Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Anahid Nersessian on Ashton Politanoff’s Dad Had a Bad Day, Peter Beinart on Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Crossing the Red Line, Jennifer Wilson on Lars Anderson’s Brady, Sanjena Sathian on Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon, and Jeff VanderMeer on China Miéville’s The Rouse. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. They lift weights, chug shakes, and play tennis until they puke, then drink too many beers at the club’s restaurant.
Many of them, including Ned and his childhood friend and rival, Roland, are scarred by their time as youth players, haunted by memories of the sadistic coaches and cruel, competitive fathers who terrorized them both on and off the court. Masculinity, in this novel, is an inheritance of anguish and misadventure—one battle after another in which boy is pitted against boy and then man against man, all of them vying for a phantom ideal of total immunity from the frustrations and injustices of ordinary life. Players will hit ‘a slice, a drive, a heavy ball, a drop shot’ or ‘a nice ice-cream floater.’ His unnumbered chapters are short, but a lot happens in each one—not unlike, you might say, a tennis match, where the governing tension between a compact field of play and balls that can reach speeds of more than 150 miles per hour creates an environment at once tightly contained and incredibly volatile.
In the space of a few paragraphs, Ned will abandon and recover his child, bungle an extramarital affair, win and lose, experience ecstasy and dejection. He is high on his own poor choices, which, for all their stupidity, seem to bring a much-needed urgency to his disappointed life. It is an identity in conflict with his role as a twenty-first-century parent, which requires him to be a gentle, endlessly patient caretaker who apologizes when he yells and stays in the bathroom with Freddie while the boy shits—a ‘mother bird,’ as Ned puts it, instead of an alpha male.
There is no question that disagreeable, even dangerous attitudes toward masculinity play a significant part in Politanoff’s novel, which is propelled by Ned’s realization that he can no longer bear being a stay-at-home dad in a sexless marriage. But in its preoccupation with what Politanoff calls the ‘abject-adjacent features’ of manospheric culture, Dad Had a Bad Day also has something in common with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) and Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin (2024), books that similarly test the boundary between self-care and self-destruction. There are moments, however, when it seems to point toward a better life than the one Ned feverishly pursues, riven as it is by competition over women, resources, and self-respect.
Some of these moments involve Ned’s imperfect yet still undeniably loving rapport with his son. Others foreground his tenderness toward other men. Ned calls this tenderness ‘a kinship,’ but occasionally it seems like erotic interest . . .
These sensual glimmers are no match for the antagonistic sociality of straight male relationships, which, in this novel, quickly convert sympathy or desire into rivalry and aggression. Inevitably, the camaraderie between Ned and his teammates will sour, sometimes turning violent; just as inevitably, his secret hobby will be discovered, his marriage imperiled, his delusions exposed. All the same, his carnal curiosity about other men feels far more urgent than his frustrated longing for his wife, who brushes off his advances and masturbates in the shower, or the female club member with whom he almost has an affair.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
