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Three Men and a Rabbi Face a Life-Changing Test: A Toddler
Tom Lamont’s debut novel, “Going Home,” considers the joys and frustrations of raising a child who is not your own.
GOING HOME, by Tom Lamont
Tom Lamont’s “Going Home” is an exceptionally touching novel in multiple ways. It’s a story of fathers and sons. Male friendship and all its many — and not often discussed — complications. Jewish community, culture and faith. What goes into raising a young boy, and tending to loved ones who are at the end of their days. The cruel trick the universe plays that brings us from child to adult to child again over the course of our lives.
At the core of this novel is the question “What does it mean to care?,” and it considers both senses of the word: to care for, and to care about, someone.
Lamont’s literary debut is set in the London suburb of Enfield, and is told largely from the alternating perspectives of four impeccably drawn characters. Téo Erskine, 30, has left Enfield for life in the big city, but dutifully returns once a month to visit his elderly father. His close childhood friend is Ben Mossam, whose parents moved abroad when he finished school, leaving him with a house and money but not many reasons to grow up. Téo’s well-enough-meaning father, Vic, does his best to hide his ailing health and wonders why providing for his family — despite being distant at times — isn’t sufficient to rate him as a good father. And the new progressive rabbi in town, Sibyl, is doing her best to win over a board of more traditional congregants while grappling with her own growing questions around faith.
Tying these characters together is 2-year-old Joel, one of the most charming children put to the page in recent memory. The novel carefully shows the way the child’s very existence changes each of the other characters’ lives, all while perfectly encapsulating the frustration, boredom, anxiety and tremendous bursts of tenderness that come from raising a young one, even when that young one is not your own.
After Joel’s mother, Lia — Téo’s unrequited love — dies by suicide, this all-ages group of lads, plus Sibyl the rabbi, earnestly try to watch over Joel in the wake of baffling tragedy. Can they make room in their lives for a toddler until social services can find Joel’s biological father or caring foster parents? Or will one of them end up caring for him permanently in Lia’s absence?
