March 23, 2015
"I've never been able to cry about life but only over aging sports heroes getting their numbers retired," muses Wilker, a sports writer, after he learns that his wife is pregnant, her "belly growing into a wrecking ball." He feels adrift as the birth of the child approaches, and his sense of detachment from the sure bets in his lifeâthe rise and fall of careers, batting averages, and victory formationsâlikewise offers the reader very little mooring in a sea of self-absorption. Rather than proceeding chronologically, he cannily relates the events of his first year of fatherhood in the style of an A-Z sports almanacâwith entries for figures ranging from Los Angeles Dodgers relief pitcher David Aardsma to New York Giants quarterback Joe Pisarcik, and for terms like benchwarmer, quitter, and zeroâin an effort to examine whether his failures at sports have any bearing on his skills as a father. Wilker's account is poignant at times: after asking, "So what is a father?" he notes, "All inherited definitions are reeling, rigid hoaxers flailing at untouchable baseline truths." Elsewhere, the author comes across as achingly naïve: "Becoming a father had forced me into a position, an uncomfortable one for a benchwarmer, of making conscious choices."