THE GOLDEN BOY

Self-made Stafford Hopkins may be “a successful man, his happiness maintained by diet, exercise, and well-planned trips to fine places,” but his more modest past is about to return and claim him.

Finn’s quirkily engaging debut has redemption stamped all over it. Its central character, former TV network supremo Stafford, is now enjoying an involuntary retirement while continuously sparring with his wife, Agnes, all part of their feisty three-decades-long marriage. Stafford, whose origins are in small-town Canada, is secretly carrying a lifelong burden of guilt regarding his best friend from childhood, Bobby Shepherd. Agnes too has a murky history, “the uneducated and illegitimate daughter of a drug-addled suicide from Wisconsin.” But having made millions, Stafford has reached a place of cushioned and luxurious security, moving among homes in Los Angeles, New York, and Aspen. Yet it’s the couple’s custom-built retirement house in Maui where the book’s action mainly takes place, during some 10 days in March, 2003. The pair have one child, Callie, now a grown woman, smart but spoiled, whom they acknowledge to have parented badly. And then, after a distant, fatal car crash, a letter arrives out of the blue which will pull Stafford back into his remote past and deliver a responsibility that upends everything. Finn’s style is mordant and often comic, dotted with Agnes and Stafford’s snippy exchanges that can be reminiscent of Hepburn and Tracy. The novel’s central section—burdened by an overload of history, both general and specific, after Stafford returns to his homeland—sags in places, but elsewhere the narrative confidently entertains. Its concluding chapters see a change of tone and perspective, and wrap up rather tidily, but the softening leads to a place of tenderness rather than sentimentality.

A tale of second chances delivered with wit and heart.