The Good Father

Starred review from November 21, 2011
The father of a man who assassinates a presidential candidate tries to make sense of his son’s crime in Hawley’s gripping new novel. Dr. Paul Allen is a successful rheumatologist happily living with his second wife and their twin sons in a chic Connecticut enclave. Contact with Daniel, his aloof son from a previous marriage, is sporadic, and when Daniel drops out of Vassar in his first year to “see the country,” Dr. Allen shrugs it off as a youthful foible; he believes that shuffling between parents turned the boy into a “teenage gypsy.” Dr. Allen had seen him only once since then, a year ago in an Arizona coffee shop, so the Secret Service agents who appear at his door are a great surprise. Daniel, aka Carter Allen Cash, has shot and killed the Democratic presidential front-runner one warm June evening at a rally in downtown Los Angeles (not far from where Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968). Despite the overwhelming evidence against Daniel, Dr. Allen won’t believe that his son is guilty (he remembers his son as a member of Greenpeace and a liberal Democrat) and becomes convinced of a conspiracy involving a second man. His myopic attention to every detail of his son’s case, and to the cases of other famous assassins, puts everything he’s worked for—both professionally and personally—at risk. With great skill, Hawley (The Punch) renders Dr. Allen’s treacherous emotional geography, from his shock and guilt to his growing sense that he knows far less about his son than he thought. Initially privileged and priggish, Dr. Allen is humanized by his attempts to piece together the missing months of Daniel’s life; although not a good father in a conventional sense, Hawley’s complicated protagonist is a fully fathomed and beautifully realized character whose emotional growth never slows a narrative that races toward a satisfying and touching conclusion. Agent: The Susan Golomb Literary Agency.

January 15, 2012
Dr. Paul Allen is at least trying to be a good father, though perhaps he crosses the line into paranoia when his son Daniel is arrested for assassinating Senator Jay Seagram, a promising presidential candidate. Dr. Allen is a brilliant diagnostician, able to sort through a welter of conflicting symptoms to reach to the heart of a patient's disease, and he tries to apply these same techniques to the news of his son's shocking arrest. He also wonders to what extent he might bear some responsibility for Daniel's disaffection, for the doctor and Daniel's mother had gotten divorced when their son was quite young, leaving Daniel feeling unmoored and homeless. When he turns 15, Daniel elects to move from California to live with his father and stepmother in Connecticut, but he is never quite able to settle down. After starting at Vassar, he leaves after three semesters and starts to roam the country, changing his name and picking up odd jobs for a few weeks at a time and then moving on. Eventually he and two veterans are arrested when they're caught riding freight trains. After the assassination of the Senator, Daniel's father becomes obsessed with previous assassinations and assassination attempts--and the novel is even contemporary enough to include the attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The doctor is convinced that Daniel could not have perpetrated such a devastating crime, even though Daniel has been caught on film and his fingerprints are on the weapon. The novel ultimately becomes as much about a father's quest for meaning and understanding as about a son's political and social alienation--and Hawley delivers on the complex psychology of father-son relationships.

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October 1, 2011

Dr. Paul Allen faces the worst thing a parent could imagine: his son, likable and reasonably smart but increasingly dislocated after his parents' divorce, has dropped out of school and, after floating around the country, has been caught on camera shooting a Democratic candidate for President. This story of guilt and love by Hawley, both a novelist and a screenwriter/producer (he was responsible for Bones), should do especially well with book clubs.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2012
Paul Allen, a successful Manhattan rheumatologist and the father of twin boys with his second wife, is completely stunned when two Secret Service agents show up at his front door. They inform him that his son by his first marriage, 20-year-old Daniel Allen, aka Carter Allen Cash, has killed a rising political star and presidential candidate. Suddenly, Paul's life as he knew it is over. Resistant to the idea that his son is the actual assassin, he is taken aback when Daniel pleads guilty. He then becomes obsessed with finding out how his son, once such a curious and gentle child, could commit such a barbaric act. Combing Daniel's childhood for clues to the one parental misstep that sent him down the path to becoming a killer and poring over documentation of Daniel's every move in the 18 months prior to the assassination, Paul becomes a haunted figure. The more elusive the answers are, especially because Daniel refuses to discuss it, the more humbled Paul becomes, until, in a moving and transcendent conclusion, he finds himself finally able to bear the unbearable. Hawley infuses his emotionally harrowing story with compelling questions about the age-old debate over nature-versus-nurture. Powerful reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)