MY DARLING BOY
John Dufresne
W. W. Norton & Company
288 pages
Reviewed by Cully Perlman
If you’re a Gen Xer, a Millennial, a Boomer, and you’re from Miami, you think of different things. Gen Xers such as myself think about scoring schwag weed in high school, cocaine and the emergence of crack during the Miami drug war, classmates too young to have driving permits revving their green neon Ninja motorcycles in the school parking lot, 2 Live Crew’s raunchy Miami bass blasting over 6×9 speakers, and watching the Space Shuttle Challenger explode 73 seconds into its journey with Christa McAuliffe in it (she was a teacher and would have been the first civilian sent into outer space). These things have left an impression on me. McAuliffe lost her life (as did six astronauts) as we watched, horrified, on a television our teacher wheeled in to interrupt French class. Don Johnson had us wearing rope-soled espadrilles, white pants, and pastel-colored shirts, pretending (rightfully so) that there were drugs and murder all around us and that we were, somehow, a part of that lifestyle. The pastoral mecca of acres and acres of horse country and U-Pick strawberry fields in those days, however limited in our community, disappeared, giving way to malls and chain restaurants and movie theaters. Our city, to state the obvious, was a different sort of place. But it was our place. Things have changed since the ’80s and ’90s, but they’ve also stayed the same, with a few tweaks.
Today, we know Miami as café con leche and coladas, cortaditos and yuca. We know it as Puerto Rican pasteles, mofongo, and malta and alcapurrias. We know it as Haitian mais souffle and diri ak djon djon (Haitian black rice with mushrooms), and we know it as the scent of rich stewed goat. The city is bright lights, expensive cars, and it is as much an international city as any around the world. But the skeleton of South Florida’s past remains strong: cocaine and marijuana and violence still proliferate, trouble lurks around every corner, and the fabric of our society is always perilously at risk. The difference now, however, is that more modern drugs have found their way into the mix: MDMA and heroin, Fentanyl and other prescription drugs like Oxycontin and Percocet, Xanax, and amphetamines, are everywhere. Even something as innocuous as bath salts have made their way into the drug culture (remember the addicts eating people’s faces while under the influence of flakka?). It’s horrible, the dark side behind the white sand beaches and towers of fresh shellfish, the quaint restaurants on Ocean Drive like News Café and Wet Willie’s, the warm laughter of the Colombians and Jamaicans, the Dominicans and everyone else who’ve decided to call the 305 home. But for us, the dichotomy of good and bad is what it is. This is South Florida. What’s abnormal to everyone else is just another day in paradise to the locals.
Guggenheim Fellow, author, and Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University, John Dufresne, has put out a new book that’s captured and modernized the hurricane of trauma and tragedy that Florida’s drug trade has caused the state, and Miami in particular, for over half a century. He’s put a human face on the issue, and that face comes in the volatile relationship of two men: a father and son named, respectively, Olney and Cully Kartheizer. (Yes, I have the pleasure of sharing Cully’s name, but no, it’s not me.) The Kartheizers’ relationship is one that’s become prevalent around the country (drug abuse mixed with mental illness and depression), and Dufresne has something to say about it, which he does within the confines and cultures and peoples mentioned above so naturally it’s clear he’s become an integral chronicler of the diaspora and tumult of the settings within which his most recent writings take place.
Olney (not Only) Kartheizer is the hero of our tale. He’s a retired newspaperman and current miniature golf attendant with a cadre of miscreants and imperfect do-gooders trying to help him save his son from drugs, alcohol, and depression. Besides Cully, Olney has a love interest, Mireille, who’s dying of dysphagia, a crushing disease that limits her ability to swallow. The omniscient narrator says she’s dying of a “slow fast,” which is just one of the lyrically clever aphorisms that Dufresne has proven a master of in this crafty, melancholic yarn he sets in the southern part of the Sunshine State. Darling, from beginning to end, is poetry, and it is wordplay that reminds you of the conventions Shakespeare uses not only in his tragedies and histories, but especially in his comedies. The ingenuity of Dufresne’s prose makes you wonder if the author’s intent in that area is deliberate: his 2002 novel, Deep in the Shade of Paradise, mirrored Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in more than a few ways, a fact that has been pointed out in interviews and acknowledged by the author himself. As a writer, the insightful prose of Darling is something to admire and aspire to in much the way you would the Bard’s ability to create memorable characters and deal with complex themes in ways other authors might not.
