136. Noah Hawley - The Good Father

Another of Paddy’s library books. But definitely one of the highlights of the year.

About a father & son; the son is arrested for shooting dead an up-and-coming democrat senator at a political rally. At first, you follow the father in disbelieving the son’s possible guilt and read it as a whodunit thriller, but as the son’s story begins to unfold, the doubt begins to disappear.

The son is a bit of a weirdo, who drops out of university and travels the US on the road Kerouac style, and seems an unlikely murderer. But he won’t deny (or confirm) it.

Towards the end a motive, just a lustful glance from the senator at the son’s girlfriend, becomes clear, and although the father clings to threads that would rationalise what happened, it becomes clearer that these are threads of wish fulfilment. The son goes to the chair and the father is left to reflect on his own and his son’s fractured life.

It is better than this summary, which doesn’t really do it justice.

(Paddy has told me that I may have missed a critical bit of the plot here, typically. Apparently, she thinks, the senator was killed from behind, whereas the son was in the audience in front of him. There are lots of other references in the book to historical figures murdered and a ‘fall guy’ convicted with very similar issues remaining open. So the possibility is that the son didn’t do it, but didn’t bother to deny it, as he was so screwed up by life, or possibly his relationship with his father).

So a definite re-read now!!

Get this on Amazon