Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater

by Seth Lerer

“This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciousnesses and almost two epochs.” That’s how Edmund Gosse opened Father and Son , the classic 1907 book about his relationship with his father. Seth Lerer’s Prospero’s Son is, as fits our latter days, altogether more complicated, layered, and multivalent, but at its heart is that same the fraught relationship between fathers and sons.

 

At the same time, Lerer’s memoir is about the power of books and theater, the excitement of stories in a young man’s life, and the transformative magic of words and performance. A flamboyantly performative father, a teacher and lifelong actor, comes to terms with his life as a gay man. A bookish boy becomes a professor of literature and an acclaimed expert on the very children’s books that set him on his path in the first place. And when that boy grows up, he learns how hard it is to be a father and how much books can, and cannot, instruct him. Throughout these intertwined accounts of changing selves, Lerer returns again and again to stories—the ways they teach us about discovery, deliverance, forgetting, and remembering.

 

“A child is a man in small letter,” wrote Bishop John Earle in the seventeenth century. “His father hath writ him as his own little story.” With Prospero’s Son , Seth Lerer acknowledges the author of his story while simultaneously reminding us that we all confront the blank page of life on our own, as authors of our lives.

Genres: Memoir

168 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2013

About the author

Professor Seth Lerer (1956 -) is a contemporary Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, specialising in historical analyses of the English language, in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, including in particular Geoffrey Chaucer.

-wikipedia

Reviews

[Jim Coughenour]

There is a whole sub-genre of memoirs by children of (usually-closeted) gay fathers. Yesterday I listened to Terry Gross interviewing Alysia Abbott about Fairyland. A few years ago Alison Bechdel published her fabulous Fun Home. But I have to say, as a subject it’s not one I find especially interesting. I picked up Prospero’s Son because Seth Lerer had written it. He wrote excellent introductions to my editions of The Consolation of Philosophy and La Vita Nuova; and last January when I was making my way through Chaucer, I truly enjoyed his lectures from The Great Courses. So when I saw his memoir displayed by the counter at Books, Inc. I yielded to impulse.

Sadly, there’s not much magic in this book. Lerer doesn’t really enter into his father’s world – and to the degree he does, he’s slightly censorious. Naturally, the book is as much about his childhood as about his father – but as childhoods go, it’s not much more interesting than my own, interesting only to friends and family. The Prospero conceit is thin, despite Lerer's sometimes too-obvious erudition. In Lerer’s telling his father is more fatuous than fantastic. I suppose I was hoping for something more along the lines of Bernard Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere, a rueful memoir by a gay son about his straight father, but Lerer, so sparkling in his lectures and introductions, misses whatever enchantment his father must have possessed. Prospero's Son is more dispiriting than blithe.

[Mark Desetti]

A very depressing book. As a teenager, I was friends with the author; I could never have imagined this as his life. So distressing; depressing. It comes across as a life so deeply mired in a world of books and academia that he has lost his love of life and failed to be engaged in what it is to be "human" - to be a son or a father or a husband. It feels as if, over time, he has become one with his books and studies and lost what it is to be a man. I long to see the friend I once knew who lived with a contagious joy. Is that boy gone?

As for the writing, I struggled. I found myself wondering who was narrating or to whom the narrator was speaking.

[Anna Dowdall]

The book pulls you in, to affect, provoke, puzzle and charm.

[University of Chicago Magazine]

Seth Lerer, PhD'81
Author

From our pages (May–June/13): In this memoir, humanities scholar Seth Lerer describes his complicated relationship with his father—a flamboyant teacher and lifelong actor with a pompadour, an eye for stylish clothes, and the ability to command an audience. The author recalls how his father embarked on many whirlwind adventures, including an impulsive move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and eventually came to terms with life as a gay man. Ultimately, Lerer chronicles two evolutions: his father's and his own.

[Rose]

I knew nothing about the author or this book and started it while waiting for a delayed flight, frustrated by a widely-hyped and over-written e-book. What an unexpected pleasure this turned out to be!

The writing is spare, honest and clean and the memoir constitutes a collection of stories which taken together illustrate a life.

[Mike Coleman]

I don't want to post bad reviews here, but this book just didn't appeal to me, despite its promise.

[John Schneider]

A few flaws but a good memoir and thoughtful reflection on generational relationships and at once, both our indelible impact on and complete lack of control of our succeeding generations

[Johann Fourie]

One of the best written books I've read.
Personal history, family history and literature reference all mixed together in a wonderful readable novel.

[Allison]

Heard him give a lecture this fall--he is a fabulous speaker, excellent writer.

[Milt]

fre-ebook UofC mini-read (some cellread)