Paternity

I've written before about the convention of beginning a novel with a wedding. It allows the author to assemble and identify his cast of characters with a minimum of exposition. David Gilbert's & Sons proves that a funeral works equally well. The deceased is Charles Henry Topping, but the focus of all eyes is Topping's eulogist, reclusive literary giant A.N. Dyer, whose first novel “Ampersand” was the “Catcher in the Rye” of his generation. The death of his friend prompts the aging Dyer to gather his three sons to New York, where he lives in a grand duplex across the street from the Frick Museum.

What follows is a week in the lives of Dyer and his sons, as observed by Topping's son Philip, a somewhat unwelcome house guest and the novel's unreliable narrator. Gilbert examines the lives of the three sons, showing how they became who they are because of their father and in spite of him. And he explores the price that the father has paid in his quest for literary fame. Interspersed throughout the book are letters between Dyer and his friend Charles Topping, stretching from childhood, which offer clues to their uneven friendship.

Gilbert's prose is at its powerful best in examining the complex relationships between fathers and sons, between brothers, between friends, between art and life. He uses New York itself as an element in the drama, and a wonderful scene at a reception at the Frick allows him to satirize the art scene even as his characters reveal funny and serious facets of their complicated connections. I especially liked Gilbert portrayal of Dyer's teenaged son Andy, the product of a mysterious liaison that ended his father's marriage, as he seesaws between adolescent angst and exuberance, struggling to understand his father and to escape his legacy.

But I sometimes found the narrator's presence awkward (I had to keep notes to remember who Philip was and why he was in Dyer's apartment snooping and eavesdropping), and for my tastes it could have been a little shorter.

An Escape

We all have times in our lives when we need a book to give us a temporary respite from reality, and that's what Charlotte Link's The Other Child gave me. Nothing works better at those times than a British murder mystery. Don't ask me to empathize, don't ask me to analyze, just lure me in with two murders (same killer? copycat?), a charming (but menacing?) farm in rural Yorkshire, a host of characters whose back stories slowly unfold as motives and clues swirl around. The narrative stretches backward to World War II, when London children were evacuated to the countryside to avoid the Blitz, and forward to the present day. And just to complicate things, Link opens the book with a scene from 1970 which seems to connect with nothing that follows.

As with all Brit murder mysteries, a rural DI must unravel the clues. I would have liked DI Valerie Almond to be a little more quirky (I guess I've spent too much time with Christopher Foyle and Jack Frost), but Link has constructed a tightly woven psychological thriller that provided me a much needed escape.

Undercover

I think there was part of me that always wanted to be a spy. Years ago I turned down an offer to work at NSA, and perhaps I was secretly expecting a tap on the shoulder from CIA. That may explain why Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth appealed to me. It's the late 60's and the tap on shoulder of Cambridge grad Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) comes from her older lover, a Cambridge professor. She is hired by MI5, the domestic counterespionage service. (Note to the esteemed Mr. McEwan: if you want your character's name to be pronounced Frume why don't you just spell it that way?).

Like virtually all the female employees, Serena's job is as a clerk to the male officers. But her love of literature, despite a degree in math, lands her an assignment to recruit a young fiction writer to unknowingly use his talents to advance the agency's anti-Communist position. She falls for him, it's mutual, and they tumble into a wholly unprofessional but enjoyable affair. She keeps her real job a secret from him, and you just know that's going to come back to haunt her.

McEwan is too good a storyteller to let this unfold in a predictable way. It's never clear until the very end who's lying, who's being deceived, who's in the loop and who's out of it. Serena is the book's narrator, and she looks back from a distance of forty years, but she lets the story reveal itself as the events occur.

I do have one quibble with McEwan. In several of his recent books - “Saturday”, “Solar” and this one - there is a 'smartest man in the room' kind of character who bears more than a passing resemblance to the author, and his female characters seldom seem as smart as the males. Maybe he'll remedy that the next time out. He's too good a writer to be weighed down by a stereotype.

I've Been Sequestered

Yes, I've been sequestered with Patrick Melrose. At least that's how it feels. Once I read Edward St. Aubyn's first book about the fictional Patrick Melrose, “Never Mind”, I was compelled to keep going. How could a writer create such a poisonous family dynamic, in which five-year-old Patrick is a helpless pawn, and still find a way to make me laugh out loud? How could I want to read more about a father like this: “He was determined to harden the calluses of disappointment and develop the skill of detachment in his son. After all, what else did he have to offer him?”. A father whose philosophy was that “what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about”.

Not surprisingly, this wretched childhood produces an adult Patrick whose attempts to harness his rage and self-pity through drugs and booze, even as he mutters darkly funny observations about the English upper class, lead him through addictions, recoveries, affairs, relapses, marriage, and parenthood in his subsequent novels “Bad News”, “Some Hope” and “Mother's Milk”, as he is all the while unable to permanently right his own foundering ship. 

The final book in the series, “At Last”, opens on the day of the funeral of Patrick's mother. He wrestles once again with his anger and depression, but still finds time to observe of his aunt: “She stood in the doorway looking exhausted by her own haughtiness, as if her raised eyebrows might not be able to stand the strain much longer”.

So clearly this is not a book for readers looking characters they can admire, people whose company they'd enjoy. Patrick would be hell to live with, but I liked being along for the ride. St. Aubyn creates a world where each darkly comic observation is matched with moment of piercing comprehension of the effects of family violence. Patrick asks himself: “What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power?”. As the books ends I was left with at least a shred of hope that this might be possible for him.