My Darling Boy

By John Dufresne

WW Norton 2025

Using tinny portentous place names in order to carry some of a narrative’s dramatic weight is a cheap and groan-inducing gimmick that should have been heaved out an aft porthole three hundred years ago when John Bunyan so egregiously overused it. But it’s tougher to kill than a cactus, so poorly-drawn characters in cheesy novels will still fetch up in places like Second Chance, Nazareth, and above all Redemption. Allegorical writing is all but extinct in these debased times, so it’s amazing how persistent remains allegory’s bluntest tool.

Novelist and short story writer John Dufresne is closer to 80 than he is to 70, and he’s been writing for public consumption for over thirty years. So the fact that he’s a prolific user of portentous names should come as no surprise; after all, one of his best-received novels was called Requiem, Mass. But even so, he overdoes the overdoing things in his new novel My Darling Boy.

The story stars Oliver Kartheizer, no, sorry, it’s Olney Kartheizer, a simple, decent man living a low-key life in Anastasia, Florida, getting fish dinners in Crocodilopolis and occasionally sending donations to a preacher in Novelty. His young son Clint, no Curt, no it’s Cully barely makes it to puberty (the hormonal state, not the town in Florida) before he’s injuring himself any way available so he can score some OxyContin (the drug, not the town in Florida). The narrative is vague on the point, but it’s very much implied that Cully is just born a drug addict (he’s literally marked from birth, with a facial birthmark). The addiction deepens, until Cully is clearly a lost cause (the state of life, not the town in Florida), drifting one place to another, always trying to scam his father for the money he needs to feed his habit. Like all drug addicts, his default setting on the subject is self-pity, and Dufresne captures that note accurately, if over-effusively:

“Look, you have no idea what’s going on up here. You don’t have to live in my head. You don’t know the pain. I’m so sad. I’ve got no one. Nothing. I took the pills the shrinks gave me, all of them, Zoloft, Ativan, Wellbutrin, Zyprexa, Paxil, blah, blah, blah. They made me ill or impotent or confused or anxious or suicidal or restless, but not better.”

The novel settles into a predictable rhythm: Cully disappears, and Olney goes looking for him. My Darling Boy might be the book’s title, but “Where’s Cully?” is a line of dialogue that’s repeated roughly 400 times in 288 pages. Along the way, Olney meets a woman named Mary, no Miriam, no Mireille (who’s originally from Requiem, MA, but then, aren’t we all?), and they follow a clue that Cully might have moved to a town called Melancholy.

Neither father nor son has anything in the way of a personality, but at least they share a few scenes together. Most go like this:

“The offer’s still good. Come back with me now and you can crash in your own room. We’ll stop at Target and get you some dry clothes.”

 “I love you, Dad. I want your respect, and I feel bad that I let you down so often. You’re the most important person in my life. I stay away because it hurts to see the disappointment in your eyes.”

 “I love you, Cully. We’re going to get through this.”

The secondary problem with encounters like this is that nothing in them is supported by the rest of the book; this is just cut-and-paste stuff. But the primary problem is far worse: it’s boring. Olney might love Cully, but the reader is never even tempted to. Cully might love Olney, but the reader barely knows him. Portentous names stood in for characters and story in Bunyan and the allegorical Christian tradition from which he drew because in that tradition, character and story were unimportant; they were just gateways to theological Deeper Truths (the life essences, not the town in Florida). That’s precisely why they don’t work in fiction, which is supposed to be producing (and traducing) truths of its own. Through decades of excellent, heartfelt teaching, Dufresne has known this. He forgets it in My Darling Boy.

At one point past the half-way mark, even Dufresne realizes that these pamphleteering scenarios might be paling a bit, and he has Olney accidentally get shot and nearly die, but since practically the first words he says upon waking up are “Where’s Cully,” again the reader feels almost no emotional impact. All most readers are going to notice, and only because it makes them roll their eyes, is that the story ends up on Main Street in a motel owned by Destiny, who tells our seekers that Cully either turned one way onto Gracious or the other way onto Whynot. Saints preserve us.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News