Only Son
Reflecting on the inescapablity of generational growing pains, a fatherless father works to connect with his adolescent son in Kevin Moffett’s tender, rousing novel Only Son.
Told in triptych form, the novel begins at the fracture point of the father’s preadolescence: when he was nine, his father died. Thereafter, his childhood was shadowed by want. His now single mother did her best, but she was “stingy with her remembrances,” and gaps were inevitable. He pored over absences, feeling “sorrow so intense and complete it [was] almost pleasurable” and asking unanswerable questions regarding who his father might have been—and who he would be without him.
Next, the novel moves through the narrator’s son’s early childhood, during which he delights in the boy’s quirks and changes: a self-conceived food pyramid Halloween costume; tears, and staunched tears, over animal deaths. By the time his son is seventeen, though, a shift has occurred, a seismic separation between father and son. Determined not to let what happens in every parent-child relationship happen in his own, the narrator grabs his father’s recovered travel notebook and initiates a pre-college road trip up the California coast, tracing the inherited route.
The narration is both self-effacing and wise, meticulous and halting, reflecting shifting life stages with calibrated sympathy. “This isn’t a quest,” the narrator insists while on a clear quest that’s marked by magical thinking. Irony arises, too: in one moment, the narrator works to decipher his father’s cryptic road notes, certain that understanding awaits him; in the next, he refuses his mother’s calls. Longing is pervasive and change inevitable, and when the impossible does happen, it’s wrenching.
An intergenerational coming-of-age story that’s marked by mourning, Only Son is about the contradictions, disappointments, and wonders of family love.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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