Painful, Funny, Beautiful, Unexpected: & SONS

& Sons by David Gilbert
Reviewed by Consuelo

In David Gilbert’s & Sons, he creates a spectacular puzzle of characters. The story revolves around A.N. Dyer, an aging, reclusive New York author who’s major novel Ampersand is a coming-of-age classic, a la Catcher in the Rye. Gilbert gives his tale a surprising first person narrator – Philip Topping, the son of A.N. Dyer’s recently deceased childhood friend, Charles Topping. He is not quite an insider, not quite an outsider. He is a sycophant who somehow knows and tells all about these two interconnected families. Through Philip’s obsession with the Dyer clan, the reader also becomes obsessed.

The Dyer sons are a wayward bunch. Richard is a recovering addict, now a husband and father, self-exiled in Los Angeles with Hollywood dreams of selling a screenplay. Jamie is a wandering documentarian, capturing other people’s realities to avoid his own. And then there is teenaged Andy, the much younger son (the result of a family-fracturing affair) who is the namesake whose shoulders must bear the weight of his father’s legacy. The older sons are called back to New York by their father in a last-ditch effort to reconnect and make sense of this strange family unit.

Despite the characters’ extraordinary flaws and the story’s heavy themes, you will laugh. Out loud. Gilbert doesn’t allow you to pity the Dyers or wallow in the tragedy of their lives. Each page is painful and funny, beautiful and unexpected.

The task that Gilbert set himself is incredible. Not only does he tell the story on the surface of the Dyers and the Toppings, but he also created the work of A.N. Dyer. Throughout the book he provides us with excerpts from Ampersand that slowly reveal Dyer’s secrets. The excerpts combined with the characters’ perceptions of and reactions to the book make it feel like something that I’ve actually read, that really exists in the canon of American literature.

& Sons covers so much territory – exploring heart-wrenching family dynamics, the price of genius, mortality, fact vs. fiction vs. truth. It is messy in a controlled way. Even when it’s throwing a mind-blowing plot twist at you halfway through, it never becomes unhinged. It unravels and then pulls itself back together again into a glorious work of fiction.

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Copies of & Sons are available in-store and via bookpeople.com.