years ago and it was Booker’s doing. He was in high school and, like his parents and brother, was an enthusiastic reader, and one day was in the library and came across Paul Murray’s 2010 Skippy Dies, the 672-page second novel by that extraordinary Irish writer. Booker read it twice and suggested I give it a whirl—it was good timing since I’d let so many periodical subscriptions lapse—and I was hooked. (I think some still remember when a thorough, and worthwhile, reading of The Economist was like taking on a novel.)

He’d finished Donna Tartt’s Secret History and gave me his copy, and then novels from Jonathan Dee, Adam Haslett (Union Atlantic), Ron Carlson, Richard Yates, Anne Tyler (whom I missed the first time around) and Sam Lipsyte. That’s just a smattering. It wasn’t exactly a “book club” we had going, but I was—and still am—immensely grateful that he goaded the old man back to my youth when I’d save up to buy the classic Scribner’s and New Directions titles at Oscar’s Bookstore in Huntington and compare notes with my pal Elena Seibert.

Now that he has a demanding job, Booker doesn’t have much time for fiction, although after a day of consuming financial spreadsheets and other market-related material, he’ll tuck into historical biographies, most recently Leigh Montville’s Ted Williams. It’s a role reversal: for his birthday I chose bios of Grover Cleveland, Benedict Arnold, Bill Veeck and Idi Amin, along with a couple of t-shirts that, for safety’s sake, he can’t wear in public. I got him a copy of Paul Murray’s masterpiece from last year, The Bee Sting—the last 100 pages of which still rattle me—but, to his regret, he’s yet to finish it, even though it’s in his bag when traveling. Work gets in the way, which makes sense.

That’s why I didn’t include Hugo Rifkind’s new Rabbits—or Colin Barret’s Wild Houses—in his birthday bag, even though it bears a faint resemblance to Skippy Dies. Rifkind, 47, is a well-known British pundit and commentator, whose column in The Spectator, which ran for 10 years, complemented those of Taki and Rod Liddle. He’s liberal, but not a squish like his American counterparts, having the audacity to leaven his pro-Eurozone views with lots of jokes, often self-deprecatory.

The semi-autobiographical Rabbits is set in Scotland, and is a screaming yarn about narrator Tommo attempting to crack the “posh” (a word that’s used, irritatingly, about 1000 times) inside circle of the upper-class at his secondary school and then Cambridge. It’s the mid-1990s, and while the striving Tommo is kind of an unaware dick—indecisive, indifferent or mean to his family and friends—his endless car rides throughout the crumbling countryside (and London), consuming an exaggerated amount of drugs and drinks, engaging in start-and-stop fucks—the attempt to solve a murder mystery kept me entertained. The novel’s scattered and repetitious, and not a patch on, say, Barrett, Murray, John Boyne or Fredrik Backman, but I suspect it was a one-off for Rifkind, and I finished it in a couple of days, which isn’t a bad recommendation.

The accompanying picture is of rough & tough guy Booker as a grade-schooler in Manhattan. Take a look at the clues to figure out the year.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Ian McEwan’s Atonement are published; Jeffrey Archer is sentenced to prison; Aaliyah dies in a plane crash at the age of 22; Liverpool wins the UEFA Cup; Tony Blair is still popular; the Baltimore Ravens win their first Super Bowl; Timothy McVeigh is executed; Britney Spears dances near-naked with a snake around her neck at the VMA's singing "I'm a Slave 4 U"; Andrea Yates drowns her five children in Houston; Pauline Kael and Jack Lemmon die; Baltimore is shut down for several days after a 60-car train derailment; Ichiro is A.L. Rookie of the Year; Ty Simpkins is born and Ray Walston dies; Monsters, Inc. and Shrek are released; and Mariah Carey signs an $80 million deal with Virgin Records.

—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023