Writing style aside, we must not forget that the story of Olney and Cully is not simply about watching Dufresne’s lyrical magic tricks, however remarkable they may be. Cully is a victim of more than a few dangerous issues, issues that have only seemed to get worse in this country with the mix of legal and illegal drugs meant to take the troubled mind away from its problems. Yes, the drug aspect is present as much as it was back when Griselda Blanco and Pablo Escobar were wreaking havoc in the city and leaving a trail of dead bodies strewn along the streets from Dadeland to Fort Myers. But the novel is also about depression, and the toll it takes on the depressed. Cully is sad. He’s unhappy. He’s an addict, and he’s a victim of the violence so prevalent when you’re living out on the streets. He also serves as a reminder to us that these things exist, and not just in Florida but as an epidemic everywhere in our country. The thing that Dufresne’s novel shows us so plainly is that the victims of these illnesses are not the only ones to suffer. Olney hurts. His ex-wife hurts. His friends, however much they’re treading water in their own lives—as blind, octogenarian twins from Barbados; as ex-alcoholics attending AA meetings; as doomsday preppers getting ready for the apocalypse; as mentally ill, inadvertent murderers who kill their friends—also hurt for Olney and the situation within which he finds himself. When it comes to Cully, the question is the same as with any drug addict: how do you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved? Someone who runs away every time he’s found? Someone who has permanently moved on from the innocent, darling young boy Olney can’t help but picture every time he thinks of him? The answer is more complicated than a simple “you don’t.” Fathers don’t give up on their children. Not real ones, anyway. And Olney, faults and all, is a real father.
One of the things that struck me about the novel, which is maybe/maybe not a stretch on my part, are the similarities between My Darling Boy and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. In Hemingway’s book, Santiago struggles to pull in his prized marlin. He goes out day after day to no effect, basking under the sweltering sun, yet never giving up on his quest to pull the big one in. It’s a Sisyphean task that any fisherman worth his salt knows well—it’s why it’s called fishing and not catching, as the saying goes. Olney’s journey is much the same as Santiago’s. He heads out day in and day out in search of a son he’ll never really catch, even when he’s right in front of him. Cully forever remains just out of Olney’s reach, just like Santiago’s marlin. In the end, of course, Santiago catches his fish. But he never gets to celebrate his victory. Santiago’s marlin is torn apart by a mako shark and then the rest of the sharks around him, attracted by the blood, leave Santiago with nothing but the marlin’s skeleton. Given the history between father and son, we imagine the same will hold true for Olney. That when he finally pulls Cully in, he’ll be left with the same as Santiago was—nothing but the dregs of what could have been. We may root for our guys, for them to achieve their goals, but we know our desires for them don’t guarantee they’ll be successful. As humans, we want that for them. As readers, we crave the opposite, even if we’re unaware we do. Whatever we may think of ourselves, this is our nature as much as it’s the marlin’s nature to get away and the shark’s to ensure it doesn’t.
What I find impossible to encapsulate in this review, however, and without making it an hour-long read, is what Dufresne accomplishes with the world he’s created in Darling. On the surface, it’s fair to say that Darling is, principally, a man chasing his addict son, finding him, failing to help him, chasing him again, failing him again, and so on. But to do so would mean disregarding the messages surrounding the main, the central plot of Olney and Cully’s story. It’s avoiding the topics of today’s world—the concerns of preppers, which have exploded in the last few years with the disruptions in the political, social, and economic realities of our time, as well as the natural disasters affecting the globe. It would mean ignoring the hustlers and unique peoples and cultures that have transformed what was once the native lands of the Tequesta and Calusa and Mayaimi Native Americans into a circus of drugs and technicolor lives, gambling and flip-flopped beach bums, communities like Little Havana and Little Haiti, Coconut Grove, the Design District, Little Venezuela and other areas of cultural interest, and the pain and sorrow of those people living real tragedies in a state and country they’ve transformed and continue transforming into its own very unique and exceptional place. Olney and Cully’s story is just one of many to take place in Florida, but as writers like Dufresne know, to tell a story worth reading you dive deep into the specific so as to explain the general. As Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and Dufresne reminds us in stark but ingeniously playful prose that this holds true for everyone, that all the world really is a stage as Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, and that sometimes you must use brightened language and carefully structured wordplay in order to be able to most effectively deliver the warnings and raw, painful missives critical to the times we live in. Darling is about a father’s love for his boy, but it’s also a cautionary tale of our time: we’re all in this together, so we better get our shit in order before it’s too late.
John Dufresne is the author of twenty-five works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including Louisiana Power and Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little. He lives in Florida, where he teaches writing at Florida International University.
Cully Perlman is the author of a novel, The Losses. He also writes a blog about learning how to write. It can be found at www.NovelMasterClass.blog/blog