In the Early Times: A Life Reframed

A son’s recollections of his father reveal much about himself in this knotty yet moving memoir. New Yorker scribe Friend (Cheerful Money) profiles his father Theodore “Day” Friend, a historian, novelist, and onetime president of Swarthmore College, always imposing and increasingly cantankerous with age. Drawing on his memories and Day’s letters, journals, and private files (one of them marked “Annals of Carnality 1948–1958”), Friend draws out multigenerational resonances in his boyhood relationship with Day and his relationships with his own young children; in their love of playing squash, which measured their vitality and decline; in their separate quests to develop as writers; and in the marital strains caused by Day’s infidelities and Friend’s own sporadic unfaithfulness to his wife. Writing in wry and inquisitive prose, Friend crafts vibrant portraits of his relatives and evokes intimate family dynamics: the joviality and tensions of Christmas rituals, things carefully left unsaid (“In my family, questions are traditionally limited to how you slept and whether you unloaded the dishwasher”), and kids’ imponderable queries (“If Jesus is one of God’s helpers, and Santa is one of God’s helpers, and we killed Jesus, why didn’t we kill Santa?”). Out of this comes a luminous narrative of love, transgression, and forgiveness, and of the ties that bind despite chafing. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (May)