Oh this is good! James Walcott totally makes fun of Adam Gopnik in The New Republic. Best line:
In a later chapter Gopnik and Luke bond over baseball, guy stuff that they can share without mom's editorial interjections killing everything. When Luke opts for pinstripes, his father does likewise. "Luke remains a Yankees fan. I have, amazingly, become one myself, in the wary, ironic way that one can be a Yankees fan now, a pigeon watching the antics of the hawks from a safe distance." As a New Yorker for over thirty years, I can confidently assert that there is no such creature as a "wary, ironic" Yankees fan. (If such a being existed, the ghost of Billy Martin would slap it silly.) No true fan would declare home-team loyalty with such a sad-sack sigh, as if adjusting the elastic band in his shorts: "We have accepted the Yankees, more than we have embraced them. They are another New York accommodation that we have made." Gopnik just doesn't seem cut out for guy stuff; his fidgety navel-gazing keeps interfering.
The piece is even more interesting if you've also read this, and especially this:
Watching the Mommy Wars makes me mighty glad I'm not a Daddy. To be sure, there's a lyrical part of me that longs to savor the joys of fatherhood; to jam a stroller into the trunk of a taxi in the pounding rain, to trade nanny horror stories with the other fellas in the support group, to lie awake at night worried sick over tuition fees and dental bills, and, most of all, to deck myself out in the official uniform of the Middle-Aged Dad: baseball cap, team jacket, hip-pouch cellphone holster, and thick-soled white sneakers suitable for a lunar landing. I often spot such dedicated MADs wheeling their sticky offspring along the sidewalks of upper Manhattan, bracing themselves as they bend over to pick up the juice cup that Jeremy has dropped for the five-thousandth time. Yes, that could be me stooping and retrieving. Married and childless, I'm missing out on so much. Yet I'm willing to forgo the mature satisfactions of being a father, and how, because it has spared me having to listen to the incessant kvetching and crabbing of the Mommy Wars--the latest endless installment of "I Can't Believe How She Lets Those Kids Run Wild."
