Memoirs about generation-gap friction between father and son are commonplace, but there's a compelling symbol at the center of essayist Phillips's (Salon, Country Life,
the New York Times Magazine) forthright, familiar story of growing up in the fractious 1960s that sets it apart: a simple cabin set on about 40 acres in the Allegheny Mountains. Over late-night bottles of beer, the grime of fly-ash sweating from his pores, the author's father dreamed of an isolated cabin as an escape from the numbing grind of his job at a coal-fueled power plant; over a period of years, he built it from the ground up with the grudging assistance of a moody, rebellious and often resentful teenaged Phillips. Phillips senior barely lived to enjoy his retreat—he finished it as he was dying of cancer. A decade later, in 1979, as a young teacher who had left his family's working-class roots behind him, Mark Phillips moved with his wife into the primitive, 20-by-25-foot cabin. With unadorned eloquence, he describes how its simplicity, solidity and ability to shelter him reconnected him with his father, a simple, dependable man who, as a mature son now understood, took good care of his family and meant well by his son. This account of how a son comes to accept his father's rough, fumbling love, and to return it, despite the chasm between them, is a genuine portrait of the ties that bind families together in difficult times. (Nov.)
