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& Sons, by David Gilbert
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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.
Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.
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
“[A] smart, engrossing saga . . . Perfect for fans of Jonathan Franzen or Claire Messud.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Audacious . . . [one of the year’s] most dazzlingly smart, fully realized works of fiction.”—The Washington Post
- Sales Rank: #411496 in Books
- Published on: 2014-05-27
- Released on: 2014-05-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.00" w x 5.20" l, .78 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 480 pages
From Booklist
*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. --Donna Seaman
Review
“[A] big, brilliant novel.”—The New York Times Book Review
“In terms of sheer reading pleasure, my favorite book this year was & Sons, David Gilbert’s big, intelligent, richly textured novel about fathers, sons, friendship, and legacies. . . . From [A. N.] Dyer’s slacker sons to a J. Crew-wearing young seductress, every member of Gilbert’s cast of characters is perfectly drawn.”—Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker
“Gilbert’s should be among the half-dozen or so names cited by critics and serious readers when they’re asked who produced [the year’s] most dazzlingly smart, fully realized works of fiction.”—The Washington Post
“A grand book, even extraordinary.”—Lev Grossman, Time
“If you read only a few books this year, this one should be one of them.”—The 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 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, The New York Times
“[A] throwback literary novel . . . Its rueful, poetic vision of faded WASP grandeur is frequently heartbreaking.”—People
“Very nearly a masterwork. Gilbert is an assured, versatile and often very funny writer.”—The Dallas Morning News
“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, The New Yorker
“This great big novel is also infused with warmth and wisdom about what it means to be a family.”—The Boston Globe
“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.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“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
“Richly entertaining . . . has the rare quality of being funny without being silly, serious without being solemn, and powerfully moving without being either sentimental or coercive.”—The Guardian (UK)
“The right novelist can turn even a novel about a novelist into a book big enough to delight all the rest of us.”—Salon
“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
“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
“& Sons is a sophisticated, compassionate novel, very much more than a clever take on the vicissitudes of the writing life. Funny and smart, it is lit with the kind of writing that makes the reader break into a smile.”—Financial Times
“Gilbert’s finely wrought prose . . . teems with elaborate word plays and tests the reader’s perceptiveness at every turn.”—Vanity Fair
“A delicious read.”—New York Daily News
“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.”—The Daily Beast
“A work of pure genius.”—The Buffalo News
“Extraordinary.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“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.”—Newsday
“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 Businessweek
“[& 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
“Celebrates the power of words . . . thick with wit and close observation . . . [& Sons is] built to last.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“& 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.”—The 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
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
& Sons is a fine literary novel that touches on many of the interests ...
By Robert Punga
& Sons is a fine literary novel that touches on many of the interests of the lesser gender in this inequitable world. It is filled with those references to art and literature and life that lets you know the author has spent time learning about literature ,visiting museums and living that reminds old men like me of all the joys of life in a cultured world. I found it a great fun read to review the exigencies that intercept most male llives.
82 of 93 people found the following review helpful.
& Sons
By Brendan Moody
A couple different phrases come to mind when I try to summarize David Gilbert's new novel. One is "all dressed up with no place to go." & SONS is full of striking characters, carefully-crafted prose, and well-evoked (if familiar) scenes from urban life. It's the story of two families, the Dyers and the Toppings, and the way their lives have been shaped by one of the patriarchs, reclusive novelist A. N. Dyer. When his lifelong friend Charlie Topping dies, Dyer confronts his own mortality, inviting his two older sons to come home and bond with their teenage half-brother, his namesake. Jamie and Richard agree, but with agendas of their own. Meanwhile, Charlie Topping's son, his life in shambles, insinuates himself into the Dyers' reunion. The stage is set for... well, something, you would think. But instead of evolving, the narrative wanders down several dead ends before stumbling into an unearned climax. There are pieces of several promising novels here, but they're jumbled together in a way that undermines rather than reinforcing them. Fortunately, the other phrase that comes to mind is "magnificent failure." The in-the-moment experience is strong enough that the larger failings aren't fatal.
I mentioned several promising novels. One would focus on Philip Topping, son of the deceased, who narrates. He's ostensibly an unreliable narrator, his simultaneous affection for and resentment of the Dyers coloring his behavior. But, though Philip is just about unsympathetic enough for the purpose, Gilbert doesn't use the device of unreliability in an effective way. Unreliable narrators work best when they betray themselves, when the reader is made reasonably certain just how extensive their dishonesty is. Otherwise, what you have is a straightforward narrative with a not-very-interesting question mark over in the margins. There's one moment where Philip's truthfulness is key, but generally speaking it just doesn't matter, and the narration becomes one more free-floating literary device in a book full of them.
Another of those devices would be satire, which comes up mostly in reference to Richard and Jamie. Richard is a struggling screenwriter, and is hoping to get one of his original screenplays produced by securing for his backers the film rights to AMPERSAND, his father's most famous novel. This brings in scenes involving Hollywood executives and a famous young actor, all of whom behave exactly as you would expect. It's funny, but not especially necessary. Ditto Jamie's background in avant-garde filmmaking, in which radical activism is, as usual, mocked as mere liberal guilt. And, too, there's the sequence at a book launch party, in which the New York publishing scene proves exactly as ostentatious, bitter, gossipy, and lively as it has been in every other novel about writers. I sound more disappointed than I am here. These scenes are enjoyable, full of vertiginously long sentences and the kind of off-kilter metaphors of which modern literary fiction is made. But, for all the mockery, there's an air of urban sentimentality here, which is no more interesting than the small-town variety, and no more genuinely insightful.
