You Can Let Go: A Review of Ben Tanzer's Lost in Space

Given that I’m a person who has never really wanted to have children, you might wonder what got to me about Lost in Space (a book of essays by Ben Tanzer relating to his fatherhood). Admittedly, Tanzer managed to hook me with similar themes (though fictional) in his novel You Can Make Him Like You. Still, I have no kids and no real interest in having any . . . but I was interested in checking out this book.

I tried to figure out why Lost in Space intrigued me. It’s not just as simple as me realizing that I’m at least the child of a father and wondering what it might have been like on the other side, though that’s certainly part of it. For one thing, it isn’t like I haven’t had to consider the possibility I could become a father. There’s always that. Actually, now that I really think about the topic, I could probably keep listing reasons as long as I keep pondering. Motherhood or fatherhood (potential or actual), what was it like for one’s parents, or whatever, there are any number of reasons why people with or without children might be interested in someone’s thoughts on being a parent. Bottom line: this is a huge part of human life and I want to see inside.

Getting to the book itself, Tanzer delivers marvelously in these essays. I think of books on fatherhood and I immediately worry about schmaltz, oversentimentality. I worry about Todd Burpo. Whether it’s fair or not to have that as an immediate concern when sitting down with fatherhood writings, it’s what I worry about. However, I didn’t find that to be a problem in Lost in Space. There is sentiment, but not excessive sentimentality (this selection from “Towers”):

From the start, your relationship with him prompted you to feel things you had not allowed yourself to feel before. Emotions you had hoped to bury or avoid. The idea of them embarrassed you. You were above all that, and not because you were better than anyone else, but because you were not willing to embrace any of it. It was all too messy and real.

But not with him, never with him, you can tell him you love him all day long.

You can also imagine shaking him, though. Some- thing you never think about when dealing with adults. You know you’re not supposed to feel this way, much less actually say it out loud, and it’s not that you can truly imagine doing it, it’s just that you can’t not imagine doing it either.

He stops moving around so much.

“You can let go,” he says.

Parenthood essays also leave me cold when an author tries to hard to seem like a perfect parent, or when an author sounds like a parental version of Gomer Pyle. We all know no one is perfect, and we also all know that no one is really prepared. The big problem for me with either of these extremes is that they feel like poses, a mask the author has decided to present instead of his or her actual emotions. However, Tanzer makes clear that he is only doing the best he can at the same time that he doesn’t overplay it. The approach doesn’t end up feeling like a pose to me. To the contrary, it feels honest and real (this selection from “The Unexamined Life”):

Children are different of course. The shadows come later, but even talking about having children makes the chance for adventure seem less likely, and Debbie and I have definitely not been on enough adventures together. And yes, I know, people go on adventures when they are parents, but will we? I don’t know, which makes me think even more about regret and shadows, which leaves me spinning.

It also makes me want to run away.

Not that I want to run away from the idea of parenthood or Debbie, but for at least one last time I want to think I can be someone who takes chances and can live in the moment.

Debbie is not interested in any of that.

“Go, go somewhere I have been,” Debbie says, supportive, though maybe hedging her bets a little, “but go, and then come back, cool?”

My main impression from Lost in Space is being next to a confiding friend on a barstool.  Mind you, not just a ‘bro’ with whom conversation only goes so far: sports, women, and no more. Instead I mean one of those close friends who really need to talk and let it all out . . . to tell you things that have real, personal gravity (this selection from “I Need”):

I need sleep, long and deep and full of dreams about love, sex, pizza, Patrick Ewing, and Caddyshack. In these dreams I will be so happy, smart, funny, and full of esprit de corps that interns will float by my office in low-cut blouses begging to hear my innermost thoughts on Game of Thrones. I will not worry about bills or love handles, and I will not think about my children, not for even one moment, yo. If they happen to make an appearance they will say “excuse me,” “yes,” and “please,” eat over the table using actual utensils, and not constantly bang their heads or mysteriously find their hands around the necks of one another.

