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Summary
Summary
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
"The Washington Post - The New Yorker - Esquire - The Austin Chronicle - Kansas City Star - The Guardian" (UK) "- BookPage - Flavorwire - Bookish"
" A] big, brilliant novel."--"The New York Times Book Review"
Who is A. N. Dyer? "& Sons" is a literary masterwork for readers of "The Art of Fielding, The Emperor's Children, "and "Wonder Boys"--the panoramic, deeply affecting story of an iconic novelist, two interconnected families, and the heartbreaking truths that fiction can hide.
The funeral of Charles Henry Topping on Manhattan's Upper East Side would have been a minor affair (his two-hundred-word obit in "The New York Times "notwithstanding) but for the presence of one particular mourner: the notoriously reclusive author A. N. Dyer, whose novel "Ampersand" stands as a classic of American teenage angst. But as Andrew Newbold Dyer delivers the eulogy for his oldest friend, ""he suffers a breakdown over the life he's led and the people he's hurt and the novel that will forever endure as his legacy. He must gather his three sons for the first time in many years--before it's too late.
So begins a wild, transformative, heartbreaking week, as witnessed by Philip Topping, who, like his late father, finds himself caught up in the swirl of the Dyer family. First there's son Richard, a struggling screenwriter and father, returning from self-imposed exile in California. In the middle lingers Jamie, settled in Brooklyn after his twenty-year mission of making documentaries about human suffering. And last is Andy, the half brother whose mysterious birth tore the Dyers apart seventeen years ago, now in New York on spring break, determined to lose his virginity before returning to the prestigious New England boarding school that inspired "Ampersand." But only when the real purpose of this reunion comes to light do these sons realize just how much is at stake, not only for their father but for themselves and three generations of their family.
In this daring feat of fiction, David Gilbert establishes himself as one of our most original, entertaining, and insightful authors. "& Sons" is that rarest of treasures: a startlingly imaginative novel about families and how they define us, and the choices we make when faced with our own mortality.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A "NEW YORK TIMES "EDITORS' CHOICE
"Big, brilliant, and terrifically funny."--Jess Walter, author of "Beautiful Ruins"
"Extraordinary."--"Time"
"Smart and savage . . . Seductive and ripe with both comedy and heartbreak, "& Sons"] made me reconsider my stance on . . . the term 'instant classic.'"--NPR
"A big, ambitious book about fathers and sons, Oedipal envy and sibling rivalry, and the dynamics between art and life . . . "& Sons"] does a wonderful job of conjuring up its characters' memories . . . in layered, almost Proustian detail."--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
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" A] smart, engrossing saga . . . Perfect for fans of Jonathan Franzen or Claire Messud.""--Entertainment Weekly"
"This great big novel is . . . infused with warmth and wisdom about what it means to be a family."--"The Boston Globe"
"Audacious . . . one of the year's] most dazzlingly smart, fully realized works of fiction."--"The Washington Post"
Author Notes
David Gilbert is the author of the story collection Remote Feed and the novel The Normals . His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, and Bomb . He lives in New York with his wife and three children.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The opening scene of Gilbert's finely textured new novel (after The Normals) isn't supposed to be a puffed-up affair, but it might as well be: A.N. Dyer, one of New York's hermetic literary giants, is scheduled to deliver the eulogy for his childhood friend Charlie Topping. What follows in this grandiose novel full of dissatisfied men and erudite posturing is a vivid and often amusing portrait of the New York's Upper East Side literary scene, as relayed by the dearly departed's son, Philip. Through Philip's idolatrous and therefore unreliable perspective (and in a few interspersed letters between his father and Dyer), the writer's life is exposed, from his foibles to his successes past and present, including the publication of his widely heralded masterpiece, Ampersand; his attempt at renewing ties with his estranged sons, Richard (an ex-drug addict and aspiring screenwriter) and Jamie (a burned-out documentary filmmaker); and his fervent preoccupation with ensuring the welfare of a third, much younger son, Andy, who was born out of mysterious circumstances 17 years prior. There's a lot to digest and reflect on in this ambitious and crowded narrative-the complicated bond between fathers and sons, the illusive nature of success and the price of fame-and the ailing author's angst-ridden waning years are placed in a harsh spotlight. As a counterbalance, Gilbert is at his best when capturing the fearless, testosterone-driven essence of adolescence, as Andy flits from boozing and deflecting empty banter at a swanky book-release party at the Frick, to chasing skirts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to trying to outsmart and outrun his father's ever-persistent legacy. Agent: Bill Clegg, WME Entertainment. