& Sons by David Gilbert – review

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/08/and-sons-david-gilbert-review

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"Fathers start as gods and end as myths and in between whatever form they take can be calamitous for their sons." The observation, which arrives early in David Gilbert's richly entertaining new novel, states succinctly the theme that, for all its elaborations of plot, & Sons pursues with ferocious singlemindedness. Given the child-devouring and father-slaying impulses it portrays, it might have been titled Saturn Choking on Oedipus.

Several fathers are encompassed in the blank space implied by the title, but the daddy of them all is AN Dyer, a New York novelist and blue-blood of Salinger-rivaling fame, Cheeveresque inner torment and a Roth-like capacity for cruel humour. He also has the peculiar charm of the titanic narcissist who just can't help it.

An old man when the story begins, Dyer makes his entrance in a state of shuffling ill health and murky remorse, having lost or alienated most of the few people close to him. His best friend (whose life he has both ruined and exploited in his books) has just died. An affair 17 years ago has cost him his marriage and largely estranged his two grown-up sons. A third son, the teenage offspring of that affair, remains his only real link to life, and with the encroaching prospect of his own mortality, he finds himself very badly wanting to reconvene the family so as to give the boy a support system when he himself kicks the bucket.

To that end he contrives a reunion, using all his novelistic powers of persuasion, manipulation and revision, to draw the deeply fucked-up elder boys and their long-suffering mother back into the fold.

Richard, the eldest, is a former addict turned drug counsellor with screenwriting ambitions. Jamie has channelled his furies into a dubious career as a documentarian of death and disaster. Both, in their scarred way, are vivacious and stimulating company. The mother has remarried; her husband is an amiable but inert lump of uppercrust WASP matter, one of many droll portraits drawn from that bastion of stricken privilege: "a particular brand of New York Calvinism that had strong opinions about predestination and free will, their existence justified by their own success".

Gilbert stages the reconvergence in a series of set-piece comic extravaganzas – a Hollywood pitch meeting, a gathering of cultural grandees at the Morgan Library, a limo ride with a coked-up movie star, a book party at the Frick museum – interspersed with more inward, emotionally probing excursions into the family's blighted past. There are some so-so passages – two stoned teenagers looking for the perfect pretzel in Central Park isn't an event you want to linger on for anything like the length Gilbert plays it, and sometimes the writing downshifts from exuberant eloquence to a kind of gabby loquacity – but in general the scenes are beautifully realised and very funny.

The comedy is partly a matter of clever plotting, and partly one of verbal sparkle. Gilbert's sharp wit runs from the caustic to the metaphysical, recalling Andrew Marvell one minute, as in this image of a nervous guest entering a party – "Holding a drink helped. It opened a small orbit of belonging, like the glass was his personal moon" – and Edward St Aubyn the next, as in Dyer's many lines of truculent self-deprecation. "Forgive my appearance. My reality as well…" As for the plotting, it shows a natural farceur's enjoyment of controlled delirium. On the micro scale, it can produce exchanges that proceed by perfectly rational sequence to an email reading: "Dad, you are a very naughty girl." On the larger scale, it breeds Dyer's narcissism into a whole subplot about self-replication that culminates in a passage of nightmarish comedy, reminiscent of the clone scene in Being John Malkovich, in which poor old Dyer finds himself – again by perfectly rational processes – suffocatingly thronged by living images and avatars of himself and his own creations.

A man can't undo the sins of his past, but a writer who has turned those sins into a novel can rewrite the novel, or at least revise the original draft. He may be especially tempted to do so if the Morgan Library happens to be offering a large sum of money for his papers. Parallel with the family story of & Sons, in which Dyer proposes an outlandish, almost sci-fi, revision of the circumstances of his third son's paternity, is a Nabokovian tale of textual revision and fakery. It has to do with the manuscript of Dyer's first novel, Ampersand, a tale of schoolboy bullying that seems to encode the origins of Dyer's twisted relationship with his recently deceased best friend, Charlie Topping. Dyer may believe his authorial omniscience gives him the power to rewrite the past, but as it happens he himself is in the hands of a greater power, namely Philip Topping, his best friend's son, who is at once his biggest fan and his most dangerous enemy.

For it is Philip Topping who is telling us the whole story. Not narrating it in the conventional way (he is conspicuously absent from many of the scenes he describes, and anyway hardly privy to the inner thoughts of the Dyer family, who despise him), so much as novelising it, and doing so with a peculiarly vengeful aim in mind. Having reprised his father's role as the Dyer family's designated victim, Topping has a great deal to avenge. A malicious and cunning sycophant (Uriah Heep, by way of Smerdyakov from The Brothers Karamazov), he insinuates himself into the Dyer household as the family regroups, from which vantage point he is able simultaneously to engineer and chronicle the catastrophe that ensues.

You don't have to be terribly interested in questions of narrative reliability to enjoy this aspect of the book. It is handled with such a graceful touch, and is such] an intrinsic part of the actual story (rather than just some metafictional flourish), that the reader simply accepts it: that another layer of pleasure in a book has the rare quality of being funny without being silly, serious without being solemn, and powerfully moving without being either sentimental or coercive.

• James Lasdun's Give Me Everything You Have is published by Jonathan Cape.

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