Middle Men

When I was writing my most recent novel, my father asked me what I was working on, and before I could answer, he said, “I hope it’s not another book about me.” It did not strike me until that moment that all stories—at least all my stories—have his presence looming over them. My father was an easy target, a larger-than-life character whose movements my two brothers and I watched and sometimes mocked. He once told the three of us, “I didn’t have children—I had critics.” And when he passed on not long ago, the second parent to do so, I realized something more important: that he and my mother had been blocking our view of mortality for us.

Both David Homel’s Midway and Norman Ravvin’s The Joyful Child are about exactly these things: fathers and sons, the meaning of life, the inexplicable hold of love upon us and mortality—our fear of it, our flight from it. Both stories feature men whose fathers have played a significant role in their lives and who are...