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Acutely aware that his time is short after the death of his lifelong friend, Charles Topping, Andrew Dyer, a revered, famously reclusive New York writer, is anxious for his youngest son, 17-year-old Andy, whose birth destroyed Andrew's marriage, to connect with his two half brothers. Their chaotic reunion becomes the catalyst for Gilbert's (The Normals, 2004) intricately configured, shrewdly funny, and acidly critical novel. Richard, a junkie turned drug-addiction counselor and screenwriter, lives in Los Angeles with his fine family. Based in Brooklyn, Jamie circles the globe, videotaping atrocities. Heirs to a classic WASP heritage compounded by Andrew's cultish, Salingeresque renown, the edgy Dyer men are prevaricators and schemers whose hectic, hilarious, and wrenching misadventures involve a fake manuscript, a Hollywood superstar, and a shattering video meant to be a private homage but which, instead, goes viral. Then there's Andrew's preposterous claim about sweet Andy's conception. Gilbert slyly plants unnerving scenes from Andrew's revered boarding-school-set, coming-of-age novel, Ampersand, throughout, while Topping's resentful, derailed son, Philip, narrates with vengeful intent. A marvel of uproarious and devastating missteps and reversals charged with lightning dialogue, Gilbert's delectably mordant and incisive tragicomedy of fathers, sons, and brothers, privilege and betrayal, celebrity and obscurity, ingeniously and judiciously maps the interface between truth and fiction, life and art.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"I'VE always been interested in how I we travel through time," David Gil-Abert says in a "conversation" included with the publicity materials for his new novel, "& Sons." Given that his own authoritative father had once been painfully shy, Gilbert wondered what it would be like to meet one's father in the midst of his awkward adolescence, and therein lay a promising if problematic premise for a novel. But then Gilbert gave this screw a rather broad turn: what if one's father were a "really mythical" writer along the lines of Salinger, "vivid on the page yet impenetrable in the flesh?" If one assumes that resembling Salinger entails not only reclusiveness but also rotten parenting skills (in his case, it depends on which child you ask), then the result would be a personage like A. N. Dyer, the impenetrable writer-father at the center of Gilbert's novel, who leaves at least one of his sons wondering how a man could be so "funny and smart" in his work, and yet such a creep in person. That indeed is the question, all the more puzzling in light of the youthful A. N. Dyer's letters from the 1950s and earlier, handwritten facsimiles of which appear at the head of every chapter but one. The winsome epistolary Dyer is nowhere evident in the crotchety, tiresome, 70-something version, who is busily occupied (long story) with retyping his first and most famous novel, "Ampersand." (At one point, the young Dyer ticks off a number of reasons for that inscrutable title - "like Groucho Marx in type form" - without mentioning the most plausibly narcissistic: his own initials.) As the reader may glean from passages reproduced at entertaining length, "Ampersand" is about the cruel abduction of Timothy Veck, the headmaster's son at a prep school based scandalously on Dyer's alma mater, Exeter: "It was as if a turncoat had taken ' Separate Peace' (the previous favorite and only a few years old) hostage, and tortured it, and brainwashed it, until it emerged from the darkness as a less forgiving version of 'Crime and Punishment.'" The school's outrage is soon quelled, however, when the 28-year-old author of "Ampersand" becomes the youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize, until finally, 50 years later, the novel has become a beloved mainstay of campus tradition. In fact, by "happy coincidence," the novelist's youngest son and namesake, Andy - a likable bastard (literally) - is now an upper-year student at Exeter, where it's suggested he play the captive Veck in a 50th-anniversary reenactment of "Ampersand." Naturally he will be "freed" by none other than his own famous father, whereupon the two will announce the winner of that year's A. N. Dyer