My Darling Boy: A Novel

There is an old Soviet joke that reverses conventional logic by asserting that the future is certain, but the past constantly changes. In My Darling Boy by John Dufresne, neither the past nor the future can be relied on for stability. The present is suspect as well.

Dufresne tells the story of Olney Kartheizer, a retired journalist (specialty:  obituaries) of Anastasia, Florida. He is divorced and working part time at the local miniature golf course, where he enjoys interacting with customers. He is cheerful and seemingly well-adjusted, with a unique ability to bring people into his life. It is the absence of his son Cully—estranged from him by drug addiction that is the one dark cloud on his small but satisfied life.

Dufresne introduces us to Olney’s idyllic memories of Cully early on. A talented boy, ambidextrous, precocious both intellectually and athletically, young Cully is most notable for the close and loving relationship he had with his father. They spent hours together eating strawberry ice cream, watching baseball, and catching butterflies. The idyllic view of family is darkened as Cully becomes an isolated and sullen teenager who lies to cover up his burgeoning drug use. By the time we meet Olney, Cully has been out of his life for years, consumed by drugs.

Meanwhile, Olney is otherwise happy in his retired life. He enjoys the identical triplets he meets at miniature golf, though he cannot tell them apart. He begins dating Mireille and they are happy together even as Mireille is dying of esophageal cancer and has only months to live. He is friends with Rylan and Taffi, an evangelist couple whose preaching incorporates a ventriloquist’s doll playing the part of their sarcastic, agnostic (and fictional) son Buddy, and spends much of his time with Julie, Lonnie, and their daughters Tallulah and Hedy. If this list of acquaintances seems quirky, it is only a small sample of the quirk in this novel. Virtually everyone Olney gets to know is an oddball with a heart of gold. It is a portrait of Florida that the Marx Brothers would have been proud of.

But as Olney renews his search for Cully, we see a different Florida. Cully’s life is anything but amusing. He sleeps in a storage closet or in abandoned motels. He works odd jobs for at best minimum wage until his drug use and the irresponsibility it brings on costs him those jobs. His is not a life of endless partying, but one of depression and scrounging survival.

And yet, he resists his father’s attempts to help him, in part because his memory of their relationship is not nearly as sunny as Olney’s. He does not consider his father abusive, but his memory is not of close affection and strawberry ice cream. He portrays Olney as consistently distant and judgmental. So while Olney is trying to recreate the past, we begin to question whether that past ever existed.

Dufresne raises questions of time and memory, factual truth and emotional truth, and the nature of relationships without ever getting heavy handed. He pushes his reader to think hard thoughts about our own family history even while enjoying a kind of pleasant and slightly ludicrous adventure across South Florida. He seems to have an endless imagination for character—new and interesting people pop up in virtually every chapter.

Perhaps that is too often. There were times when the constant flow of unique and unusual individuals seem to do more than distract Olney from his failure to find Cully—they distracted the reader as well. In addition to characters, there is a constant stream of references to songs, movies, literature, and the ephemera of pop culture. There is a long and funny motif regarding the plots of romance novels, for example. It is difficult to fault a writer for being too entertaining, but some of these characters beside the point. Like Olney, one needs to find Cully, not another person with an interesting name and back story.

Ultimately, My Darling Boy is about hope, and the way novels and movies and songs teach us that it will ultimately bear fruit or be abandoned. But are those the only choices? In Dufresne’s hands, Cully’s resistance will grow more and more frustrating, but Olney’s faith in the future remains impervious and, while we have come to doubt his view of the past, we are with him as he clings to his hope for the future.