& Sons (Gilbert)

& Sons 
David Gilbert, 2013
Random House
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812984354


Summary
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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio

David Gilbert is the author of the story collection Remote Feed, the novels The Normals (2004) and & Sons (2013). His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, and Bomb. He lives in New York with his wife and three children. (From the publisher.)

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

Discussion Questions
1. First of all, thank you for reading the book. Want to get that out of the way. A big thanks. One of the scariest things a person can tell me is, Oh, hey, I’m reading your book. It makes me want to crawl directly into the nearest hole. Funny choice of career. Here I’ve published a book with a big time publisher—dream come true—and the knowledge that someone might actually read my book makes me cringe to the point of splitting in two. I’m cringing now. The other scary thing you can tell me is, Oh, hey, I read your book, particularly if you tweak the verb with a raised eyebrow, like a hairy umlaut. I might smile in return, and I might say, Oh Great, that’s great, but in reality I’m performing a private Seppuku ceremony, a thousand doubts the blade. Anyway, discuss vis-a-vis A.N. Dyer and ask yourself, Why would anyone want to be a writer?

2. It took me six years to write this book, which seems a ridiculous amount of time. I mean, it’s a kind of a long book, but six years long? At best three years, maybe three and a half while also maintaining a full time gig with Doctors Without Borders. Now A.N. Dyer hasn’t written a truly new book in something like twenty years (forgive the vagueness, but it’s been a year since I actually read this book), why do you think he’s stopped writing? I have my ideas, obviously. I think it has something to do with the break-up of his marriage—duh—but also with the birth of his third son, the young Andy. Has this boy perhaps taken on the role of fiction? What is Andy’s relationship with fiction in terms of his relationship with his father? Did I just answer my own question? I don’t think I’m very good at this.

3. You know when you go to the theater and you read the Playbill and there are those bios for the actors and the director and the playwright – I love reading those bios – did you know that those bios are actually written by the actors and the director and the playwright? You probably did, but from some reason I didn’t, or not until maybe ten years ago. I just assumed there was a national bio database, very official, probably housed in a suburb of D.C., that fact checked and sourced and confirmed all this professional information. Yes, yes, Patty St. John did indeed play Fastrada in the Tacoma Players 2007 production of Pippin. It wasn’t until I started seeing those personalized messages that suddenly became popular—Ms. St. John would like to express her gratitude to her Chihuahua Chekov for teaching her how to be human—that I realized, Wait a sec, these things are actually self-constructed. At first I was shocked. It seemed dubious. And kind of braggy too. How much of this is truly true? But then I found myself digging into these credits, not only to suss out a career but also to suss out a person, and suddenly a deeper appreciation began to emerge from those handmade bios. A trajectory. I mean, how do we compose our lives for public consumption? What do we say? And where are the divergences, the betraying tells? Who is composing who? Or is it whom? And does David Gilbert live in New York City or does he live in Brooklyn or in Queens? Is that a question?

4. I don’t normally like books about writers. A writer writing about a writer writing, well, that sentence alone is tedious. I want to read about someone who does something. Like I wish someone would write the great American novel about scuba diving. That would be cool. Shipwrecks. Sharks. Those giant clams and your foot is suddenly caught. There has to be treasure too. We as a nation deserve a fabulous piece of scuba diving literature. But another book about a writer? And an old privileged white male writer at that? I almost feel as if I should apologize. That said, what interested me was the tension between fiction and life and how we twist our own stories to suit our will. I remember in 5th grade English class the teacher mentioning in Huck Finn the theme of Appearance Versus Reality, underlined twice on the chalkboard, and I was blown away by the notion—yes, yes, appearance versus reality! It was my Matrix moment. My teenage anthem. Like Jake with Chinatown, it explained all things without explaining a thing. It is, after all, the mother of all themes and introduces by far the most interesting element of any decent piece of writing, the subtext. So: what is the subtext of & Sons? Sorry, that’s a terrible question.

5. Okay, how about this: who is telling the story? And how is he telling the story? Is this an act of autobiography or an act of fiction and is there a difference between the two? I mean, we have the one narrator and then we have each chapter divided into three separate character-driven parts (and here I have to acknowledge Richard Powers since I essentially stole that structure from him ((a really useful structure by the way, if you’re ever looking for structure)), and Philip Roth’s Zuckerman books in the way Zuckerman jumps into other people’s heads yet always remains distinctly individual). I guess the question is: how good a writer is Philip Topping? Also, a follow-up: what writer is the biographer of your life? (For me, it’s Charles Schulz.)

6. Why all the Wizard of Oz allusions? Seriously. I think a lot of readers assume that the writer has relative control of his/her text but I can tell you that that simply is not true. I mean, that’s not true either, and no need to bring up Derrida or any of the deconstructionists, please God no, though during the Eighties I used to say Paul-De-Man instead of You’re Da Man (and got just as many laughs), but in all seriousness, I wrote a draft of this book and looked over it and saw all of these Wizard of Oz references, which I then burnished since it seemed so odd and unexpected and must mean something. So tell me about Dorothy? And Kansas and Oz? Who is the Wicked Witch?