award in creative writing. Fat chance. Just as Salinger was said to have spent most of his waking hours in a bunkerlike studio apart from his family, so the grimly ascetic Dyer hides from the world behind the "forbidding door" of his office, while his two neglected older sons hover outside, beguiled in spite of themselves. And little wonder these sons later feel estranged from the man, especially after he sires a child with a much younger mistress after 31 years of marriage to their long-suffering mother - a child who, save for the sweetness of his disposition, resembles their father to a nicety. And far from being indifferent to this last, illegitimate son, the elder Dyer is solicitous to a fault: "Try to do something beyond what's inside your measly head," he urges the boy. "Be a citizen of the street rather than the ruler of your own world. I'm speaking as a cautionary tale." During this speech, "cud-like material started to mortar the corners of his mouth, like even his insides wanted him to clam up." The incongruity of this passage - the sententious advice about the pitfalls of writerly solitude, blah blah, followed by that marvelous detail about bits of cud mortaring the man's mouth shut - points to a larger problem with the novel: namely that the reclusive, inscrutable artist is a dreary cliché that even a splendid writer like Gilbert can't quite transcend. A.N. Dyer can scarcely speak except in elaborate platitudes about his vocation, and no amount of agonizing exposition can account for how such a witty and (mostly) benign young man turned into such a bore. Quite simply, great writers are not like that. Salinger could spend hours on end crossing out words and tossing logs on the fire, but occasionally he ate turkey dinner at the local church and wrote mash notes to Joyce Maynard; Cheever went from breakfast table to typewriter six days a week, and in person was often a ghastly snob with a silly accent, but he also liked to swim naked in other people's pools and get drunk in dive bars with an ex-con pal from Sing Sing. It's true that writers tend to cultivate their gift because of an aching chagrin toward their earlier selves, but the result is often an intriguingly compartmentalized human being, not an embodied thesis about the impenetrable artist. AND when I tell you that Gilbert eventually introduces an actual clone of A.N. Dyer - well, you may begin to gather that a credible, coherent plot is not among this book's strong points. But the same may be said of "Hamlet," or "The Catcher in the Rye" for that matter, and few would dispute their greatness. I would hesitate to call Gilbert's novel great, but it does contain a number of set pieces that, taken together, are more than worth the price of admission. There's a book party at the Frick that is, as far as I'm concerned, the last word on the New York literary life as it exists in this dark phase of our history. The occasion is a much anticipated first novel by a young man named Christopher Denslow, whom I could almost swear I've met before, as he affably signed books and bantered with fans and congratulated himself for "remaining patient with those who were far less evolved, hoping this might excuse his other, faintly genocidal thoughts." At such times one can almost hear Gilbert's sigh of relief as he abandons the mechanics of plot and lets himself have fun, pure fun, describing a believable, non-mythic writer like Denslow and his precocious opus, "The Propagators," whose starred review from Publishers Weekly is gleefully printed in full: "All of this works as both a satire on postwar America and a thoughtful meditation on misplaced dreams, the pitfalls of conformity, of colonialism, the rise and fall of feminism. It is the human condition as seen through an ape." Now that's a book I want to read. Perhaps the worst that can be said about "& Sons" is that it's too ambitious by half. Embedded within its almost 450 pages is a poignant tour de force on the vicissitudes of time - Gilbert's original theme, in short, before he attached all that baggage about Salinger-like fathers and so forth. Anyone who's spent a few formative years in Manhattan (particularly on the Upper East Side) will experience piquant shocks of recognition on almost every page: the route one takes through Central Park to find a favorite pretzel cart, or the way a landmark like J. G. Melon abides like a poetic motif over the years, with its green facade and "slice of red neon that seemed forever reflected in rainwater." That shimmering ruby is one jewel among many in this book, and largely rewards the patience required by its stultifying hero. A son asks how his novelist father could be so 'funny and smart' in his work, yet such a creep in person. Blake Bailey is the author of "Cheever: A Life" and, most recently, "Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson.
