Father and Son

Starred review from July 17, 2023
This exceptional posthumous memoir from National Book Critics Circle Award winner Raban (Bad Land, 1942–2023) runs on two equally rewarding tracks. The first involves Raban’s six-week stay at a rehabilitation facility following his sudden stroke in 2011; the second concerns his father’s WWII correspondences with Raban’s mother while he was at war in Italy and France and she remained in England. In the book’s early sections, Raban delves into his parents’ back-and-forth as he navigates endless days in the hospital, soothed by their fortitude in the face of even greater adversity. Drawing on the work of various historians, he places their letters in the war’s chronological context, and finds himself growing emotionally closer to his father, with whom he barely had a relationship until he was in his 40s. Before long, a second father figure comes into focus: Tony Judt, whose 2006 book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 Raban reads “as a self-imposed course on intellectual rehabilitation... and a history of my (and my father’s) lifetime on my own subcontinent,” and whose Memory Chalet (in which Judt discusses his ALS-induced quadriplegia) Raban calls “one of the most engaging memoirs that I have ever read.” Like Judt before him, Raban catalogs “the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration” with warmth and intellectual rigor, effortlessly weaving together personal history and literary critique. Tirelessly researched and told with remarkable candor, this often breathtaking memoir is a worthy successor to Raban’s hero’s.