David Gilbert: & Sons

David Gilbert's second novel, & Sons, is a gift to readers of novels: good story, insights and characters, all painted with great writing and a deft touch. This novel is chock full of wonderful one-liners that display playful word-smithing while bringing meaning to the passage. Gilbert keeps the gloves off and the prose is never over-written. & Sons is the story of two families, fathers & sons, husbands & wives, friends, love & meanness, and...writing. The aging A.N. Dyer is a hugely successful novelist, and a not very good father or friend. His lifelong friend, Charles Topping, loved him, and was dominated & hurt by Dyer. Their children are more or less dysfunctional or bruised, each in their own way. They are lovingly and honestly drawn by Gilbert in all of their frailties & faults. Some of these characters are more aware of their own brutality, others blind to it, and some of their love and need. It is not a coming-of-age novel, thankfully, and has none of Jonathan Franzen's sophomoric vignettes of childhood & parents, thankfully again. Each year I read many novels, snooze through too many and am captured by a very few. In 2013 there were two highlights: The Dinner by Herman Koch,  a very dark and very human story, and & Sons, a very human and unblinking story of fathers, sons & friends.