Over the last two decades, writer Michael Lewis has exhaustively—and hilariously—chronicled both the "big swinging dicks" of Wall Street and the inside world of professional baseball. Now he takes on the subject he is most intimately familiar with in his new book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood (Norton). The memoir offers not only a highly entertaining account of his parenting life (he has three kids: Quinn, 9; Dixie, 6; and Walker, 2), but also a shrewd look at modern fatherhood in general. "We're in the midst of some long, unhappy transition between the model of fatherhood as practiced by my father," Lewis notes, "and some ideal model to be practiced with ease by the perfect fathers of the future." Here, he provides an offbeat list of books that have helped him bridge the gap.
My Dog Tulip
by J. R. Ackerley (New York Review of Books)
"Before my wife, Tabitha, and I had children, we visited friends who had recently adopted a boy, I think from the Philippines. They were telling us, with great amusement, that some people would actually ask if they could love the child, since he was not really theirs. There was a curiosity about how you engage with an adopted child. The father's response was always, 'Have you ever had a dog? Did you love your dog?' And then people just got it. When he told me this, I thought of the 1947 Ackerley book, a beautiful memoir about the relationship between the author and his dog, and I reread it. Before I had kids, I worried that I wouldn't have the right emotions. So when this friend told us his dog remark—and I had close relationships with our animals growing up—I completely understood how I would get the feelings I was expected to have. You build a feeling that comes to be known as fatherhood. Ackerley's is the best depiction I've ever run across of this, despite being about a dog. The message is the same: The amount of intimacy between a father and child—or a man and his animal—is highly correlated to the amount of caring that man does."
Rosemary's Baby
by Ira Levin (Signet)
"One of the clichéd tensions between parents is the different attitudes toward their child's taking risks, both physical and emotional. In our relationship, I am often the one who is okay with the kids' having experiences their mother might disapprove of—and oddly enough, one of the reference points I have for this is Rosemary's Baby. When I was a kid, we would spend part of the summer in a family vacation house in North Carolina. The shelves there were laden with books that frustrated housewives read—Valley of the Dolls, The Stepford Wives, Rosemary's Baby—books that an 8-year-old wouldn't know to be trashy. My parents just let me loose on them. I picked up Rosemary's Baby—a story about a nice young woman who gives birth to the devil's spawn—and I found myself so out of my depth. But I loved the feeling of being stretched, and I was incredibly proud to get through this bizarre book. I felt like I had special powers as a reader. What I take away from that for my kids is: If they want to get way ahead of themselves, I want them to do it. I don't tell them to do it. But Rosemary's Baby is there on the shelf if they want to read it."
Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain (Puffin Classics)David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens (Penguin Classics)
"These novels belong together in the way that they have informed me as a parent. They capture unbelievably well what adults look like to children. In David Copperfield, there is a scene—the child gets put to work in a factory, and it's a barbarous thing—where Dickens is absolutely in the head of a 9-year-old. The same is true of Twain. Imagine scaling the world up to what it would be like to be a kid—everybody would be 12 feet tall and have enormous amounts of unseemly body hair. It's warped! When you enter the child's perspective, you realize why kids seem insane. This is a natural barrier to communication between my children and me. So I try to remind myself what my craziness must look like to them; these books help me do that."
The Golden Compass
by Philip Pullman (Knopf)
"I read this book to Quinn when she had just turned 8. She was riveted. It was the first time that I had a little girl grabbing me by the elbow in the middle of the day, saying, 'Can we do a chapter now?' I don't want to be rude about all children's literature, but an awful lot of what I've read has been unsatisfying. With this book, however, I had my first literary experience with my child. This is a great yarn and a dark tale. Set in a parallel universe, it's about a girl's journey to find her father and a missing friend. There are abductions and souls living outside of bodies and strange experiments with children. I think that kids know from a young age that adults are holding back awful stuff from them. The effect it has is to make it all seem more awful than it really is. Part of what made reading this book to Quinn so exciting was that she knew there was going to be stuff that was a little scary—and we were going to experience it together."
