Philoprogenitive Man

A man who deliberately starts out to write, for public consumption, about his family (and particularly about his children) is, to put not too fine a point upon it, a temerarious man. He runs all sorts of risks. The public will find it cute or, worse, bathetic. That will be bad; it won't sell.

A more fell circumstance may occur. His children will find it from Squaresville, and, sales or no sales, he has to live with them. But Tom Braden is of stout heart. He has written of his eight children, five female and three male, and this is his deft account of his struggle to raise them and of their attempts at his salvation.

I cannot testify from direct knowledge whether Tom Braden's children find Eight IsEnough is from Squaresville. But, somehow, I strongly suspect they do not. (And if they do, as a member of the Father's Club, I want a strong SHOUT with them in the front hall, immediately.)

As a member of the reading public, I found "Eight" neither cute nor bathetic. Tom Braden, as many a man-jack among us knows, comes at things, including his eight children, from all sorts of angles. Sometimes bluntly; sometimes outrageously; quite often unexpectedly; and most often with a wry sense of appreciation and the proper, true weight of things.

This is a book about his eight varied children. It is a book, as any well-written book is, about the author. It is a book about his variegated (and I use the word deliberately) and wonderful wife Joan.

If it were only that, it would be an acceptable and amusing book. But it is also a book about ideas and insights and the emotional barometric pressures that occur in a family, all inserted effortlessly and economically, like an Iowan stacking hay.

There is, to be sure, the Sturm und Drang of parenthood, male division, as in the opening chapter, "How I Resigned As a Father" (and how many of us poor wights have wanted to go and do likewise?). This is neatly returned to, in an autobiographical reprise, in the final chapter, "Fathers Can't Resign," in which Tom Braden gives his notion of what a father must try to do for his children:

"To do his best to see that they grow up to be worthy of trust in whatever kind of world they're going to live in."

That is a sample of his modest and admirable aims in this book. He doesn't make his children out to be paragons, and he makes it quite clear that they do not always regard him as the ultimate model of wisdom, truth, and justice.

But he does try to make truth out of them and out of himself, A bunch of individual, various, and - God spare the Geritol! - vital people, bound together quite obviously by ties of love. And by ties of that not inconsiderable word, family.

It is a thoughtful book, warm and worried and wondering - as any good parent should be. It is not alone about Fatherhood, for, justly and appreciatively, the genius of Joan Braden runs through it. It is, as Pooh Bear might say, A Very Good Book.

(P.S. And Bradens, eight [or even nine], if you need any fire-power against the author, give me a jingle. I shared digs with him once, too.)

EIGHT IS ENOUGH. By ThomasBraden '40. Random House, 1975.201 pp. $7.95.

Assistant director of the Dartmouth News Service,Mr. Farley, with help from his ownvariegated and wonderful wife, is pater familias of a household of only six.