At first, the title character completely turned me off, with
his five marriages and countless absurd failed business ventures. I thought this book was going to turn out to
be a farce. However, as the book
unfolds, we find that Charlie has redeeming qualities, despite the marital
infidelities and poor judgment with regard to building a business. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he has a
heart of gold, but neither is he heartless.
At 68 years old, he convinces himself that he has pancreatic cancer and
proceeds to alert his children regarding his imminent death. Apparently this is not the first time that he
has diagnosed himself with a terminal illness, and his children are rightfully
skeptical. I don’t know to what degree
this novel is autobiographical, but the narrator is Charlie’s son Jake, who is
a writer. Jake holds his father in high
esteem, despite his father’s flaws and the uneasy relationship Jake has with
Charlie’s current wife, Barbara, who seems to love Charlie more than perhaps he
deserves. Certainly Barbara and Charlie
grew on me as the story unfolded, but the book has basically two endings, sort
of like
Atonement or
Life of Pi. I was
not wild about this device in any of these books. I can understand a need for dual endings if
unreliable memories are at play, but that’s not the case. The author has a different purpose here, and
it ties in with Jake having given his father an unfinished draft of a book that
Jake has written about Charlie, which is obviously this novel. Several family members read this draft and uniformly
react to it negatively, even denying some of its obvious facts, perhaps giving
Jake pause about whether the truth is always the best path.
No comments:
Post a Comment