7. Is this tedious?

8. Why did I write this book? Finally a question for me. I wrote this book because I have a son and a father and I myself am a son and a father and this funhouse mirror effect has been interesting, to say the least. Raising children is an act of love as well as an act of fiction in which the characters slowly free themselves from the supposed author. I remember being scared about having a boy. There seemed so much pressure involved. How would I teach someone how to be a man when I had no idea how to be a man myself? My own father is a wonderful guy, very impressive, an intimidating figure to me growing up as well as bit distant. He himself was the product of a strict family, raised by a step-father after his own father’s early death. Anyway, my Dad had a successful career in banking, and I remember when I was in my early thirties and just starting my own family, I was at an event and my father had to get up and say a few words and he was as always confident and charming, a commanding presence, and this old friend of his was sitting next to me and she leaned over and said,

It really is amazing, seeing your dad in these situations, so comfortable and at ease, considering how painfully shy he was as a boy. I mean, he could barely look you in the eye and had a bit of stammer. Amazing, the transformation.

Now this surprised me. I’ve always known him as a reserved and self-contained man, a bit unknowable, but never as a shy and awkward boy, and so I remember imagining: what if I could meet him when he was younger, say seventeen, how would my impressions change? That was the impetus behind & Sons. Hence this follow-up question: What if you could meet your father when he was five, or ten, or fifteen, at the height of his vulnerability? How would your feelings for the man change? We all reinvent ourselves with our children.

8. Let’s talk about the book within the book, Ampersand. Go ahead, I’m listening.

9. Okay, the women in the book—what women, I know. But hey, the book’s called & Sons, what did you expect? That said, there are women, in particular Isabel Dyer and Eleanor Topping, and they do play their part. How do these women function within this world of boys (notice I didn’t use the word men)? Does it ring true? My mother disagrees. I really wanted to make Richard’s wife Candy a bigger character and there was a scene in an early outline where she bonded with A.N. Dyer (much to the frustration of Richard), but I couldn’t quite find the narrative space for its inclusion. I’m curious, did I get away with my impersonation of Alice Munro in that Isabel chapter? I’m a fan of her stories and I loved trying to write in her particular style, not just overtly but covertly (and setting some action on a train). That said, is there a deeper purpose to my impersonation? What does it say about the fluid nature of authorship?

10. The novel has a prologue and an epilogue, though thankfully not tagged as prologue and epilogue since I myself always skip prologues and epilogues. I’ve never understood their purpose. Just start the book and end the book. I’ve never read a prologue and said, Wow, now that’s a great prologue. And an epilogue is like that awkward encounter with a friend after you say goodbye and depart down the street in the same direction. Oh, yeah, hay (awkward laugh). That said, I am guilty of writing a prologue and epilogue (italicized, no less). For me to stoop to this shame, there must be a reason…I hope.

11. Does Phillip Topping work as a narrator? I mean, yeah, he’s kind of unreliable, (unreliable narrator is like subtext 101), but do you believe him? I know, I know, I just said he’s unreliable, but how much of what he says is believable. The same with A.N. Dyer. I know, I know, A.N. Dyer is being filtered through Phillip, his biggest fan, who at the same time is trying to channel A.N. Dyer—so many layers of fiction. I guess the question is: who is the dog and who is the tail?

12. Do you like the letters? Regardless, they look great. The Random House interior designers did an incredible job to create that sense of reality. That was very important to me, to maintain a tight grip on the real, just like all the locations in New York and beyond are very real places, the same with the schools. That reality was key. Why do you think I cared so much? Sometimes I think of A.N. Dyer as a spider who has spun his web in the corner of these realities, a beautiful and intricate construction, lovely to behold, and not once does he think of the poor creatures who blindly fly into these traps and find themselves stuck and immobilized, a sudden character in one of his dramas. What stories do you tell yourself about your own life that you know are untrue, those exaggerations that have become fact? How of much of who were are is what we steal? And if fiction can bring a family together, do we care about the truth?

13. If you called someone up and told them to come find you in front of your favorite work of art, where would you be standing?

14. With Richard in the beginning, when he’s at the movie studio and feels as if his dreams are about to come true, Richard playing the fantasy forward and then discovering, too late for his ego, that he has misread the situation, can you relate to this mortifying situation? I certainly can. I once thought a girl was madly in love with me but actually she was in love with my best friend—wait, is that me or a movie I saw? How much of our memory is collage?

15. Dream Snap is an anagram of Ampersand? Do those kinds of games interest you? If they do, play on.

16. When I started & Sons I wrote a single word on a Post-It note and stuck it to the wall in front of my desk. What was that word? Five dollars to anyone who guesses right.
(Questions from author's website.)

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