From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Dad: A Novel |
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| Author: | William Wharton |
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| Publisher: | Newmarket Press |
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John Tremont, a middle-aged man with a family, is summoned to his mother’s bedside after she has suffered a heart attack. When he arrives, he finds her shaken but surviving: it is his father, left alone, who is unable to cope, who begins to fail, to slip away from life. Joined by his nineteen-year-old son, John suddenly becomes enmeshed in the frightening, consuming, endless minutiae of caring for a beloved, dying parent. He also finds himself inescapably confronting his own middle age, jammed between his son’s feckless impatience to get on with his life and his father’s heartbreaking willingness to let go.
A story of the love that binds generations, Dad celebrates the universe of possibilities within every individual life.
Related works
Dad
Gary David Goldberg
William Wharton’s startling and moving novel about fathers and sons got an above-average film adaptation from TV’s Gary David Goldberg, who wrote and directed. While the film couldn’t capture the sadness and wonder of Wharton’s worlds-within-worlds construct, it did get exactly right the notion of how one closes the distance from a parent or a child. Danson plays an ambitious businessman forced to put work aside to care for his aging parents (Jack Lemmon and Olympia Dukakis) when his mother is hospitalized. Mom, it turns out, is a domineering dictator who has…
