Michiko Kakutani calls David Gilbert’s new novel, & Sons, “smart, funny, observant and occasionally moving.” Although I can’t understand how any attentive reader might reach such a judgment, I’ve seen it happen often enough to wonder what leads professional book reviewers to respond with such stupefied impatience. Let’s begin with “funny.” & Sons is not funny. Its cleverness and its sharp perceptions will make you smile, certainly, but laugh? I don’t think so. That’s largely because the novel is not “occasionally moving” but constantly, achingly mortal. It begins with one funeral and ends with another. Watts’s great hymn is not sung at either, but never have I read a book that brought these lines so clearly to mind, and kept them there:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away.

The verse is doubly apt, because & Sons is indeed about sons. When I was talking about the book to Kathleen after I’d read it, she asked, “Why do men need rites of passage?” My first thought was to point out that women just have them, in menstruation and childbirth. The transition from boyhood to manhood is, in contrast, ambiguous and variable, and it frequently occurs only in retrospect. War, unfortunately, is the surest of the rites that we have come up with — war and training for war. The men in & Sons are spared, by the accident of timing, that particular ordeal. The older men (a little more than ten years older than I am) are too young even to have fought in Korea, while their sons miss Vietnam. Further complicating the business is the indiscussability of personal matters that characterizes masculinity in general but that achieves a stinging irony in the affluent, educated, and class-conscious world that Gilbert has chosen for his background. Almost anything can be talked about at length, so long as it is not important.

As if to highlight the uncertainties of achieving manhood, all of Gilbert’s men, with the exception of two boys, are products of the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and one of those boys is a student there. These men — the famous writer, Andrew Newbold Dyer, his “best friend,” the lately-deceased lawyer, Charles Henry Topping, and their sons, Richard and Jamie Dyer and Philip Topping — have all grown up in the smallest of small worlds. But familiarity does not breed understanding. To grow up in this world is to strain to grow out of it, into the autonomy of self-directed sex life and career. Straight boys do not spend their adolescence wondering what their best friends are going through inside. And  Gilbert’s men are all straight — or, at least, they seem to be.

A N Dyer, as he’s known to his fans, launched his career with Ampersand, a best-seller that, ever since, has rivaled The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace. We are given enough extracts to want to read the book (even if Kakutani doesn’t think much of them as literary material), especially after we learn of the reason for the disgust and shame that inspired it. It would be wrong to charge Dyer with homophobia, I think, when he is so clearly guilty of the much worse failing of exploiting weakness wherever he finds it. In one of his novels, he plants verbatim entries from his son Richard’s journal, proferred by the emulative son for his father’s judgment, not for his pilferage. Such plagiarism is unlikely to be felt as the implied compliment that it is. But Andrew is a user, ever on the make, and never so heedless of other people’s feelings as when he consents to participate in an occult experiment.

Seventeen years before the demise of Charlie Topping, whose funeral opens the book and whose eulogy reduces Andrew to a shambles, the famous writer brought home an eight-month-old baby boy, allegedly the fruit of a dalliance with a Swedish nanny who has since died. He is genuinely surprised when his wife of thirty-odd years declines to help him raise the boy and instead leaves him, but what’s even more interesting is his decision not to tell her the truth (as he sees it), which is that the baby is a clone — a clone of him! Gilbert handles this intersection with science fiction very well. He wraps up the episode in a somber murk that ever so slyly parodies the gothic excitements of Conan Doyle. When the story is told (by Andrew to his older sons), the novel proceeds in a way that allows the reader to decide whether Andrew is delusional. (And cloning isn’t science fiction anymore.) What remains is this: is it better or worse, more or less unfaithful, to have a clone than to have an affair? It doesn’t take Andrew’s estranged wife (a lovely figure) to finger the narcissism of cloning. I was reminded of Wotan’s vain attempts to nurture better versions of himself in his son and grandson, while at the same time standing in the way of both. The impulse to redeem, to make amends, is tragically displaced.

As it is here. Andy, as the love child or clone is called, is now seventeen, and not quite a man. From the moment that he meets his nephew, Richard’s son, Emmett, Andy’s passage to manhood is put into play.

Emmett might have been a year younger but he seemed older by four, safely on the other side of adolescence while Andy struggled through chin-high water.

Andrew is not quite as remote from Andy as he was from his older sons, but he is remarkably obsessed with Andy’s safety; ever since Charlie Topping’s death, he has needed to keep an eye on his youngest son, betraying an anxiety about the boy’s passage to manhood that far exceeds Andy’s. Andy is understandably annoyed, and we are put on notice. How will Andy die? I could not put this question out of my mind until it finally happened, and whether or not it was the most meaningful conceivable death it is too soon for me to tell. But that doesn’t matter, because Andy is simply too good to be true. Too good, that is, not to disappoint Andrew’s orgulous ambition. To his father, Andy is better than a best-seller; he promises a world in which best-sellers and even ordinary fictions won’t be needed, a world free of disgust and shame. Such a world is simply not in the cards. This is not to say that Andy’s character is thinly drawn, not at all. Clone or not, Andy Dyer is a fully present human being, and the most appealing of happy-go-lucky teenagers, longing only to lose his virginity — that curiously ineffective simulacrum of adolescent dénouement.

***

So much for the men — I can only mention in passing Richard’s resentful itch to bully, and Jamie’s slippery absurdity; and as for that interesting villainaster and sometime narrator of the novel, Philip Topping, I’m saving the penetration of his character for a second reading.

& Sons is also a book about Manhattan, as in Upper East Side of. Its points of reference were so familiar to me that I wondered if anyone not a denizen of this quartier would find the book intelligible, never mind interesting. Time will tell. Gilbert doesn’t bother to say much about St James’s, the church in which both funerals are held, beyond pointing out that Andrew Dyer attended Sunday school there — which is really all that needs to be said. But Gilbert waxes gorgeous about the society that inhabits these precincts. In fact he survives comparison with Proust in this regard. Like Proust, Gilbert can deconstruct the glamour of the wealthy and the professionally self-important without tarnishing their allure. Admirable perhaps they’re not, but desirable sadly they remain. At the center of the book, but diffused throughout several chapters — we arrive at it several times — is a big party, a glittering reception at the Frick. The hedge-fund father of an anthropologist-turned-novelist hosts a superlative book party, and Gilbert presents the various guests in a delightfully sustained astronomical conceit. At the climax, an addled Andrew, searching for Andy, runs into his own alter ego in Ampersand. It is a famous actor who, in preparing to star in the film adaptation that Andrew will never in his lifetime permit, has memorized great chunks for the book and then dressed up in prep-school duds.

It was Edgar Mead straight from chapter 18. Even in his muddled state, Andrew knew this was too fantastic to be true, that there must be a good explanation, perhaps within the mixture of pills and alcohol, the overexertion, the long nights rewriting, the possible guilt and the goddamn gout. The last week had been fraught and he was likely hallucinating. Would any other characters drop in? All in all, he was amazed by the magic of his imagination, however delirious, and with curiosity he watched Edgar Mead beaver his teeth at this stand of long-legged women. What would he do next? Possibly something from chapter 23? Instead he spotted someone in the crowd and he went and dragged him over.

Andrew’s gut reversed course.

It was Andy.

“Have you met my new best pal?” Edgar asked the swaying trees.

I suppose that there might be some who would laugh at this. I was richly entertained.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, July 29th, 2013 at 12:21 pm.