Frank O Connor s hilarious tale of a tiny boy s war against his paternal rival in My Oedipus Complex sits beside Ann Packer s touching portrait of a man preparing for the wonder and terror of his first child s birth. At the other end of the lifespan, John Updike s My Father s Tears, Jim Shepard s The Mortality of Parents, and William Maxwell s The man who lost his father bring us face to face with a loss that is like no other.
In between, we encounter a full range of emotions connecting men and their offspring: tenderness and devotion, anxiety and incomprehension, admiration and regret. Powerful patriarchs cast a long shadow in Katherine Mansfield s The Daughters of the Late Colonel and D. H. Lawrence s The Christening, while Edith Wharton s His Father s Son sheds a more ironic light on the paternal legacy. E. L. Doctorow s young protagonist, forced to write letters impersonating his dead father, arrives at a deeper understanding of him, while in Helen Simpson s Sorry? an old man s hearing aid seems to reveal what his children secretly think about him. Paternal bonds are forged outside biology, too: Graham Swift portrays a man wistfully seeking a substitute son, while Guy de Maupassant s forlorn waif triumphantly acquires an ideal father. In these twenty stories, an array of great writers–ranging from Kafka, Joyce, and Nabokov to Raymond Carver, Harold Brodkey, and Andre Dubus–offers a wonderfully varied assortment of fictional takes on paternity.