The Thing About Life has received hundreds of laudatory reviews from magazines, newspapers, websites, bloggers, readers’ reviews, but inevitably there have been a handful of naysayers. The book aspires to be (ultimately, deeply) consoling, but until it arrives there it's formally, emotionally, and intellectually unnerving, nervous-making. What interests me about the naysayers is their antipathy to this level of discomfort.That is, the few negative reviews have come from people who are, it seems to me, uncomfortable with the degree of ambivalence I acknowledge feeling toward my father—the blend of “filial love and Oedipal rage,” as a generous review in Time put it—and they also resist the book’s boundary-blurring: the convergence of data stream, wisdom stream, and father-and-son stream. Content, though, tests form: a work should look like what it’s. about. And life, friends (as John McCain would say), is nothing if not messy. Death, too.