Barrelhouse Reviews: Attachments by Lucas Mann
Reviewed by Marissa Castrigno
University of Iowa Press / May 2024 / 280 pp
“There was a conversation five or six weeks into her life in which we both said that we didn’t love her. What we were saying, I think now, is that to love her felt like an imitation, and we needed to admit that,” Lucas Mann writes, in the beginning of the tender yet incisive Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances. “To call a newborn beautiful or perfect feels both rote and hopeful, but not accurate. Very soon, it seemed impossible to have ever not loved her, but when did the change happen?”
In his new collection—12 essays that examine contemporary fatherhood in both its broadest cultural and most intimate, personal conceptions—the author stretches to analyze numerous versions (visions) of fatherhood, always observing from a new angle. Simultaneously, Mann tells a timeless story: that of a man and his happy, curious little girl.
The emotional cycling of the book rings true to any consuming, human experience. Fear, wonder, amusement, love, anxiety, exhaustion, back to wonder with a hearty laugh. Having a child is irreversible: Will I like it? What if I don’t instinctually, immediately love them? Can I avoid hurting my child in the same ways I was hurt (instead inventing new, unique and damaging mistakes)? But for Mann, at a bird’s eye view: what is a father?
In his effort to understand and examine fatherhood—what it is, how it is branded, and by whom—Mann launches himself toward a parade of father-shaped vessels: sports fanatic-grill master; court jester; man distracted to the point of dissociation, or tragically divorced from his children altogether—rendering each flat archetype anew, in full color, peering at them as if seeking shards of his own reflection. The reader gazes at one father while potentially seeking another.
Everything familiar to Mann, his interests, his work, his environment, comes under review after his daughter is born. His decades-long sports fanaticism, particularly his obsession with LeBron James, evolves beyond the court as Mann looks to James’ public depiction of his own fatherhood. The same man idolized for his athleticism and ruthlessness in the game now posts videos singing Frozen in the car, his daughter Zhuri looking on from the back seat, “tenderly ashamed.” Mann identifies a certain dualism in elite athletes, the most ferocious competitors available to us in modern society in lieu of gladiators, which takes on a magnetic charge. “I’m drawn in all over again to the image of these hardest men doing the simple act of fathering softly, which really means fathering at all,” Mann writes. Gentleness reframed as defiance, of expectations, of norms; containing multitudes, as they say. And if Mann’s intent in writing Attachments could be distilled into one phrase, fatherhood as multitude may fit.
The number of children born to professional athlete fathers, however, is infinitesimally small. What we are used to seeing, and experiencing, are TV dads, characters who are rarely situated at the fore and whose roles lack the depth afforded to other players. For Mann, most depictions of fatherhood lack sincerity, or sincerity has been aligned with “mother,” whereas “father” falls into a bucket with buffoon at best, evil at worst. Off the screen, he counts very few literary fathers “indelible,” and all of them are foregrounded as the parent, not a parent—like the Disney trope where Father is hero and Mother is dead. Atticus Finch, for example, “shines through in absence or because of absence. As though, in a narrative full of characters alive and where they are supposed to be, he would fade.”
Contemporary American fathers are invited to slip into one of the prescribed caricatures without much alternative, and Mann spends more than 200 pages illustrating the intention and effort necessary to parent outside of those available narratives. He explores the unique set of tensions that have governed the first four years of his daughter’s life: man vs. self, man vs. toddler, man vs. phone.
For as consuming, present, and immediate as parenthood may be, Mann describes the inescapable rip current of public parenting—Instagram, Twitter, dad blogs, meme accounts, et al.—as well as the way his young daughter recognized a vacancy in his scrolling very early on, already exerting her own pressure to pull him offline. Mann juggles work and parenting, teaching on Zoom with a toddler in his lap and somehow engaging his students while occupying his daughter. Quarantine is in full swing and his wife works outside their house, so Mann’s with his daughter all the time. And if I’m left with any prevailing impression, as a childless person, it’s the oversaturation of those early years. Every moment a parent is not paying attention risks becoming a personal failure or worse, but to connect outside your tangible surroundings is to form a lifeline.
In one essay, “Dads Being Dudes Making Jokes,” Mann turns to the vast digital empires of dad content: memes grown into websites grown into vast brands, where the predominant image of “Dad” is goofball or sweet idiot waiting for his cue to ease Mom’s stress (by pouring a glass of wine, rather than directing energy toward the source of it). These modern and widely disseminated characterizations of fathers “are insulting, yes, but they also provide a bar of expectations so easy to clear that a merely present father can feel not only annoyance but righteous superiority.” And then like a Good Intellectual, the nagging question: “Just how different am I from the archetypes I mock?” Mann laughs at a zombie meme, a supposed portrait of Dad after the bedtime routine. But the heart of the dad joke concept, he says, is “that he’s funny to laugh at, not with.” And so, in an experience where there cannot be humor, an experience like his hungry, screaming newborn refusing a bottle from her weary father, there is only shame. Not of “failing at the role I was supposed to be born to perform. Instead, it was the opposite: confirmation of a uselessness that was supposed to be inborn in me.”
There are so many scenes in this collection that reject the broader societal accusation of a father’s uselessness, and yet much of the book thrums with anxiety and self-doubt. As the subtitle of the collection suggests, Mann opens with an admission of what he feels is fraudulence: he is imitating fatherhood until it feels real to him, not knowing if it ever will. What stranger feeling could there be than having a featherless Cornish hen thrust into your arms? Immediately, the existential truths and circumstances of your life are overturned. “I find it hard to trust that I didn’t just do the impression of how I should have felt until it stuck. I love you I love you I love you—not as an expression of truth but an attempt at manifesting.”
The book is written in first person, so the reader is pressed right up against Mann’s anxiety and joy and exhaustion and elation and shame and boredom and thrill of it all—everything that constitutes a complete and true love. Throughout, Mann invokes books or movies or the internet or pop culture, searching for (or avoiding) those pangs of recognition. “This can’t be true,” he says, “but from what I can remember I’ve only read one version of fatherhood that felt worth emulating: Reverend John Ames in Gilead.” That book, too, is written in first person: “the best kind of first-person novel, in that it wouldn’t be good if retold in third. What Ames thinks and feels is so much more compelling than what he does, which is nothing, really.” Mann describes a scene of Ames and his son eating honeysuckle, the memory of which takes on a gravity for Ames that blooms outwards until it’s enormous enough to encapsulate the emotion of his entire life. Mann is “moved by what [Ames] wishes for, so much more resonant than anything he could have done. If the novel was in third person, he would be stiff and silent; there would be no evidence (and this is the most painful thing to think about) that he cared at all.”
We don’t grow up experiencing our parents in first person, and so there festers the gap between intention and action, desire and doing. For many, “father” was not a word first shown to be a verb, no matter how much sincerity one’s own may have put into the role. It’s always hard to be a child, just like it is always hard to be a parent, but Mann manages to kneel beside his daughter on every page, so that even when they are engaged in the type of combat only a toddler can launch, there is a beautiful clarity in their mutual recognition. What lesson could be more important for a child? “She sees me as well as I see her,” Mann writes. And I believe him.
Marissa Castrigno writes and edits from Brooklyn. She holds editorial positions at Shenandoah and The Rejoinder, and her own work appears online and in print. @marskc on X.