Irma: The Education of a Mother’s Son

Novelist and former Sports Illustrated editor McDonell (The Accidental Life) delivers an unfocused memoir of growing up in postwar California with his mother, Irma, and stepfather Norm. Norm was a chauvinist who beat Irma and salved his failures with racist, sexist bluster, on one occasion “rolling a toothpick in his mouth and winking to [McDonell] that a girl in his seventh-grade class was stacked.” After Irma divorced Norm, she built an independent life as a teacher and conveyed to her son simple lessons—“it’s better not to be like everyone else”; be “kind and fair and [stick] up for people”—that questioned patriarchal attitudes. The author moves on to his own romantic entanglements and relationships with his sons, crediting Irma with nurturing his love of liberated women and teaching him how to let his own children be themselves. McDonell’s male feminism can be overwrought, as when he castigates himself just for looking at women, or registers “disgust” with Ernest Hemingway’s literary machismo. His writing is itself often Hemingwayesque in its spare, blunt prose, but it also tends to get bogged down in hazy, directionless ruminations. The resulting meditation on what it means to be a decent man isn’t wrong, but it lacks the profundity it’s straining for. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (Apr.)