A Friend of the Family, by Lauren Grodstein

This novel's first sentence makes clear that narrator Pete Dizinoff is in trouble: "These days, when people ask how I'm doing--some of them still ask, you'd be surprised--I shrug and say, as manfully as I can, 'Much better than you'd think.'" He's living above the garage, and his son Alec is not speaking to him. Once part of a thriving medical practice in an upscale Jersey suburb, Dr. Pete, as he enjoys being called, has been forced into a much more modest office above a restaurant in Bergen. He is awaiting the outcome of a malpractice suit, but the primary causes of his difficulty revolve around his son.

Alec is 20 and has dropped out of college, working instead on his art. When the eldest daughter of Pete and wife Elaine's best friends Joe and Iris (not incidentally, Pete has had a thing for Iris since college, before he introduced her to Joe) returns home and Alec shows immediate interest, Pete is appalled. Laura is 30 and has been hopping from place to place since she was released from the mental hospital where she was confined after she, as a 17-year-old, bashed in her infant's skull and threw her in a Dumpster. To Pete, she is a threat to the dreams he has for Alec--"a slut with a criminal record." He wants Alec to return to school, find a career he enjoys, get married, and provide Pete and Elaine with grandchildren.

The narrative jumps around in time, filling us in on Pete's life from childhood to the present in bits and pieces. Grodstein skewers both immigrant and suburban aspirations, while exploring the lengths to which a parent will go to protect a child--or to guard his own reputation from the embarrassment of having a child who is a failure or involved in a relationship that would raise eyebrows. Because Pete is not the nice guy with a strong sense of wrong and right that he would have us believe. He loves his wife, he says, but we know his feelings for Iris were (and are) always stronger and he also feels a strange attraction to Laura. He enjoys making the difficult diagnosis, he tells us, but he misses what is wrong with a young patient, even after Joe quickly matches her symptoms with Addison's disease. He describes his son as a level-headed young man and says he was shocked when Alec dropped out of school, but Pete himself filled out his son's college application and refused to get him therapy when his mother had cancer. Is it any wonder that Pete's attempts to control his son are destined for failure?

To Pete, the tragedy of his story is that Alec might go to Paris with Laura and never fulfill his father's dreams; to me, the tragedy is the extent of self-delusion that Pete practices, even after experience might have prompted an only-moderately reflective person to have an a-ha moment (see first quote below).

A Friend of the Family would be an excellent book group choice.

Favorite passage:

Other fathers, I know, they get over their sons--they experience some profound moment of disappointment, catch the kid whacking off in a bathroom, realize he's a shit to his mother, or just slowly lose the romance they once had with him; let it curdle the way all romances can. But that had never happened to me.

Suburbs, man. I don't care what anybody says. It's the only civilized way to live.