Guardian Review
"Fathers start as gods and end as myths and in between whatever form they take can be calamitous for their sons." The observation, which arrives early in David Gilbert's richly entertaining new novel, states succinctly the theme that, for all its elaborations of plot, & Sons pursues with ferocious singlemindedness. Several fathers are encompassed in the blank space implied by the title, but the daddy of them all is AN Dyer, a New York novelist and blue-blood of Salinger-rivalling fame, Cheeveresque inner torment and a Roth-like capacity for cruel humour. He also has the peculiar charm of the titanic narcissist who just can't help it. The novel has some so-so passages, but in general the scenes are beautifully realised and very funny. Gilbert's sharp wit runs from the caustic to the metaphysical, recalling Andrew Marvell one minute and Edward St Aubyn the next. Another layer of pleasure is the rare quality of being funny without being silly, serious without being solemn, and powerfully moving without being either sentimental or coercive. - James Lasdun Fathers start as gods and end as myths and in between whatever form they take can be calamitous for their sons." The observation, which arrives early in David Gilbert's richly entertaining new novel, states succinctly the theme that, for all its elaborations of plot, & Sons pursues with ferocious singlemindedness. - James Lasdun.
Kirkus Review
A charming, often funny, sophomore novel by Gilbert (The Normals, 2004). Novels about novelists run the risk of being too meta on the one hand and too cute on the other, though some occasionally work--the sterling example of our time being Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. Gilbert wisely places as much emphasis on the surrounding players as on paterfamilias A.N. Dyer, who has written one particularly well-received coming-of-age novel and a host of other works that have established him nicely in the oak-paneled Upper East Side literary stratosphere. Those surrounding players are, somewhat in order, the late friend whose funeral opens the novel, then offspring, his own and the deceased's: thus the " sons" of the title, suggesting that literature might be a family business but more pointedly, that, in a household run with distant dictatorial benevolence, as if in a company, there's going to be trouble. So it is with Dyer's boys, gathered as Dad feels his own mortality approaching, who are a hot mess of failure coupled with ambition (and, for the most part, willing to work to attain it); one is a former addict, the other a maker of documentaries no one sees, still another, the youngest, is fully aware that he is the agent of his father's split from his older brothers' mother. Much of the story is a (mostly) gentle sendup of the literary life and its practitioners of the fusty old school and the hipster new ("You know what would give the story extra kick," says one of the latter, "if the other guy was Mark David Chapman."); a highlight is a devastatingly accurate peek into a hoity-toity book party. In the main, the novel moves without a hitch, though a couple of elements don't quite hang together, particularly the place of the narrator, at once respectful and not quite trustworthy, in the whole affair. Still, Gilbert tantalizes with a big question: Will Dad, before he kicks the bucket, share some of his fortunes in any sense other than the monetary and bring his sons into the fold? Read on for the answer, which takes its time, most enjoyably, to unfold.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This large-scale novel explores the dysfunctional family of A.N. Dyer, a famous New York writer who recalls J.D. Salinger.ÅAs the novel opens, Dyer, 79 and in failing health, is attending the funeral of a close friend with his three sons. The two eccentric older sons from his former marriage have histories of drug abuse, while the youngest son attends boarding school and is mainly concerned with losing his virginity. The narrator is the son of Dyer's deceased friend, a mysterious, creepy character who seems to harbor a grudge against Dyer's family. Letters between Dyer and the narrator's father, interspersed throughout the narrative, reveal behavior by Dyer that has had tragic consequences. VERDICT Like Jonathan Franzen, Gilbert (The Normals) works on an expansive canvas as he examines the tragedies and comedies of a modern American family. He knows New York's Upper East Side intimately, and he has created a memorable curmudgeon in his portrait of an aging writer that will delight many readers.