Happy New Year!

My Darling Boy by John Dufresne

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on January 14, 2025

The protagonist of the novel I’ll review after My Darling Boy describes his life as “a long domestic novel’s worth of childhood trauma too common and boring to dwell upon.” While My Darling Boy is a domestic novel, and while its childhood trauma (daddy didn’t pay enough attention to me) is common, the story is too engaging to be boring.

My Darling Boy is a story of hope and death that unfolds in the context of a father-son relationship. The son is an adult and has left home, but he’s addicted to pills. The father wants to help but doesn’t know how. The father gives the son well-intentioned advice, some good, some mundane, mostly unwanted. Because it avoids sentiment, the story rings true.

Olney Kartheizer was a staff writer for a Florida newspaper who was relegated to writing obits after the paper killed its book section, and then its travel section, and then its Sunday supplement. Olney retired and now passes his time by working at a miniature golf course.

Early in the novel, Olney is a bit adrift. Apart from his miniature golf gig, he enjoys watching a cable access show about a reverend and his family. “Olney is aware that what attracts him to the show is this loving family in a cozy home, all smiles and comfort, and the boy who will not grow up and will never leave.” Olney has given up believing in God but he “enjoys watching religious programs on TV, especially those that tend toward spectacle and ostentation, and he does wish he could believe in something that transcends our mortal lives, but he just can’t.”

Olney believes he spent 29 years as a devoted husband to Kat and a doting father to Cully. His perception is not shared by Cully, whose childhood seems to have been shaped by sorrow that his only friend moved away. As an adult, Cully eventually makes a familiar complaint about Olney as a father who judged him rather than accepting him without reservation.

By the time he is 18, Cully is injuring himself in feigned accidents to obtain pain medication. Doctors prescribe anti-depressants that make him “ill or impotent or confused or anxious or suicidal” without easing his pain. He borrows money from his dad to begin a new life but he always spends the money on pills. When Olney rescues Cully from a suicide attempt (thereby earning his son’s wrath), Kat decides she has had enough and moves out.

Olney has fond memories of pulling his son on a wagon, memories that Cully lost or never formed. Olney is angry that the adult Cully has deprived him of the loving son he wants to remember. Both characters have understandable perspectives, leaving the reader to wonder whether it will ever be possible for them to bridge their resentments. Cully certainly doesn’t make it easy but, to his credit, Olney never stops trying. That makes him likable, or at least sympathetic.

Olney will eventually begin a relationship with Mireille Tighe, although he quickly learns that Mireille has a disorder that impairs her ability to swallow. She is well along the road to death.

My Darling Boy could be seen as a reminder that death is ever present (Olney knows that from writing obituaries), making it important to treasure the days we have. But neither life nor the novel are that simple. Mireille represents hope, even if it is only the hope of having another good day before she can no longer breathe. Cully, on the other hand, never has a good day and, although he tells himself that he’ll get clean, he has no real hope of achieving a better state than oblivion.

Olney thinks: “You can’t live without hope, and you wouldn’t want to.” But when that thought resurfaces later in the novel, “he thinks hope contradicts the future, doesn’t it? He thinks of all the people who have come and gone in his life, and how once they start going, they don’t stop.” Hope and death are antagonists in a competition that death will always win.

The story also explores fear of abandonment, a fear that has been an important part of Olney’s life. “He can’t be the last person to leave a meeting or a social gathering. He doesn’t mind solitude. He minds being left behind.” Cully feels he was abandoned by his father, although Cully is the one who ran away from home — and who repeatedly runs away from Olney, rehab, and life. His sense of abandonment might be irrational, or it might be a convenient excuse to find oblivion with oxy, but how people feel is how they feel.

Novels about addiction often reinforce the truism that it is impossible to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Cully’s AA sponsor understands that even if Cully doesn’t want to be helped (and thus will not fundamentally change), people need to be there for him so he can at least survive. Olney repeatedly urges Cully to get into rehab but Cully has a cynical view of the industry: “They aren’t in the recovery business. They’re in the moneymaking business. And there’s more money in relapse than in recovery.” Is this a valid criticism or an excuse delivered by an addict who isn’t ready to live without drugs? Perhaps both are true.

These are insightful themes, delivered in a plot that meanders a bit. My Darling Boy fits the definition of a novel as a messy house, but the mess is carefully controlled, each new diversion — from an unexpected gunshot to Olney’s waking visions of a future in which Cully is healthy and productive — adds something noteworthy to the story. The novel does a good bit of truth telling without becoming preachy. As a story of difficult lives spent navigating a complex world, My Darling Boy is the best kind of domestic drama.

RECOMMENDED

Pro Bono by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on January 14, 2025

When Charlie Warren was a teen, his mother Linda started dating Mack Stone. Perhaps put off by a name that sounds like the invention of a bottom shelf thriller writer, Charlie never got along with Mack, even after he married his mom. Then he discovered that Mack was stealing money from his mother’s accounts. Mack nearly burned down the family home as he made his escape, but Charlie miraculously put out the fire, used a borrowed car to chase down Mack, and ran him off the road where he crashed into a tree.

