![]() ![]() ![]() It was as if my father had sat me down to show me the magazines himself, or, worse, as if he had taken me to a whorehouse. Twelve-year-old Benito finds in a stack of dirty magazines his father’s “specific preferences.” After Benito’s mother catches him looking at the magazines, his parents argue: ![]() In “No More than a Bubble,” Benito’s Italian father is passing down his own muddled views of race, having married a woman who does not have the skin like “old milk,” but is instead a black woman whom he has sexualized. “No More Than a Bubble” follows two friends through an evening that ends with a sexual encounter neither anticipated, leaving one of them to “keep imaging what it would be like, to be a father to a boy who loves and believes in me and, despite all our differences, wants nothing more than to be a man in my image.” In “I Happy Am,” a boy bussed from summer camp expects a field trip to a white home full of poolside treats, but instead ends up with Arlene Clinksdale, a black woman “no different from him.” In “Infinite Happiness” a man betrays his friend and comes to understand his loneliness and true heart. One feels the holes left by these absent fathers on every page, as the characters question and define their assumptions about women, men, and themselves. As Eric says in “Everything the Mouth Eats,” “Isn’t it family that, in so many ways, determines our approach to life’s deceptions?” ![]() Absent fathers abound in this debut collection of stories, leaving behind their complicated legacies of race and love. ![]()
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