-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I.i And there he sat, up front, all alone in the first pew. For those who asked, the ushers confirmed it with a reluctant nod. Yep, that's him. For those who cared but said nothing, they gave themselves away by staring sideways and pretending to be impressed by the nearby stained glass, as if devotees of Cornelius the Centurion or Godfrey of Bouillon instead of a seventy-nine-year-old writer with gout. Rumor had it he might show. His oldest and dearest friend, Charles Henry Topping, was dead. Funeral on Tuesday at St. James on 71st and Madison. Be respectful. Dress appropriately. See you there. Some of the faithful brought books in hopes of getting them signed, a long shot but who could resist, and by a quarter of eleven the church was almost full. I myself remember watching friends of my father as they walked down that aisle. While they glimpsed the Slocums and the Coopers and over there the Englehards--hello by way of regretful grin--a number of these fellow mourners baffled them. Were those sneakers? Was that a necklace or a tattoo; a hairdo or a hat? It seemed death had an unfortunate bride's side. Once seated, all and sundry leafed through the program--good paper, nicely engraved--and gauged the running time in their head, which mercifully lacked a communion. There was a universal thrill for the eulogist since the man up front was notoriously private, bordering on reclusive. Excitement spread via church-wide mutter. Thumbs composed emails, texts, status updates, tweets. This New York funeral suddenly constituted a chance cultural event, one of those I-was-there moments, so prized in this city, even if you had known the writer from way back, knew him before he was famous and won all those awards, knew him as a strong ocean swimmer and an epic climber of trees, knew his mother and his father, his stepfather, knew his childhood friends, all of whom knew him as Andy or Andrew rather than the more unknowable A. N. Dyer. All this happened in mid-March, twelve years ago. I recall it being the first warm day of the year, a small relief after months of near-impossible cold. Just a week earlier, the temperature sulked in the teens, the windchill dragging the brat into newborn territory. Windows rattled in their sashes, and the sky resembled a headfirst plunge onto cement. After a long winter of dying, my father was finally dead. I remember standing up and covering his face, like they do in the movies, his bright blue socks poking free from the bottom of the comforter. He always wore socks with his pajamas and never bothered to sleep under the sheets. It was as if his dreams had no right to unmake a bed. I went over and opened both windows, no longer cursing the draft but hoping the cold might shelter his body for a bit. But on the day of his funeral, the city seemed near sweltering, even if the thermostat within St. James maintained its autumnal chill, the Episcopalian constant of scotch and tweed. Churches are glorified attics, A. N. Dyer once wrote, but now he resembled a worshipper deep in prayer--head lowered, hands crammed against stomach. His posture reminded me of a comma, its intent not yet determined. People assumed he was upset. Of course he was upset. He and my father were the oldest of friends, born just eleven days apart in the same Manhattan hospital. Growing up, this minor divide seemed important, with Andrew teasing the older Charlie that he was destined to die first--it was just basic actuarial math--and Andrew would bury his friend and live his remaining numbered days in a glorious Topping-free state. "The worms and creepy-crawlies will eat you while I swig champagne." This joke carried on until the punch line became infused with intimacy and what once made young Charlie cry now made him smile, even toward the end. "You really are milking this," Andrew muttered during his final visit. "I've had the bubbly on ice for a month now." He sat by the bed, like a benched player witnessing an awful defeat. My father was no longer speaking. That bully with the scythe straddled his chest and dared him to breathe, c'mon, breathe. So Andrew decided to give his friend the last word by leaning closer and stage-whispering in his ear, "This is where you tell me to go look in the mirror, with all my pills a day and my ruined joints and unsalvageable lower midsection; this is where you point and say with the awful knowledge of those who go first, 'You're next.' " Andrew was rather pleased with this comeback. He wondered how far back his dying friend could reach, if apologizing was worth all the dragging up, but really he decided the important thing was that he was here, A. N. Dyer in the flesh, today's visit no small feat considering the state of his big toe. It had been a two-Vicodin morning. Charlie for his troubles sported a morphine drip. "Just look at us," Andrew started to say when Charlie's right hand took unexpected flight and flopped like a dead bird onto Andrew's knee. His fingernails were thick and yellow, and Andrew recalled from his more macabre youth the keratin that keeps growing