Maintaining Separate Orbits

When I began writing my dissertation twenty-two years ago, its eventual subtitle Positional Sons and Double Husbands, Kinship and Careening in Jack Kerouac's Fiction, I was not a husband, though I'd been one just three years before. By the time I deposited the pages that would earn me that most academic of union cards, the PhD, I was a husband again. A couple of years later, I wasn't again. Fast-forward three years. I'm a husband for the third time and a couple of months into becoming a biological father for the first time. I'm elated at the news, and then I'm not. It occurs to me we might have a son. I'm spooked at the prospect. I can't know for sure, but I suspect my fear originates in the cockeyed idea that if I wound a daughter I do so as a parent, but if I wound a son I do so as a father.

Jump forward a year (daughter!) or three (daughter!) or five (another!) or nine (enough already!). Make the leap thirteen years and you'll be here in the present with me, my four daughters, ages twelve to four, their mother, who is also my wife (same one!), and a copy of Reamy Jansen's Available Light: Recollections and Reflections of a Son. In my house of women, where I live comfortably without the son-anxiety I felt once upon a time (it lessened with each birth but never went away, not totally), I continue to enjoy tales that originate in sonhood, especially those as honest and beautifully written as Reamy Jansen's set of vignettes and essays about familial relations and obligations. Weighing in at fewer than a hundred pages of text, it's a slight book, only two of the fourteen chapters longer than eight pages, the final chapter ("Last Words") a mere eight words long. Yet it's a sturdy book. As Jansen writes in what amounts to a prologue or a set of instructions for reading, which he titles "A Word of Beginning," Available Light is a book of loss about the recovery and assemblage of family items and the work they might do: "I never lose them outright, but I can't always locate them...." Not with his hands anyway.

What he can do and does beautifully is build one "cabinet of curiosity" after another, sentences, paragraphs, set pieces, vignettes, essays, the book itself, all of which are word boxes as intricately detailed and perfectly built as the house he grew up in, with its "thick and irregular hand-hewn cypress shingles, the bluish-hued slate roof, and where, inside, the hand-pegged oak floors had planks as wide as diving boards." As a boy growing up in a family whose members "maintain separate orbits," rarely if ever touching, the author makes his "domain... the basement, a dimmer universe parallel to the house's extensive first floor," where his father sits alone at a folding table in the middle of the living room and works without a word late into the evening while his mother sits off to the side, a drink in hand or about to be, and volleys an occasional comment that falls to the floor unremarked upon. Day after day in the basement, under a single, exposed bulb, the boy builds a world with no help from his father, a railway landscape that "looks so unappealing, even to me, that I don't blame him for his absence." It is the studied absence of specific blame (his father gets a pass not afforded to the mother, who, well, read the book) that so deeply and sadly underscores the family's shared vacancies. What his father might have taught him through sustained interaction he picked up instead from the house itself or, via paternal surrogacy, the accomplished architect who originally built the house for his family: "In such an environment, I had learned beauty and proportion, of an aesthetic...