& Sons (Gilbert)

Book Reviews
A contemporary New York variation on The Brothers Karamazov, featuring a J. D. Salinger–like writer in the role of Father, and a protagonist who turns out to be as questionable a tour guide as the notoriously unreliable narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s classic The Good Soldier.... a big, ambitious book about fathers and sons, Oedipal envy and sibling rivalry, and the dynamics between art and life, talent and virtue. The novel is smart, funny, observant and...does a wonderful job of conjuring up its characters’ memories of growing up in New York City in layered, almost Proustian detail.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


A witty and ultimately tragic take on the perennial subject of how the sins of the fathers are visited on their sons. There are echoes of Turgenev here, to say nothing of Jonathan Franzen and John Irving. But the music is entirely Gilbert’s, and at the end of this bravura performance you'll want to give him a standing ovation.
New York Newsday


Six months from now, Gilbert’s should be among the half-dozen or so names cited by critics and serious readers when they’re asked who produced 2013’s most dazzlingly smart, fully realized works of fiction.
Washington Post


This great big novel is also infused with warmth and wisdom about what it means to be a family.
Boston Globe


[& Sons is] about the emotional bonds between fathers, sons and brothers—the overwhelming love that can’t be adequately expressed and the burden of unspoken expectations.... Gilbert is an inventive, emotionally perceptive writer.
Associated Press


& Sons is a work of pure genius...full of genuine poignancy and gut-punch pathos.... [Gilbert’s] acts of empathy—at its core, every author’s task—are so daring and truly moving that you’ll have to discover their slow and beautiful unfolding for yourselves.... This is a book to return to as the decades pass, and, as they pass, to pass down, so that the pages might accumulate many shades of ink and so aid other fathers in communicating and other sons in finding their fathers, in that wonderful, silent, deeply flawed way—and meanwhile, to take its place on the shelf of American classics.
Buffalo News

A thought-provoking and engrossing read.... I found myself falling into [the characters’] lives, caring for them, worrying for them and ultimately missing them as the novel came to a close.
Chicago Tribune


Very nearly a masterwork. Gilbert is an assured, versatile and often very funny writer.
Dallas Morning News


Gilbert has great narrative gifts and a wonderful eye for the madness of families and the madness of writers.... & Sons is a novel that creates an imaginary author who is so real and flawed that the reader feels he understands American literature itself a little better after reading his story.
Los Angeles Times

 
If you read only a few books this year, this one should be one of them.
Huffington Post
 

Clear the sand from your beach-book-overloaded mind for this smart, engrossing saga about a reclusive famous author and his late-life attempt to make amends to the many people he’s let down. Perfect for fans of Jonathan Franzen or Claire Messud.
Entertainment Weekly

 
[A] throwback literary novel.... Its rueful, poetic vision of faded WASP grandeur is frequently heartbreaking.
People
 

Throughout & Sons, Gilbert provides lengthy excerpts from [his] novel-within-a-novel, and, as far as the reader can tell, Ampersand is caustic, comic, and clever, like Gilbert’s own novel.... Gilbert has a rich theme, and plenty of talent. He has a wonderfully sharp eye for the emotional reticence of the men of A. N. Dyer’s generation and class, for the ways in which their more open, more voluble children must become expert readers of patriarchal gaps and silences, in order to make sense of what he finely calls "these heavily redacted men."... Gilbert often writes superbly, his sentences crisp, witty, and rightly weighted.... Some of [his metaphors] realign the visual world, asking us, as Nabokov’s best metaphors do, to estrange in order to reconnect.... Every page proposes something clever and well turned. Gilbert is bursting with little achievements.... This is a writer capable of something as beautifully simple, and achingly deep, as this description of Richard and Jamie, as they see their mother approaching them in the pub: "The brothers straightened, reshaped as sons."
James Wood - New Yorker
 
 
When someone uses the term "instant classic," I typically want to grab him and ask, "So this is, what, like the new Great Expectations? You sure about that?" But David Gilbert’s novel & Sons, seductive and ripe with both comedy and heartbreak, made me reconsider my stance on such a label... This is the book I’d most like to lug from one beach to another for the rest of summer, if only I hadn’t torn through it in two very happy days this spring.... Gilbert’s portrait of [New York City] and its literary set is as smart and savage in its way as Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, half love letter, half indictment, and wholly irresistible.
NPR
 
In her iconic essay Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion famously described New York City as "the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself."... David Gilbert’s layered & Sons probes that nexus from the inside, limning the emotional decay of two prominent Manhattan families and literary masterpiece that cages them.... Vivid, inventive.
Oprah Magazine
 
 
A Franzenish portrait of a biting, aging New York writer, David Gilbert’s novel is perceptive, witty, and—like all great books about remote fathers and their sons—prone to leaving male readers either cursing or calling their dads
New York Magazine
 

Gilbert’s finely wrought prose...teems with elaborate word plays and tests the reader’s perceptiveness at every turn.
Vanity Fair
 

If the stylish brilliance of recent novels by Rachel Kushner, Jess Walter, and Peter Heller has been hinting at a new golden age of American prose, then David Gilbert’s ambitious, sprawling, and altogether masterful second novel, & Sons, confirms it.... By turns challenging and multilayered, weird and hilarious...& Sons is more than worth the effort.
Daily Beast
 
Brilliant...weaves together the frayed threads of fame, fatherhood, family and friendship into a meditation on the blessing and curse of creativity.... Thoughtful, farcical, acerbic and original, Gilbert’s crisp writing and sinuous mind could grab and hold any reader
Bloomberg


The book’s central figure is an aging, Salinger-esque writer, A. N. Dyer, who, as his health declines, grapples with complexities involving family, friendships and his influential life’s work. Gilbert could have dealt with Dyer’s books as a necessary afterthought, tossing off some titles and quickly setting down to the real business of regret and death and endlessly messy human relationships. Instead, Gilbert really got into it. & Sons conjures a career’s worth of drool-worthy fictional fiction that’s so convincingly evoked, I almost recall writing a paper on it in freshman English class.
New York Times Magazine
 

[A] big, rich book.... With wit and heart, Gilbert illuminates the complicated ways that fathers and sons misunderstand, disappoint, and love one another and how their behavior affects the women in their lives.
Real Simple
 

& Sons is an often funny, always elegant, lingering gaze back at a world in which writers are still gods at the very center of culture.
Esquire


The opening scene of Gilbert’s finely textured new novel 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...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.... 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.
Publishers Weekly


This large-scale novel explores the dysfunctional family of A.N. Dyer, a famous New York writer who recalls J.D. Salinger.... 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...reveal behavior by Dyer that has had tragic consequences. Vedict: Like Jonathan Franzen, Gilbert works on an expansive canvas as he examines the tragedies and comedies of a modern American family.—James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Library Journal


[C]harming, often funny... [with] 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 [famous author A.N.] Dyer's boys, gathered as Dad feels his own mortality approaching, who are a hot mess of failure coupled with ambition.... 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.
Kirkus Reviews