Book Review: Man in the Moon edited by Stephanie G’Schwind

Man in the Moon: Essays on Fathers & Fatherhood
Edited by Stephanie G’Schwind
The Center for Literary Publishing, May 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1885635358
$19.95; 256pp.
Reviewed by B.J. Hollars

If there’s a lesson to be learned from Stephanie G’Schwind’s father-themed anthology, it’s this: fathers, by virtue of being fathers, always disappoint their children. But upon reflection, the reader is left feeling that this generational disappointment has less to do with a flaw in the paternal design and more the result of children setting unreachably high standards. This serves as the subtext for many of the included essays, though on the surface, the fathers-in-question are often left bearing much of the blame. Dan Beachy-Quick attributes the oft-fraught relationships between fathers and sons to “the paradox of being a father and a child at once…” while essayists Gina Frangello and Carole Firstman point to the child’s struggle to transition from the recipient of care to the caregiver. While these themes occasionally repeat, the means of exploration always differ. On the conventional side is Bill Capossere’s title essay, in which he turns his head skyward, using the stars for his own narrative navigating purposes; reminding readers that fathers, though often as distant as the moon, can be just as omnipresent. On the experimental side is Dinty W. Moore’s “Son of Mr. Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing Fathers,” which employs a structurally unique A-Z index as a distancing technique, though all the while he secretly reels us in. If, as many of these essays imply, the curse of fatherhood (and perhaps parenthood, generally) is that we will all let our children down, rest assured that this collection does not. Rather, it simultaneously serves as a thoughtful compendium and a cautionary tale—one that arms us with knowledge in the hopes we might break the curse.

B.J. Hollars is the author of Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America, Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa, and a collection of stories, Sightings. His latest work, a hybrid text entitled Dispatches from the Drownings: Reporting the Fiction of Nonfiction, is forthcoming in the fall of 2014. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.