MY DARLING BOY, by John Dufresne
John Dufresne, known for his dark, rollicking novels laced with wit, grit, compassion and offbeat characters, has written an improbably entertaining book on opioid addiction.
“My Darling Boy” is a heartbreaking yet oddly charming story of a father’s quest to rescue his beloved son from the painful grip of painkillers. The novel’s hero is Olney Kartheizer, a retired journalist whose long career at the ever-shrinking Daily Sun of Anastasia, Fla., left him with a generous buyout and a deeply ingrained tendency to find narratives in the lives of everyone he meets.
Accordingly, the novel brims with personal histories. Some are happy — like Olney’s recollections of his son, Cully, as a bright young child. But most are not. Cully was a star athlete in high school, but then he fell into depression, self-harm and drug use. What followed was more than a decade of rehab stints, drug counseling, lies, thefts, arrests, A.A. meetings and disappearances. Now Cully has vanished somewhere near a town called Melancholy where his mother, Kat, lives with her second husband. Not willing to give up on his son, Olney sets out to find him and bring him home.
Olney is an uncommonly open and kind man who picks up unlikely friends, the way sweaters pick up lint. He offers rides to strangers stranded by circumstances, including an attractive 50-year-old who explains matter-of-factly that she will soon die from progressive dysphagia; and a young, unhappily married mother whose car has broken down at the Winn-Dixie supermarket.
Both women become part of Olney’s inner circle, advising him to keep fighting for Cully. Several others join Olney’s team, including a former nun who runs the seedy boardinghouse that becomes his search headquarters. Sister Robbie left the convent after her reports of rape by a priest were brushed aside. (This was in Requiem, Mass., which is the hometown of many of Dufresne’s characters, and the title of one of his previous novels.)
About this motley crew, the author reflects: “Whom we meet, where we live, what we do, it’s all accidental, all a blessed fluke.”
Olney’s circuitous search for his skittish, down-and-out son involves crossed paths, near misses and occasional breakthroughs followed by tanked opportunities. Whenever he does catch up with Cully, well-meaning Olney inadvertently asks him questions that make him feel worse about himself, such as: “So what are your plans?” Cully bolts.
The expedition to save Cully takes Olney into dangerous territory. At one point he finds his son bleeding in an alley after a life-threatening beating by drug dealers. At another, he’s shot by a tightly wound paranoiac at Sister Robbie’s boardinghouse when he’s mistaken for an intruder. Underlying it all is the intractability of Cully’s sorry state.
Throughout his career, Dufresne has juxtaposed dark themes with playful prose. In “My Darling Boy,” he leans into jokey wordplay and malapropisms (“scarlet teenager,” “french benefits”) to offset the heaviness of the addiction narrative. Melancholy — where Cully’s haunts include a cafe called Mug Shots and he has odd jobs at a kosher pet boarding facility called Katz Meow and a pawnshop called Pawnography — is described as a “no-irony zip code.”
Some details are more distracting than delightful. No one Olney meets is deemed too extraneous to include. We are also regaled with the plots of too many of the romance novels on which a housebound neighbor subsists.
Yet, Olney is a Candide who persists in being charmed by life. He recognizes that while all things are certainly not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, this is the world we have to deal with.
Dufresne, a professor of creative writing at Florida International University and the author of several writing manuals, including “The Lie That Tells the Truth,” often incorporates reflections on the mechanics of storytelling and memory in his fiction. In his 1994 debut novel, “Louisiana Power & Light,” his narrator announces up front, “A story, we believe, and perhaps we are out of fashion here, should exert a moral force, should charge and illuminate.” He adds, “Our story is what we say, and how we say it. And it’s what we remember.” But memory, as Dufresne reminded us in that first book, is “a myth-making machine … we keep revising our past to keep it consistent with who we think we are.”
Thirty years on, Dufresne is still probing the relationship between narrative, memory and truth. At one point in “My Darling Boy,” as Cully’s birthday approaches, Olney asks himself, “What do you get a man who has nothing? A future?” Then he thinks, “the future’s messy; the past is tidy.” What he really wants is “to tell Cully it’s not too late to be the person he wants to be.”
“My Darling Boy” is a tale of parenthood, friendship and resolute love. But it’s also a book about the power of our personal myths. Because, as Olney learned in his last post at the Daily Sun, on the obituary desk, “in the end we’re all just stories.”
My Darling Boy | By John Dufresne | Norton | 274 pp. | $29.99