What We Lost: a story of my father's childhood Dale Peck Granta Books, 288pp, £12 ISBN 1862076413

Dale Peck, one of America's most earnest and urgent critics of contemporary fiction, and an accomplished novelist, has written a memoir chronicling 18 months in the life of his father in the mid-1950s. Dale Peck Sr, a teenager from an abusive, impoverished home in Long Island, is sent by his alcoholic father to live with his uncle and aunt on their farm in upstate New York. Slowly, through his hard work, once away from the squalor and decrepitude of home, Dale earns his uncle's trust and finds acceptance, even love. Some months later, when his parents visit the farm, he is forced to choose between returning to Long Island or continuing to live on the farm. Dale's decision, and its repercussions, are felt through the rest of the book.

What We Lost is Peck's first work of non-fiction, although he has written fictionalised accounts of his father in both Martin and John (1993), his debut novel, and, more substantially, in The Law of Enclosures (1996). The finest scenes in Peck's book - exchanges between father and son, communicating in a language of anger, confusion and unspoken love - are reminiscent of Philip Roth's magnificent tribute to his father, Patrimony (1991). But What We Lost lacks the urgency and raw emotion of Roth's memoir, replacing gravity with laxity, energy with complacency, fury with a stubborn forgiveness. Even the outbursts of violence that interrupt the story seem rhythmical and expected. Too often Peck's narrative strolls, when what we want is for it to break into a sprint.

The book suffers from a lack of incident. Thus the death of a cow feels loaded with unnecessary significance; neither the tortures of adolescence nor the trials of farm life are illuminated in any significant way. It is never explained why this period of Peck's father's life is examined while others - his marriage, his alcoholism - are left unexplored. And yet parts of What We Lost seem deeply felt. One long scene in which the young Dale and his half-brother rob their drunken father is conveyed with a masterful intensity.

The book's brief final chapter describes a visit that the author and his father made to an old acquaintance on a farm in 2001, and is told from the perspective of a 21-year-old girl who lives on the farm. Had the ending either been narrated by Peck Jr or recounted in the third person, it might have cemented the father-son relationship and bound the book's themes together. But as it is, the scene feels fleeting and irrelevant.

Although What We Lost seems at times like a lost opportunity, Peck's talent is everywhere apparent.

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