Book of the week: Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

(Scribner, $38)

Andrew Solomon’s new book is “a headlong run into a minefield,” said Nathan Heller in The New Yorker. Fascinated by one of the paradoxes of procreation—that a child can be profoundly unlike his or her parents—Solomon interviewed some 300 families in which the quirks of biology contributed to an almost existential break, or potential break, between generations: Maybe the parents discovered in the first months that their infant didn’t respond to visual cues. Maybe the child was born with shortened limbs. Maybe a teenage son or daughter started hearing voices. Whether blindness, dwarfism, or schizophrenia is the obstacle, “Solomon’s question is simple: Why do parents devote themselves to raising children who are nothing like the ones they thought they could love?” In asking that, the author of The Noonday Demon raises some interesting questions about human difference, but also risks making a lot of people angry.

This 1,000-page book “tried my patience,” for sure, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Solomon has “shoehorned what might have been 10 or 12 books into one,” and he also did too much of his sampling among the well-to-do, who bring greater resources to these battles. But this is a work “that shoots arrow after arrow into your heart.” Solomon’s stories about the challenges that parents have confronted and often overcome “will leave you weeping.” You feel how isolating it can be for a family to raise a child with severe limitations or disorders, but Solomon’s accounts all lead to an argument for extreme diversity. He mourns what’s lost when cochlear implants reduce the deaf population, or when fetuses with Down syndrome are aborted.

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But do such disparate conditions really belong in the same argument? asked Kathryn Schulz in New York magazine. Solomon’s decision to lump together all manner of parenting challenges—from raising an autistic child to raising Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold—“seems like not just a category transgression but a moral one.” Yet even that flaw in Solomon’s argument serves his greater purpose, which is to get readers to look hard at our species’s innate and often havoc-creating discomfort with profound difference. “Solomon’s stroke of genius was to find a rare exception” to this response: “a group of people who extend unconditional love to those who are different from them.” From such people, we can learn.