Only Son

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

Florida, 1982. A nine-year-old watches as his dead father’s possessions are hauled away: his clothes and tools, his faux-leather recliner. His sensei says it’s a perfect time to turn his weaknesses into weapons. His PE teacher says he runs like a pregnant ostrich. His mother takes out a personal ad. Everyone is trying to teach him a lesson but he is, it seems, a slow learner. Meanwhile, with each passing day, his father recedes, growing less and less plausible, almost a myth.

Twenty-five years later, adrift in suburban Southern California, married with a son of his own, he’s still trying to sort through the fragments of his father’s death while imparting his own sketchy education onto his son. Which snakes are poisonous? Why did I tell him that Candyland is based on a true story? Why has he stopped asking me to go skateboarding with him and his friends? After discovering a travel journal he didn’t know his father kept, he and his son light out on a road trip, retracing the father’s mystifying journey.

They drive up the Pacific Coast, foggy, overtaken by beauty. As he strains to decipher his father’s notes, his relationship with his son begins to take on new heft and shape. With wit and compassion, Moffett delivers a bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home.