As Charlie is driving away from the scene of the crash, he passes an oncoming bus full of prisoners who are fighting fires. The bus stops at the crash scene and two of the prisoners — Andy Minkeagan and Alvin Copes — recover Mack’s documents from the truck, including records of his stolen investments and convenient proof of his actual identity. The prisoners see Charlie’s face as he speeds past and deduce that he caused the crash, a deduction of Sherlockian power. That coincidental encounter sets the scene for the rest of the story.

In the present, Charlie is a lawyer who specializes in recovering hidden funds, usually in the context of divorce. Vesper Ellis retains him after noticing that three years after her husband’s death, someone using his identity has been withdrawing funds from his investment accounts. Charlie is a CPA as well as a lawyer, so he quickly confirms that there is something fishy about the accounts held by two different firms.

The financial thieves who stole from Vesper are married to two sisters — May and Rose — who enjoy the lifestyles their crooked husbands provide. Thomas Perry provides no convincing reason to believe that the sisters would be murderous, yet they need to be to keep the plot in motion. The sisters have a brother named Peter who turns up from time to time without adding anything of significance to the story.

Most of the story is dedicated to Charlie’s efforts to recover Vesper’s stolen money, as well as additional sums to keep the firms’ wrongdoing confidential. For reasons that only make sense to Charlie, he does this pro bono rather than taking a third of the millions he manages to recover for Vesper. A lawyer can’t shag a current client so he isn’t motivated by sex, although Vesper clearly wants to give him a naked reward for his efforts.

The rest of the plot relates to the money stolen from Charlie’s mother. As Charlie chases the crooked husbands, he enlists the help of Andy and Alvin, who have been released from prison and plan to force Charlie to help them access his mother’s stolen funds. To foil their scheme, Charlie has to become a tough guy superhero. He just doesn’t seem the type, creating yet another plot point that I couldn’t accept.

Even less probable is Charlie’s plan to reform the criminals by putting them on his payroll with the promise that they’ll get a fair share of the money after Charlie recovers it. Now I'm all in favor of reforming criminals, but I'm not willing to employ two ex-cons after they point their guns at me. Charlie's saintly qualities are a bit much in a guy who murdered a man for swindling his mother.

Obligatory action scenes justify the novel’s marketing as a thriller, culminating in a plan by the sisters to protect their husbands by befriending Charlie’s mother and then doing away with her. Like Charlie, Linda has an improbable knack for avoiding death. A final improbability involves Charlie’s uncanny knowledge that his mother will need rescuing despite the absence of any reason to fear for her safety.

The plot of Pro Bono is mildly interesting because it focuses on financial crime rather than the typical thriller obsession with serial killers. The coincidences and strains in logic that drive the plot are the novel’s most serious flaw, but the flaw is so often repeated that it detracts from Perry’s effort to build suspense.

Perry always writes in a plodding style, making the success of his novels turn on whether he tells an intriguing story. Pro Bono is sufficiently intriguing to earn a guarded recommendation, but I won’t be putting it high on my list of 2025 thriller recommendations.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Merry Christmas!

A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

Published by ‎ Tordotcom on January 7, 2025

The long-running Laundry Files series imagines a secret British agency that is tasked with defending Great Britain against occult threats. Since summoning a supernatural being from another dimension is essentially a math problem, supernatural incursions became more prevalent with the proliferation of computers. Laundry snatch squads capture cultists who summon demons and place them in Camp Sunshine for investigation and deprogramming.

As a boy, Derek Reilly mastered the game of Dungeons and Dragons. He did research into the occult to create new game scenarios. The government, mistaking his notes for evidence that he was summoning demons, snatched him and rendered him to Camp Sunshine. Years passed before his captors realized he was just a harmless, stuttering, mildly autistic kid, but by that point, camp authorities worried that he had absorbed too much knowledge of the supernatural to permit his safe release.

Derek has been in Camp Sunshine for thirty years, passing the time by running a Dungeons and Dragons game by mail. When he learns about a nearby Dungeons and Dragons convention, he breaks out of the camp, hoping for a taste of freedom before he turns fifty. Unfortunately, true cultists are also attending the convention.

Iris Carpenter — high priestess of the Brotherhood of the Pharaoh — now works for the Laundry, although she wears an explosive collar that will allow the government to end her life if she uses her skills to help the dark side. Iris leads the search for Derek and then joins a squad from the Laundry to put down the mischief that is arising in the hotel where the convention is being held. Supernatural action ensues.

Fans of the series will recognize Iris. Derek is (I think) new to the series. The most frequently recurring protagonist, Bob Howard, doesn’t appear in the main story, but after this novel concludes, two short stories featuring Bob round out the book.

I always enjoy Charles Stross’ Laundry Files stories, perhaps because he grounds the supernatural in math that opens portals to other dimensions, transforming the series into something that is closer to science fiction than fantasy. Generous infusions of humor make clear that the supernatural isn’t meant to be taken seriously. While some of the supernatural entities are horrific, the books are too funny to fit within the horror genre. A Conventional Boy works as an intelligent, fast-moving action story. Derek is a sympathetic, likeable character who uses his wits to save the day. What more could a reader want?

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