I expected David Barringer’s novel American Home Life (So New Media) to be a “brilliant comic work of contemporary suburban fatherhood” (as the cover describes it), and it certainly was. What surprised me, though, was how crucial imagination and the need for it are to the story. Maybe it’s because I’m only a few weeks from fatherhood myself and was looking for reassurance, but after reading AHL I feel like parenting well is as much art as composing a symphony or writing a book.^*

Henry Doran, narrator and father in the novel, relies on his own imagination to keep daughter Lilly and son Lance engaged with the world, as when he motivates them to eat breakfast by declaring:

Our enemy is Fatigue in the Face of Daily Life. Our objective is to transform Chores into Games, Work into Play. The few and the proud are, today, going to eat whatever we can find in the yard. (11)

Henry makes his own life more interesting by imagining, in one case, the inner lives of the family’s pet hamsters (22). His daydreams (and Henry’s dreams are both physically and figuratively placed at the novel’s center) aren’t of the escapist, Walter Mitty variety, but an insistence on finding mysteries where others might miss them. Thus the monotony of a long drive is countered by picturing roadside troops of gorillas replacing the more familiar sight of deer, and wondering how that would change the response of drivers to roadkill (187). At other times, Henry’s imagination keeps him from self-pity or desperation, as he worries about money and struggles not to see himself as a failure — the semi-employed, stay-at-home Dad who is turning into his father — by picturing his everyday quests to serve breakfast and order the house as epic feats. “Imagination,” he decides, “is a camel: a little water goes a long way” (56).

In the ambiguous near-future setting of the novel, the school Henry’s children attend and the novels he writes both have corporate sponsors, and young bodies are implanted with monitoring devices as their minds are implanted with the need to be “Junior Achievers,” all threatening a droning monotony. So Henry works to instill imagination in his children, worrying, “teach your children how to work through their boredom, Dad, or someone else will get rich off their lack of imagination” (59). Meanwhile, corporate entities sell devices meant to keep kids safer, devices that lead concerned parents to picture ever more horrible events that might occur thereby selling ever-improved devices. It’s an escalation of anti-imagination, imagination replaced with paranoid, terrified fantasies. Tension emerges between knowing enough about the world to see it clearly and safely, and maintaining enough mystery to keep life exciting without artificial stimuli. It’s a hard struggle to resolve, as when Henry forces his family to butcher their own meat so they know where it comes from and makes them sick in the process: how much knowledge is too much, and how much do his kids need to live their best possible lives? In this regard, American Home Life is reminiscent of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle and Roald Dahl’s Danny, The Champion of the World — bittersweet novels of childhoods alternately sheltered and disrupted.

It is also, finally, a novel about how to be an artist and a father at once, as Henry struggles to balance his own writing and creativity with paying bills and washing dishes and taking care of sick children. And that may be why I’ve focused on the parenting aspects of the novel myself, since for obvious reasons I’ve been worrying lately about how I’m going to get any artistic work done myself once there’s a baby in the house to take care of. Reviewing a novel as a parenting manual isn’t the most critically astute approach, but all the same I hope I can be as imaginative a father as Henry Doran, and perhaps write about it half as well as David Barringer has.

^* Full Disclosure: In addition to reading through the lens of pending parenthood, I also came to AHL more fan than critic, and with a story of my own forthcoming in an anthology Barringer is editing.