My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

Deals with the confrontation between an aggrieved 18 year old boy and his estranged novelist-turned-screenwriter father

Morris Dickstein wrote (in Harper’s) of Jonathan Baumbach’s previous novel that it “beautifully explores the relationship between what we image and who we are.” My Father More or Less, which deals with the confrontation between an aggrieved eighteen-year-old boy and his estranged novelist-turned-screenwriter father, is a continuing exploration of the fiction making capacities of the imagination.
 

161 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1982

About the author

Born in Brooklyn, New York on July 5, 1933. Married Annette Grant (fourth wife) on Dec. 18, 2004. Former wives: Naomi Miller, Elinor Berkman, Georgia Brown. Children: David, Nina, Noah and Nico. A.B (English) Brooklyn College, MFA (Playwriting) Columbia University, Ph.D (English and American Lit), Stanford University. Fellowships include Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Arts, Merrill. Invented in 1973 (with Peter Spielberg) Fiction Collective, the first fiction writers cooperative in America; reinvented in 1988 as FC2. An unintentionally well-kept secret among contemporary American novelists. Author of 14 books of fiction

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first novel from Baumbach. Opens with an epigraph from Kafka’s letter to his father, which sets the tone for the strained patriarchal palaver that follows: a lost teenage son travels to London to visit his neglectful and emotionally useless novelist father, hoping for some sort of rapprochement that is never likely to happen. Excerpts from the novelist’s shlock thriller script are placed throughout the novel, leading to a sort of blurring between reality and fiction (inside the fiction), with the father paranoid that his son’s borrowing of his handgun might have bad consequences for his brains. An engaging novel that plays around with perspective and tone, that entertains and forces one to remark ‘hmm’ at various moments: always a pleasurable enterprise.