after death, which raised his eyes to that weedy Topping hair and how in the coffin Charlie would miss his monthly trim and turn bohemian, like Beethoven conducting his own decay. Unnerved, Andrew gave his friend a gentle pat. His own hand seemed hardly any better. Then Charlie tried to speak, he tried and tried--clearly he had something to say--but all meaning remained locked up in his throat and what rattled free sounded like one of those cheap Hollywood scarefests where the living transform into the contagious undead and you had best run. To his credit, Andrew refused to look away. While he was obviously upset, he also seemed embarrassed, perhaps more embarrassed than upset, as if dying involved a humiliating confession. Please let me go, he probably begged to himself. Release me. After a minute of listening to this hopeless rasp he interrupted by saying, "I'm sorry, pal," and he placed his hand on Charlie's chest and kissed him softly on the head. That was good enough, right? Charles Henry Topping earned a respectable if pictureless two-hundred-word obit in The New York Times--lawyer, philanthropist, trustee, world-class decoy collector, and lifelong friend of the novelist A. N. Dyer, who often wrote about the blue-blooded world of the Toppings and the Dyers. Wrote? I'm sure Andrew marveled at that particular choice of tense. It likely surprised him that my father even warranted a mention in the Times. How little a life required nowadays. The church organist played the last of the Mendelssohn prelude. Andrew curled farther forward in his pew, as if pressed by the world behind him. If only Isabel were here. She would have known what to say. "Enough thinking about your miserable self." She could cut through him like no other. All day yesterday Andrew had sat over his IBM Selectric and found little to recall about his friend except that he liked bacon, liked bacon tremendously. Charlie could eat a whole slab of it. BLTs. Bacon burgers. Bacon and mayonnaise sandwiches. Liver wrapped in bacon. Disgusting. Of course there was more to say (after all, the Times managed two hundred words) but it seemed that so much of the Dyer-Topping friendship was based on those early years when action trumped language and bacon was as profound as anything. Since birth their relationship was as fixed as the stars. That was a large part of its charm. Like many men who keep friends in orbits of various length, a month, six months, a year might pass without talking and yet they could pick right up again, unfazed. The two of them were close without question so why bother searching for answers. Talk centered on the trivial, past and present, on summers and schoolmates, those earnest memories of youth, while the stickier issues, like disease and divorce, death and depression, occurred on the subatomic level: they had their fundamental effect, their important interactions, but they had no identifiable consequence when having a pleasant meal together, a meal likely pushed upon them by their ever-attentive wives. Charlie sure loved his bacon. Andrew removed the eulogy from his suit jacket. How can I read this crap in public? he wondered. How will I even manage to climb the lectern without my gout igniting a thousand crystal-cracking explosions? My bedrock is nothing but chalkstone. From his pocket he retrieved then popped his just-in-case Vicodin, the lint-covered backup to his post-breakfast Vicodin. Just swallowing the pill seemed to hurt, as if ground‑up glass were part of its pharmacology. The organist approached her tonal amen. Behind the altar loomed that massive golden screen with its carved miniatures of important church figures, once memorized by Andrew and Charlie during their Sunday school days, with that cow Miss Kepplinger insisting on a metronomic recital of names--St. Polycarp, St. Gregory of Nazianzus--a pause and no snack for you--St. Michael, St. Uriel--and while Andrew had a strong memory--St. Raphael, St. Gabriel--if old Miss Moo were tapping her clubfoot today--the fifth archangel up top, um, the patron saint of all who forgive, um, the angel who stopped Abraham's Issac-slaying hand, um--he would have gone graham crackerless. But there was no tapping. Not today. Mendelssohn was done and Charlie was dead and Andrew was a few minutes away from mortifying his more famous self in front of all these people. Just leave right now, shouted in his head. Pull the old fire alarm and bolt. He blamed the whole mess on the second Mrs. Topping, my stepmother. Lucy had the unique ability to corner a person on the phone. "He did love you," she told him the day after my father died. "Yes," Andrew said. "So so much." "Yes." "So proud to have you as a friend. So proud. Just plain proud of you." "And I he," Andrew said, wondering if he was speaking English or Mandarin. "And the boys, and Grace, they