Alfred A. Knopf

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.” Continue reading →