Early in Simon Van Booy’s new novel, “Father’s Day,” there is a phrase describing a bad dream that Harvey, a young American woman living in Paris, has before the man who raised her, Jason, arrives for a visit. The dream weaves “the details of her life conjured from emptiness and longing.” As the story of Harvey and Jason’s lives unfold in “Father’s Day,” that phrase settles deep like an anchor in a dark place, curiously capturing not just the emotional undercurrent of the story but its structure as well.

Simon Van Booy

Simon Van Booy

“Father’s Day” is a stark departure from Van Booy’s earlier stories. The prose is lean, stripped of the lyricism of “Everything Beautiful Began After.” It is at times brutally raw in contrast to the melancholia of “The Illusions of Separateness.” Despite its stunning differences, “Father’s Day” is every bit as probing into the mysteries of what it means to be human, and is deeply moving when those mysteries are at last finally revealed in their entirety.

The story swings between Harvey and Jason’s backstories and their present lives. Harvey’s coming-of-age story is rooted in the fact that she was orphaned at 6 when her parents were killed in a car accident. Jason’s backstory slowly reveals his dark and violent past. Their lives are linked in the crucible of Jason taking in his dead brother’s daughter and struggling to raise her. The contours of the story are shaped by powerful secrets that are slowly revealed. In “Father’s Day,” Van Booy again deftly demonstrates that he is a master at the craft of storytelling.

Jason has lived alone since he was released from prison for blinding a man in a bar fight with a broken bottle. A kindly caseworker bends the bureaucracy – and Jason’s heart – to place Harvey in his care. Though she’d never met Jason before, Harvey is predisposed to like him because of the stories her father had told her about his “older brother.” The boys’ own father had been a violent alcoholic, but Jason always interceded to protect his younger brother, often shielding him with his own body.

The dance Van Booy crafts between the two – one impish and relentless in her pursuit to change her uncle-now-father, the other clueless about parenting – is alternately richly entertaining and piercingly heartbreaking. Through Harvey’s ministrations, the reader witnesses glimmerings of the brave, protective brother that Jason has long hidden away. In the process, Harvey opens Jason to the vast love in his heart for others that was his birthright.

Twenty years on, Harvey is living in Paris, working in a design firm. She is beside herself with excitement that Jason accepted her offer of a plane ticket to visit her. Harvey has engineered his weeklong visit so that he’ll be there on Father’s Day. She plans out the week, as well as carefully planning a trove of presents he is to receive, “objects from childhood, and each one stood for some vital moment of their lives.”

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“Father’s Day” is a departure from Van Booy’s earlier work in part for the leanness in the writing, but more significantly for the penumbra of darkness at the edges of light, and for the sharp, short sketches of violence.

Father's Day cover

And yet, “Father’s Day” could be viewed as fated in Van Booy’s growing oeuvre. Before Van Booy penned any of his fictional books, he curated three volumes of philosophy, on love, fate and violence. This is an intriguing mix on the face of it, but all the more so when one considers the trajectory of Van Booy’s stories. What precedes “Father’s Day” are investigations of the themes of love and fate, earning Van Booy growing critical acclaim and ever more eager readers. This latest work forcefully addresses violence, its dark origins and its painful consequences. One cannot help but wonder about the dimensions of the worldview that Van Booy seems to be working out through his fiction.

“Father’s Day” leads to a dramatic, poetic ending that the reader never sees coming. It makes manifest the fatefulness of two characters’ lives made whole by finding one another. And it reveals the deep belief the author obviously harbors in the power of love and fate to lift people above the darkest obstacles and to change their lives forever.

Frank O Smith is a Maine writer whose novel, “Dream Singer,” was named a Notable Book of the Year in Literary Fiction in 2014 by “Shelf Unbound,” an international review magazine. Smith can be reached via his website: frankosmithstories.com.


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