The back cover of Lisa Lazarus and Greg Fried’s The Book of Jacob leads with a quote from Tom Eaton: this book, says Eaton, is “a startlingly honest, superbly adult and intelligent insight into the existential earthquake that is the arrival of a first child”.
Tom Eaton: an unlikely source for a parenting book’s blurb. Fittingly, The Book of Jacob is an unlikely parenting book. At its launch, Fried classed it as a “gothic parenting” text, which may well be a genre of one. A quote from Franz Kafka prefaces a section toward the end, called “Late Winter”; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland features heavily.
There’s possibly another “genre of one” that The Book of Jacob belongs to, too: the parenting book that is celebrated as much for its writing as for its subject. It is, quite simply, splendidly written. Here’s an excerpt from the mother’s pen:
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2 + 1 = 3
‘This is my ear, this is my ear, that is your ear, your ear,’ sings Greg. He conscientiously touches the appropriate bits of Jacob’s body. ‘This is your foot, das ist gut.’
‘Do you think this will help him learn English and German?’ he asks.
I don’t answer. I have no idea. In truth, I’m stumped as to how Jacob can possibly learn English from the disconnected slivers of language he hears from us. Perhaps he hasn’t settled on English yet: the other day he chirruped, perfecting a sound found only in the Amazon rainforest, beautiful and melodious.
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