[REVIEW] I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, by Kent Russell

304 pages, $24.95

Review by Joseph Demes

“I am homesick most,” Kent Russell writes, in I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, “for the place I’ve never known.” Framed by a road trip with his father, from San Francisco to Martins Ferry, Ohio, and a biopic of Daniel Boone, Russell’s essays (which have been featured in n+1, GQ, Harper’s, and The Believer) are imbued with longing for a mythology he has never embodied – and possibly cannot embody. His subjects are pearls excavated from an oceanic high- and low-brow milieu. They include: the “partially deflated . . . most physically unhealthful” fans of Insane Clown Posse (ICP); an entrepreneur peddling a Crusoean retreat for the rich; a man self-immunizing to snake venom, attempting to break records; and Amish teens furiously competing in youth baseball leagues in the throes of Rumspringa (time when they’re allowed to tour the secular world and either reject or commit to their religion).

Russell’s most comfortable and poetic when speaking of sports, especially hockey. While he writes about baseball with awe – of its immaculacy and a necessary ascetic view about stats – hockey is tragic, an entropic system. Gone is the purist view that players must display both technical finesse and vicious pugnacity. Stratified team dynamics are the norm: virtuosic scorers, middling defenders, and golem-like enforcers. Russell resurrects John Brophy: an aged, terminally concussed minor-league enforcer, a casualty of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE): brain damage usually spotlighted in football. Russell won’t allow us to forget Brophy, though; Russell can’t let us shake the past, despite his attempts at divorce. There is pent-up violence and frustration in his prose, a disjunct between his masculinity and a mythology of American maleness. Russell worries that he may be the son his father begrudges, and yet still his patriarch’s rightful inheritor: “I am become Dad, destroyer of beers.”

The book’s title is from a terse elegy of Boone’s, to his then-dead son who, unbeknownst to Boone, volunteered for enlistment and died in the Battle of Blue Licks, in 1782. Russell sees himself, though not without slippage, as the obverse of this son: a child of tour-worn military men, having never himself served. The first essay of the collection details correspondence between him and Ryan, his best childhood friend who enlists, serves in Afghanistan and returns to Florida a tense, rubber-band ball of anger and uncertainty. “It wasn’t romantic,” Ryan tells Russell, “not noble or ideological. It was a group of guys in the mountains trying to kill another group of guys in the mountains.” This simplicity is what grounds a mournful and hopeful thesis: that the myths we ascribe to are mostly lies, but that we must excavate the truth in them to survive.

Russell writes of Boone’s mythos: “the exaltation of Daniel Boone began as a scam” between Boone and John Filson – a freelance writer and friend of Boone’s – to “pen a bestselling book; boost immigration to Kentucky and drive up land prices; profit.” Here Ryan seems more like Boone to Russell’s Filson, and the latter is aware of this. Text-message correspondence between Russell and his sister reveals his father’s reluctance to take the trip: “he thinks you are a silver-tongued lie jockey who condescends to his subjects . . . suspects your only aim is to flush his ancestry, shoot them in their american-dreamdomes . . . for your fucking irresponsible moneymill.”

Russell admits that he lied about journalistic affiliations to get a VIP press pass into ICP’s yearly festival, the Gathering of the Juggalos, but redeems himself by respecting the wishes of an Amish contact who asks for anonymity. Multiple times Russell makes an aside of his father’s complaint of his recording their conversations on his phone: the “nibshit machine,” as the elder calls it. Their dialogues are coded with curses aplenty and Stockholm Syndrome-like affection. But underneath this there is genuine love; father and son understand they are each other’s deficits refracted, and Russell sees in his subjects – nomadic, blue-collar, geeky misfits – something of himself. Russell wants to make this book a home for these people, a here. But, his father asks in the last line, “how you figure you’re gonna put here into words?” In the only way he can, is Russell’s response: by connecting myriad, disparate points, and making from them the topography of a new frontier for outcasts.

***

Joseph Demes is a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is working towards an MFA in writing. He writes less often than he ought to, and runs even less than that. But he is trying to become better.