MISGIVINGS

Award-winning poet Williams (Repair, 1999) looks back on his parents' unhappy marriage, a mix of personalities that was

guaranteed from the start to produce some sparks—and did. Williams's family was in most ways a typical middle-class Jewish family of the post-Depression, postwar era. His father was a businessman who achieved success only relatively late in life, transforming the family's circumstances from dire need to relative comfort. An imposing figure, Dad was a stern and uncompromising man who, by his own choice, never apologized to anyone—a fiercely unhappy fellow. Mom was a lovely but utterly self-involved woman of great fragility, someone who never quite adjusted either to deprivation or sufficiency. Williams opens his slender memoir with a recollection of his first words to his father's dead body, "What a war we had," leaving readers to expect a sordid tale of incest or abuse—yet, mercifully, the family history is a surprisingly conventional one, littered with the kind of little battles that everyone has experienced. Williams explores these skirmishes with considerable fairness to all the participants and that, too, is a nice change of pace from the standard-issue grudge-bearing family memoir of today. Told in a series of short takes—no chapter is longer than four or five pages—this is a thoughtful excavation of ordinary family life, a refreshing change from the usual tiresome dirty laundry. Williams brings a poet's sensibility to the world of familiar people and common pursuits, and he is capable of carrying an unusual amount of insight into the psychology of family life. As more boomer-generation writers age (and as more of their parents die), we can expect to see an ever-growing number of such memoirs—but probably very few of them will be better written than this.

Sad, almost grim, rewarding.