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.

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I Don't Like Where this Is Going by John Dufresne

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on April 11, 2016

I didn’t like where this book was going (it didn’t seem to be going anywhere) until about the last third, when it finally hit its stride. By the end, however, I wondered whether the author had a plan in mind when he sat down to write. The plot makes a certain convoluted sense but it is interrupted by events that come across as filler. Some of the events are interesting but too many are not.

The early pages of I Don’t Like Where This Is Going provide what I assume to be an update on events that occurred in the first novel in the series. Not having read it, I felt a bit lost until the current story began to move in the direction of a plot. That takes place after Wylie "Coyote" Melville and his friend Bay watch a woman plunge to her death at a Vegas casino, where they have gone to chill out until it is safe to return to their usual Florida residence. In the story that follows, Wylie and Bay try to get to the bottom of the woman’s death.

Wylie is a therapist, although his wanderings make it difficult for him to serve an established clientele. He passes the time by volunteering at a crisis center when he’s not solving murders or avoiding his own murder. Wylie is a good guy who likes to help people, a point that is emphasized by contrasting his goodness to the sleaze of Vegas. That struck me as a bit obvious and superficial. In general, characters in the novel tend to preach about society’s evils, repeating stories that are (mostly) urban legends in an apparent effort to highlight social problems that are (mostly) overblown.

There are some clever sentences in I Don’t Like Where This Is Going, some amusing observations of Vegas (admittedly an easy target), and a few action scenes in the novel’s second half that generate excitement. Unfortunately, those positive attributes are balanced against extended chunks of the novel that seem purposeless.

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