In this novel, modern fatherhood is depicted as a state of heightened and pervasive anxiety, where the intimate struggles of raising children are inseparable from a broader sense of global catastrophe. The narrator’s worries about his daughter’s refusal to go to school and his friend Max’s anxieties over his daughter’s eating disorder are consistently framed against a backdrop of pandemics, climate change, and political turmoil. Parenting is thus presented as a constant, fraught attempt to create a small pocket of safety and normalcy in a world that feels increasingly hostile and futureless. The fathers in the story are tasked with managing their children’s fears while simultaneously grappling with their own sense that the future itself is in peril.

The narrator explicitly connects his daughter Eva’s anxiety to the cascading crises of the modern world. He speculates that her reluctance to attend school stems from both social difficulties and her awareness of large-scale disasters. He lists the potential sources of her fear: “Everything with Covid. The sky orange with Canadian wildfire smoke. There was that day of floods, we were almost swept away on the expressway. There is the war—the wars—the political—” (29-30). For the narrator, Eva’s anxiety is a rational response to an unstable reality. His role as a father is therefore to mediate her existence in a frightening world, a task that leaves him feeling helpless as he recognizes the validity of her fears. The domestic space of the family is porous, unable to keep out the existential threats of the 21st century.

Max’s story intensifies this theme, portraying his child’s crisis as an all-consuming vortex that pulls the entire family into a state of emergency. His daughter Emmie’s struggle with an avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) transforms their home into a laboratory of experimental parenting. The family receives the initial diagnosis of “Failure to Thrive” like a “biblical curse” (80), a judgment that reflects their ability to provide basic nourishment. Max feels a deep sense of shame, reflecting that it is one thing to fail as a parent due to poverty or war, but another “to have every privilege… and to see your child starve herself, to see her—this is how it felt—refuse life, the life you have offered” (89-90). His narrative illustrates how a child’s suffering becomes the central organizing principle of family life, magnifying parental anxiety to an unbearable degree.

The novel also explores how technology offers a flawed and troubling sanctuary from these anxieties. Emmie’s eventual breakthrough with eating occurs only when she enters a “fugue state” (102) while watching YouTube unboxing videos. Max theorizes that these videos, with their sanitized aesthetics and satisfying sounds, provide a “safer, addictive, milder, repeatable version of satisfaction” (102) that shields her from the pressures of reality and helps her to ingest food. This paradoxical solution, where a child can only receive nourishment while zoned out in front of a screen that filters out the world, serves as a metaphor for parenting in an age of crisis. It suggests a desperate bargain in which finding solace in artificial, mediated experiences becomes a necessary defense against a reality that is too overwhelming to face directly.