A Safe Home Base

THE CROWD SOUNDS HAPPY

A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball

By Nicholas Dawidoff

Pantheon. 271 pp. 24.95

FATHERS & SONS & SPORTS

Introduction by Mike Lupica

ESPN. 296 pp. $24.95

Before their recent autobiographical confessions, who would have suspected that so many writers of the late baby-boom generation had suffered through such bleak, desperate childhoods? It turns out that Jonathan Franzen spent his adolescence wallowing in self-disgust. The fatherless J.R. Moehringer found male companionship only in the local saloon. Sean Wilsey's theatrically narcissistic mother and emotionally abusive stepmother sent him reeling into drugs and depression. Now, Nicholas Dawidoff, author of "In the Country of Country," has composed a painfully evocative memoir of a joyless youth in New Haven, Conn., his mentally disturbed father absent but perpetually looming. It makes me want to consider my own parents' acrid divorce as a creative impetus.

The narrative of "The Crowd Sounds Happy" is unsettling but hardly unique. As Donald Dawidoff, a Washington-based attorney and author, declines into instability in the mid-1960s, his wife flees with their son and daughter. Money is tight and their household is cramped; she sleeps on a couch, while Nicholas occupies a semiprivate anteroom at the noisy nexus of the ground-floor apartment. He's a bright boy, and -- though small and scrawny -- a talented athlete, proud of his ability to scoop ground balls off any terrain regardless of how patchy or irregular. Still, he's unable to parlay those attributes into anything resembling popularity.

It sounds grim, and it is. But the crackle of Dawidoff's writing and his unstinting, if occasionally overbearing, sensitivity make his unfortunate journey compelling. Already keenly aware of the differences between himself and his peers -- his lack of a proper and present male parent; the straitened financial circumstances that force his mother to substitute powdered milk for fresh; her stubborn unwillingness to allow television in the home -- he chronicles each unkind nickname and mortifying incident. Most unsettling are the interactions with Donald, who moves to New York and grows increasingly erratic, by turns racist, crude, boorish and incoherent. "Father's Day for me," Dawidoff writes, "was like Valentine's Day for the brokenhearted."

Only adulthood can save him, but in the meantime baseball serves as a potent distraction. Introduced to the Mets by his mother's sister, he becomes a devoted fan and student of the game. "I felt increasingly like a loner, and these men filled up my room," he writes of the old-time players. "I experienced a peculiar nostalgia for these distant days and distant games I had never lived through." Eventually, he switches allegiances to the Red Sox. The epic quality of the team's disappointments gives Dawidoff a fresh perspective on his own. "I felt oddly consoled by their pursuit of failure," he says.

In rooting for Boston, he turns his back on the New York of his father; his pathological hatred of the Yankees, he understands with hindsight, is in large measure in loco parentis. Ted Williams, the legendary Red Sox star of a prior generation, becomes an idealized male substitute. "Maybe I kept reading about Williams," Dawidoff writes, "because I couldn't do what I really wanted, which was to watch him play, and then be with him, have him tell me more stories, tell me that it would be all right in the end for me." By high school, he's plodding through days in a fog, just waiting for Red Sox radio broadcasts at night. "I did not feel fully alive until I had gone off to be with them and hear whatever story they had for me . . . the present but nonexistent men I wanted around me to make up for the absent but existing father whom I no longer wanted at all, except in ways that he could not be."

The most successful essays in the anthology "Fathers & Sons & Sports" mine the same territory. Here, too, the paternal relationship is freighted with burdens that complicate the already difficult matter of male adolescence. "I grew up a kid whose father left and who experienced his leaving as a death," writes Paul Solotaroff in "A Father's Small Hope," an essay about his severely autistic son. "Some holes you fill, and some you don't -- not, at least, until you're a father yourself."

Mike Winchell, a high school quarterback in an excerpt from Buzz Bissinger's "Friday Night Lights," uses football not only to come to grips with his father's premature passing, but also to validate the elder man's life. In "Holy Ground," sportswriter Wright Thompson tries to work through his father's demise while covering the Masters. "Maybe I'll find those answers out here, at this place he loved so much. Is that crazy?" he wonders. "Nothing seems crazy to me anymore."

Like Dawidoff, they're longing for connection with fathers or sons who are unwilling or unable to connect. For them, sports serve less as a metaphor for real life than as a substitute, an orderly world in which box scores tally, standings brook no ambiguity, and even losers look forward to next year.