RAFFI GESSEN-GOULD, age 6, is an expert on these topics: Greek gods, international currency exchange, sharks, geology, when his father will go bald (when Raffi is a teenager), invisibility cloaks, waffles, slingshotting stretchy rubber snakes across the living room, making slime without his mom, and the benefits of getting slime stains on the couch (they feel good to touch). He is the second-tallest kid in his class. He can jump the farthest. He sleeps on the top bunk. The longest book he has ever read is 199 pages. He has not read his father's new book, Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, which is 241 pages, and he does not seem in any hurry to do so. He did ask if he was responsible for the bad crayon drawing on the cover. (No.) This Raffi-the real-life Raffi-will turn 7 in early June. The character Raffi in Raising Raffi will never be that mature. That Raffi is a creation of his father, Keith Gessen, a device through which Gessen explores his parental fixations: the pros and cons of teaching a child Russian or making a child play hockey, the problem of gentrifying schools, and conflicting camps of parenting advice. Raffi the literary creation is a bit of a hooligan-or, as his father puts it, a collection of "pain points." That Raffi spends a lot of time doing stuff like punching his father in the nose and breaking down toddler gates to get into his parents' bed at 2 a.m. That Raffi wonders what it's like to sit on his infant brother Ilya's head and follows through. Raffi the real person has outgrown all that now.
One recent Saturday evening, after his father opened the door to the 990-squarefoot Brooklyn apartment Raffi and Keith share with the writer Emily Gould (Raffi's mother and Keith's wife) and Ilya, now 3, I asked Raffi how he felt about a book coming out with his name in the title.
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