love you too, like a second father really." "Their father was a good man." "You have such a way with words. As a matter of fact . . . " It was ridiculous, her flattery, or perhaps mockery since her lips often pursed the thinnest of smiles, passed down from a particular brand of suburban housewife who could appear both dense and all too wise, like any service industry veteran. Yet somehow by the end of the conversation the divorcée from Oyster Bay had nabbed her prized eulogist. A goddamn eulogy? What could be worse? Maybe a graduation speech. A wedding toast. Andrew had said yes despite the clearest of professional and private intentions, had said yes despite the fact that his last novel, The Spared Man, was published ten years ago and most of that was cribbed from something he had abandoned twenty years before--since then nothing new from the celebrated author of Ampersand and Here Live Angry Dogs and Brutal Men and a dozen other books, not even a letter of decent length. Sometimes it seemed a vital piece had gone loose in his brain and he could feel the bit rattling around, a temporal gear that had slipped its carriage and no longer stamped thoughts into proper words and sentences. He was, in effect, broken. Often he wanted to jam a screwdriver into his ear. Like last night, in his study: he was sitting at his desk distracted by the recent reissue of his books, with that stupid business on their spines (if arranged chronologically they revealed a red line that traced the peaks and valleys of a cardiogram), which, while clever enough, did not take into consideration the random heart conditions after midnight, the arrhythmias and shortnesses of breath and implied flatlines, the irrational fear of sleep, the old friend recently dead and only a few hours to sum up his life. Four-thirty in the morning and chest-deep in his own grave, Andrew reached for that most loathsome and inguinal of writing instruments, the laptop computer. He lowered himself into the underworld of the Internet. Almost as a lark he did a Google search (was he the only one who noticed in its logo a babyish connotation, a sort of infantile infinite?) for eulogy and help and please. Within an hour he found his Eurydice: My dear friend, I am here to offer you my very deepest sympathies for the loss you have recently suffered. In this time of grieving it can seem overwhelming to deliver an eulogy in front of an audience of friends and family and clergy and strangers let alone writing said eulogy with all the care it so obviously deserves and all in a matter of a few fraught days. What can you give but tears? Believe me I know what you are going through. I myself was beyond bereft and scared when my brother-in-law asked me to give the eulogy for my much loved but tragically deceased sister and while I was afraid I might not do the lovely part of her life justice I preserved and there were such good feeling and warmth for my words that since than I have written and delivered eulogies for my father, my cousin, my uncle, two of my aunts, my grandmother, countless dear friends, even poor newborns abandoned I have remembered. If you want to skyrocket your confidence and save precious time and rest assured in delivering a memorable tribute to someone who once meant so much to you, then www.eulogiesfromtheheart.com is the most important website you will visit today. My Instant Eulogy Package will give you everything you need to stand tall with appropriate and meaningful sorrow. Let me help bring forth the loss that is struggling within you. Sincerely and again with deepest condolences, Emma Norbert Yes, Andrew thought, Emma Norbert understood. Her photo was front and center, her face soft with the sweetest kind of intelligence, even if the eyes were punctuated with too much makeup, like unnecessary quotation marks. But you could tell she was an honest if dyslexic mourner. Emma had the real words while all Andrew had was artifice. Drunk with scotch and swirled with Vicodin, he considered the fourteen books that would stand as his testament, a handful of older critics giving their kind words, a handful of younger critics challenging such weary opinions. Oh Emma, Andrew thought, what would you say about me for $29.99? He plugged in his information, his credit card number, then pushed enter. In five minutes he had his choice of fill-in-the-blank eulogies. They say that at the end of our time on this earth if you can count a few good friends you are a fortunate person. I know that I am fortunate because I could always count on [insert name] to be the truest friend I ever did know, and today I am sick with despair, doubly sick because [insert name] is not here to repair me with his/her kind words and loving heart . . . Excerpted from And Sons: A Novel by David Gilbert All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.