https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/11/fatherhood-caleb-klaces-review

‘Life and language split open’: there is beauty as well as humour in a poet’s portrait of the disruptions of parenthood

Some of the most exciting and unconventional fictions of recent years have converged, improbably or otherwise, on the ancient orthodoxies of the domestic sphere. From Jenny Offill’s wryly subversive Dept. of Speculation to the corporeal meditations of Jessie Greengrass’s Sight, the need to re-examine marriage and motherhood has provoked richly divergent creative responses. With notable exceptions, such as the protean folklore of Max Porter, a new fiction of fatherhood has been slower to emerge. This first fictional experiment by the poet Caleb Klaces addresses the deficit in stark terms, hoping to capture “a life and language split open”.

On the surface, at least, these fissures are not readily apparent. The new parents (neither is named) buy a house and must grapple with the division of domestic labour. The nearest thing to cataclysm is supplied by planning failures and sketchy estate agents: the house has been built on a flood plain and on Christmas morning is duly inundated. A cache of notebooks and a laptop are destroyed, and with them the only draft of the father’s novel.