In the end, Tanzer hooked me just as much with Lost in Space as he did with You Can Make Him Like You. He manages to hit a lot of different topics in these essays: whether or not he does the right things for his boys, worry about what could happen to them, concern about who they will become, desire to share in their lives, the need to have life of his own, trepidation about having children, and the decision to go ahead with surgery finalizing what children he will have. There are a variety of different aspects of fatherhood in here, approached in a variety of different ways. I still don’t think I truly know what it is to be a father after reading, but I think I have shared some of what it’s been like for Ben Tanzer.

I found Lost in Space to be intimate, insightful, and vulnerable. It has a weighty subject, but the writing doesn’t rely on the subject’s weight to get by. Whether you have kids or not, I can’t imagine someone reading this book and not being affected. In short — it’s good, yo.

A Small Congregation of Nerdy Younger Kids: A Review of Ben Tanzer's So Different Now

During the final session of my MFA advanced fiction workshop, my classmates and I read our answers to some questions our professor had cribbed from Paris Review interviews. The idea was to take a step back from our work, which we were all probably sick of by that point, and examine it from more neutral ground. The exercise reminded me of that SNL sketch where James Lipton was interviewing himself, but I did the best I could to not sound like an asshole as I read mine aloud.

In response to the question about hidden flaws in my work, my response was that I have a lot of trouble writing from character because I don’t really understand human interaction at all. I mean, I engage in it (with varying degrees of success), but it’s largely out of reflex. My professor told me that the best writers didn’t understand people either, and that great characters come from those questions about how people would act in certain situations or circumstances, or around certain other people. The unspoken second half of this theory, I think, is that being able to decode people interferes with the process of developing characters and telling stories through them.

It’s a gratifying theory to hear, but it flounders before a writer like Ben Tanzer, who really does seem like he understands people. He sets his own parameters on his characters’ interactions and familial circumstances, as we all do, but you never get the sense that his characters are being moved around like chess pieces for some grander literary purpose.

I’ve reviewed Ben’s work over at my own blog before, and I remember saying that Ben makes writing, specifically the process of building a character arc, look way easier than it really is. His new collection of short stories, So Different Now, shows that his already-impressive gifts for astute narrative observation have sharpened. It’s infuriating. And you can’t even hate him for it because he’s so damn nice and helpful.

Anyway, “Stevey,” the third story in the collection, is the best example of what I’m talking about. The story is anchored by the advice doled out by Stevey, the titular character, to a small congregation of nerdy younger kids that includes the narrator. Any credibility Stevey has is due to his hot girlfriend and cool dad, and because the narrator and his friends “didn’t yet know the difference between being confident and being smart.” This should ring true for anyone who looked to their peer group, rather than their parents or siblings, for guidance.

With this story, Tanzer displays a tiered understanding of how young men seek out role models. The shallow reason is because they’re attracted to success, whose definition is relative to their peer group, and another explanation might be that the narrator is “careening from one fuck-up to the next,” so the illusion of control Stevey has might as well be the real thing. Tanzer’s approach gives the narrator much more agency – he is so desperate for some kind of help structuring his entry into adulthood, which he knows is above his head, that he chooses to heed advice like “don’t ever date girls with dirty nails,” even though he identifies it as one of Stevey’s quirks rather than something to be generally assumed.

Even when this relationship unravels, when the narrator sees evidence of domestic abuse in Stevey’s house and laughs at Stevey’s insistence that “sweat is the biggest fucking turn-off you can imagine,” the writing avoids melodrama. The narrator may brush off his own skepticism, but actual evidence that Stevey “wasn’t in control all the time, that he was flawed, and . . . he struggled just like everyone else did” can’t be so easily brushed aside. It’s the moment where the narrator sees his own path emerging, whereas before it was either follow Stevey’s advice or spend adolescence rudderless and adrift.

