Housebroken

May 1, 2003
Novelist and journalist Eddie (Chump Change) is living a dissolute bachelorhood of bohemian squalor and interchangeable"sexually forthright, non-rocket-scientific young women" when he finds the love of his life in the form of a family-minded woman. He was wary of the crimp domesticity might put in his literary aspirations, but when son Nicholas comes along, the avowedly unemployable writer decides that he was"born to be a househusband." He may stay home while his wife goes to work, but he's not entirely housebroken: he uses the corner bar and neighborhood lingerie shop as day-care centers, longs to join the glitterati, muses about divorce on a hellish family vacation, exists for long periods in a haze of boredom and sleep-deprivation and wears the indelible social stigma of the stay-at-home dad. But he derives an unsuspected degree of fulfillment in a house well-kept, a meal well-cooked and a child well-cared for, and finds that family life gives him"more sustained happiness than I ever expected to enjoy on this earth." These superbly crafted explorations of fatherhood are full of wry humor, keen observations, and hilarious, off-kilter riffs on such topics as the Teletubbies, the seduction techniques of the single man and the scientific literature of parenting. This indispensable guide to fatherhood in the post-feminist age proves that writing and child-care do indeed mix.