Isidore Auberon is a good man who dies too young, leaving
behind two young sons and a heartbroken wife.
Leo is the older of the sons and the main subject of this novel. He is much more bereft than his younger
brother Mack, who basically has no memory of his father. This disparity between the two boys’ grief
drives a wedge between them. Leo
struggles with his anger, while striving to live up to his father’s legacy. I felt that the author tried a little too
hard at times to be literary and instead managed to overdramatize Leo’s angst
with wordy prose. Leo is not a
particularly likeable character, but he is all we have here, as Mack is not
fully fleshed out. In fact, Mack
disappears frequently, just to avoid Leo’s company. Their mother remarries, and, although Philip
is a loving stepfather to the boys, he lacks interest is some activities that
Leo and Mac have come to enjoy, such as baseball. Following his stellar academic performance in
high school, Leo enrolls at Yale, treading a convoluted path to get there that
sours the whole experience for him.
Honestly, it’s hard to root for a guy who keeps sabotaging his
relationships and has allowed grief to define his entire life. Mack eventually reaches out to Leo and
invites him to join him on a road trip in an effort to repair the division
between them and restore the camaraderie of their early childhood. This book just did not command my attention,
and the author fails to share with us certain important aspects of Leo’s adult
life. Did he graduate from Yale? If not, where? He went to med school, but did he become a
doctor? On finishing this book, I felt
that these omissions had some sort of artistic purpose that left me frustrated
and disappointed.
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