I don’t think a writer who didn’t get people could drag those last few paragraphs out of me, because that writer couldn’t handle a coming-of-age piece without relying on the same stereotypes and operatic emotions we’ve seen play out for generations. Hell, someone who didn’t get people couldn’t write teenagers at all, I don’t think – they’d read like miniature adults on the page. Tanzer’s work, by contrast, makes statements like “good writers don’t have to ‘get’ people” sound like flailing self-justification.

When Publishing a Book Becomes More than Publishing a Book

When I think about You Can Make Him Like You I feel incredibly lucky to have published it; to have been any part of it at all means the world to me. My goal as a publisher has always been to honor great writing with great design, but YCMHLY went beyond that — it became a journey unlike any other book I’ve had to the good fortune to be a part of.

So, let’s see if I can trace this correctly. I’d seen Ben Tanzer’s name around. I knew he had a book published by Orange Alert, a place that had been an early supporter of my own writing. That book took its title from a Bob Dylan song, so obviously I was intrigued. But before I ever got a chance to pick up one of his books Ben submitted a short story to Artistically Declined Press’s .pdf ebook series. The story was great and I was excited to have a writer whose name I recognized, but with whom I’d had no personal experience submitting something. I accepted the piece within a week, and within days, maybe hours, Ben friended me on Facebook.

Ben and I exchanged a few messages and he mentioned he had finished a new book. He very cautiously made sure I didn’t feel like he was soliciting me when he told me he thought I would really dig the book, that he felt there was something going on — some sort of connection that made him feel like this book would up my alley.

Being the careful person I try to be, I told him I wasn’t looking for manuscripts, but to send it to me anyway, that I would like to read it. It was, after all, titled after a Hold Steady song. Naturally I was intrigued.

I knew within a few pages of starting You Can Make Him Like You that it was something special. I quickly emailed my publishing partner at the time and she responded in a manner that affirmed my initial feeling, that this was a big book. A book any small press would be lucky to get its hands on. A book that could easily be published by any major publisher. So for a relatively new publisher like ADP we both felt we better snatch it up. Quick.

Tanzer is not only a relentless book writing machine, he’s got an enthusiasm that spreads to all he associates with. Putting YCMHLY together was a great experience. It wasn’t without its difficulties, but where some writers might approach the publishing process as a self-centric journey, Tanzer focused on it as a team effort. Where I was constantly concerned with doing right by him and his book, he was constantly concerned with doing right by the press.

Sometimes you publish a book and the relationship with the writer is just about the book and there is nothing wrong with that. They can be fantastic relationships. But with Tanzer it went deeper. Our conversations never ended — rarely did they break for more than a day. It felt like I was talking to someone I’d been friends with my whole life. At AWP 2011, as we geared up to release YCMHLY, I met Ben Tanzer for the first time in person and we split a hotel room. Even if you’ve talked to someone a million times through emails it can still be awkward in person, but that wasn’t the case.

We’re moving toward the one-year anniversary of YCMHLY and the book’s seen some exciting successes. But more than anything, even more than being a part of publishing a fantastic book by a fantastic writer, the most exciting thing to me will always be how it gained me another brother.

I published YCMHLY because it was well-written and because it spoke to me both as a man, husband, father, and writer. While I might not relate to the particulars of the protagonist’s adult coming of age journey in the book, I recognize the soul of that journey. The urge and desire to be the best version of yourself as a man, friend, husband, and potentially a father without any sort of knowledge or road map for how to get there. I recognize the urge as a writer to deal with difficulties in relationships and coming to terms with what it means to have all the labels of man, father, husband, etc.

People often talk about “women’s fiction,” books that speak to women about their lives and mindsets, while entertaining them. Tanzer writes the very best kind of men’s fiction, and I don’t use such a label chauvinistically. Tanzer writes about every aspect of a man, whether flattering or not. He does it with soul, and that’s what makes people gravitate toward his writing and his personality. It’s why his books appeal to both men and women. It is what makes him the best sort of friend and brother from another mother, because What Would Tanzer Do? wouldn’t be a bad credo for any of us as writers or people.