This review is ballooning beyond my original intentions, and I haven't even mentioned Andy Dyer's teen angst over the 24-year-old who might become his girlfriend, or the brief interruption of all this male self-pity by a not-very-successful attempt to explore, via A. N. Dyer's ex-wife, why women put up with men like this. Nor have I alluded to the bizarre plot point that emerges about halfway through, which is probably meant to be resonant or ironic but just feels weird and unnecessary, literalizing a metaphor that was fine ~as~ a metaphor. But never mind all that. The heart of & SONS is its interest in awkward father-son relationships, and this is where the novel falls most thoroughly flat. Thoughtful readers will already understand that fathers and sons often have difficulty communicating, and will look for an especially vivid portrait of that reality. But Gilbert never really creates the illusion that the sons in this novel have much to do with their fathers, for better or for worse. Richard, Jamie, and Andy are caught up in their own desires and dramas, and barely interact with A. N. Dyer at all. That might be the point, but what their few scenes together suggest is not a dramatically-interesting disconnect, but benign indifference. There's something real there, and I can't deny a certain pathos in the father's unsuccessful attempts to bond with his sons after a lifetime of putting his identity as a writer above his family, but this isn't enough to sustain a novel, especially one as rambling as & SONS.
As is too often the case with sprawling fiction, the welter of subplots is resolved by a sudden, dramatic turn of events that feels unbearably contrived. The scenes that follow are easily the novel's weakest, not only because they depend on heavy-handed plotting, but because they require an emotional investment in the father-son bond that hasn't been elicited by what came before. Instead of contemplating the beauty of it all, I was thinking about how tired I am of books in which neurotic, self-pitying men are set up as tragic figures simply because they're aware how pathetic they are. That's a harsh response, not least because & SONS is far from the worst offender in that department. But I can't deny that I find it uneven and unsuccessful. There's a lot to admire-- I still haven't touched on A. N. Dyer's fictional oeuvre, with its parallels to other twentieth-century fiction and to the events of the novel itself. But such things are trappings, and underneath the gloss and style, this isn't a wise or a profound enough novel. You should read it anyway, if books like appeals to you; you may well like it better than I did, and even if you don't, it's a failure more interesting than many lesser successes.
46 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
Sometimes a Great Notion
By KC
David Gilbert's ambitious & SONS is one of those books that will as easily garner 5 stars as one. There's that much to like -- and seriously wonder about. Let's start with the problematic aspects so we can finish on a high note. While the book centers on an aging, J.D. Salingeresque writer named Andrew (A.N.) Dyer and his three sons, it is supposedly narrated by Philip Topping, son of Andrew's best pal Charlie, whose funeral opens the book. Seems innocent enough, but the point-of-view is convoluted. Though he plays a minor role in the 400+ page book, Philip seems to be an omniscient narrator for most of the scenes he is not privy too.
Then, when he's on hand, he's more like a 1st-person POV narrator, a Nick Carraway sort, if you will. Most damning of all, he's a bit creepy in his hero worship of Andrew Dyer and in his hanging around in general. He asks if he can stay at the Dyer home after his dad's funeral and, thanks to the awkward situation, is granted permission even though no one but him took the offer seriously. I'm left to wonder why Philip was included in the first place. The book would have done as well -- or better -- without him.
Another deficiency is Gilbert's tendency to overwrite. There's no digression he's willing to forgo, no back story he's willing to pass on. Instead, he indulges himself, sometimes for dozens of meandering pages. The reader gets a bit lost, brushes back the spider webs, and wonders aloud, "Why am I here again?"
All that said, the book has its merits. First and foremost, Gilbert is an idea man and can grace the page was some eloquent sentences at times -- the kind you stop, reread, and say, "Wish I thought of that." In these moments, you seem willing to forgive the self-indulgence of his digressions because, well, a writer's writer doesn't come along every day.
The book is ambitious, too, which deserves praise for its willingness to take a risk, if nothing else. Gilbert does not play it safe, but instead takes the big leap into the giant thematic miasma we call father-son love-hate relationships, in all their messy glory. There's the patriarch Andrew, of course, and his eldest sons, recovering addict Richard and creative Peter Pan-like Jamie. And then there's the third son, Andy -- supposedly the product of an ill-advised fling, but actually the product of an even more ill-advised plot twist revealed at the halfway point. Yep, it's a bit of an eye-roller and probably as gratuitous as the over-the-Topping narrator, but still, Andrew's special love for Andy has its moments and puts the reader in a more forgiving mood.
Overall, a march through some word-count agony and some word-smithing ecstasy. Some readers will see more of one than the other -- thus the critical gaps in appraisals. It's all about your reading DNA and what you bring to the table, actually. For my part, I'll acknowledge both and split the difference with a middle road assessment.
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