Discussed in this essay:

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, by Andrew Solomon. Scribner. 976 pages. $37.50.

Sixteen or so years ago, after it became apparent that neither nature nor medicine would provide my wife and me with a child, we turned to bureaucracy. Social workers vetted us and took our money. After a wait of (as it turned out) almost exactly nine months, and on a couple days’ notice, they delivered into our arms an infant boy. Save for a brief, fraught meeting in a roadside café, we and his birth mother…