Greg Olear

Josh Lansky is a SAHD. Yep. That stands for Stay-At-Home-Dad, but lets just say that it isn't the only thing that acronym implies. Fathermucker is just the best kind of novel. It's a fictional story, but one that so many people will connect with! Mothers, fathers, people who aren't even parents but work with children. Each person will find their own hilarious piece of this Josh's story to fall in love with.

Greg Olear manages to squeeze every minute and mundane detail about a day in the life show more of a stay at home parent into this book. Being a person who is not yet married, and one who hasn't started a family yet, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to really immerse myself in Fathermucker. Wrong. Maybe it's my history of working with children, but I found myself cracking up during Josh Lansky's comments about his daily life. From debating on whether or not to shower or eat (there's never time for both), to his inner thoughts on the people around him, I fell in love with every aspect of his musings. Josh Lansky isn't perfect. His flaws are bared for all to see.

What really brought extra life to this story though is that Josh Lansky doesn't just have one child, he has two, and one of them has Asperger's Syndrome. I loved how much information about this syndrome was present in the book, and how honest Greg Olear was about how it changed the family dynamic. Josh Lansky has a fierce love for this children in this book. He's a father who, despite the exhaustion and slight mental breakdown, knows his kids inside and out. This is a book about family, about parenting, about marriage, and even about how thoughts sometimes (despite the fierce love) wander back to the time before children. As I said, brutally honest. Just also hilariously done.

The references to pop culture in Fathermucker are many, and Greg Olear's ability to create the real world around his characters are fantastic. Reading this book is like watching a movie. I know authors are always going for the "show don't tell" method when writing. Kudos to Olear! A day in the life of his character, Josh Lansky, is complete with Facebook, Noggin, McDonalds, and the all important Moka Java for those poor exhausted parents.

I'm rambling I know, and I'm not even sure I've done justice to this book. Here's what I'll wrap it up with. This is a hilarious book. It's honest, it's funny, it's a look into the life that most parents live but try not to share with the outside world. Yes, there is some language that people might be offended by, but it is a male point of view after all. I for one enjoyed it immensely, and hope that you will too! show less

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Though my setting is different, and far more conservative, I drive that same dark blue Honda Odyssey and at time it felt like the author was pulling the very thoughts from my mind. Motherhood, like the author's view of fatherhood, is failure. Every day I go from thinking I'm the best mother in the history of mothers to thinking I am the worst mother that ever procreated. The fact that the author was willing to tell the truth about this is brilliant. Good on show more ya, Greg Olear/Josh Lansky, glad someone, especially someone wearing the same type of Target t-shirts as me, is willing to admit that sometimes parenting isn't all sunshine and roses, and sometimes you just want your kids to leave you alone. This is a great book for parents of either gender. Mr. Olear has knocked this one out of the park. He has a fantastic voice and I'm eager for more. show less

Aw, I liked this. It's deceptively light and pop-culture friendly, but there's actually a lot going on beneath the surface. And in the meantime it's funny as hell. I reviewed it here.

The suburbs of the Northeast have been fertile domestic-fiction territory for decades, but Greg Olear’s view of that landscape in Fathermucker, his second novel, is thoroughly contemporary. As many others have before them, Josh and Stacy Lansky left New York City for the Hudson Valley once they started a family, but the shape of that family is a little different. Having sold a screenplay that almost got produced a few years earlier, Josh has become a struggling work-at-home writer and show more stay-at-home dad to their two children, while Stacy brings in the steady income working in marketing at IBM. Their five-year-old son Roland is on “the spectrum,” and toddler daughter Maude is a handful in her own two-year-old way. At the end of a week of single parenting while Stacy is away on business, Josh is having a real two-star (out of five) day: there are mice in the walls of his house, there’s a preschool outing in the afternoon (during which he hopes to find an opportunity to pitch an interview to one of the other parents, a renowned punk-rock musician), he and Stacy keep getting each other’s voicemails...and he’s very distracted by a neighbor’s suggestion that she just might be cheating on him.

Plotwise, this is clearly not new territory, but the framing is. The last few decades have made us increasingly conscious that parenting is a job. In some progressive circles, that job’s more likely to be viewed as an intensely child-focused full-time vocation, and one that doesn’t exclusively call mothers. Having said that, there aren’t many at-home dads at the playgroup and on preschool field trips in the Lanskys’ circle, and even fewer breadwinner moms. And having said THAT, the novel’s parent-centric aspects sound like everyday conversations at school pickup (or posts on a parent blog), and that extends to the particulars of raising a special-needs child.

Much of Fathermucker sounds like everyday conversation, actually--everyday RIGHT NOW. I’m torn over whether this is a strength or a weakness. Olear uses some very specific pop-cultural references and gives his characters dialogue that places them firmly in the 2010s. I appreciated that the novel was so current, but wonder if those details might cause it to be dated quickly--can a book be TOO contemporary? Then again, Fathermucker could just as easily turn out to be an artifact marking and elaborating on a particular point in our social history.

But regardless of how it holds up, it’s a great read at the moment. The style is modern--Josh’s internal monologue frequently goes stream-of-consciousness, and his speculations about Stacy’s alleged infidelities are presented in screenplay form--and while some of the characters’ specific concerns are very current, their larger ones are timeless. While it’s built around some elements that are certainly ripe for satire, Fathermucker mostly avoids that; rather, I found it intelligent and earnest, without taking itself too seriously. The details are sharply observed, and the commentary is on them is often very funny. I was thoroughly engaged by this novel, and at times I thought it was brilliant. show less