FATHER OF THE MAN

A rather stiff debut novel about a grief-stricken old man’s descent into madness and violence.

Dutch Potter is a tough old coot. A small-town boy from upstate New York, Dutch grew up in a stern Lutheran family and saw plenty of action in France and Germany as an infantryman during WWII. Later on, he settled down with his wife Sarah, took a job as a bus driver, and raised a family. His life would have been moderately happy and entirely unremarkable were it not for the Vietnam War, but Dutch’s son Jom joined the Marines in the late 1960s and was sent over on a tour of duty from which he never returned. Reported as missing in action, Jom became an angry, hungry ghost tormenting Dutch, who never for a minute could accept the possibility that his son might be dead. For 12 years Dutch pursued his hopeless quest, firing off increasingly wild and angry letters to government officials in the US and abroad, until one day, in 1982, he decided that he had to resort to more desperate measures. He showed up for work dressed in his old army uniform, drove his bus off the road, and took all the passengers hostage, demanding an answer to what he knew to be an official cover-up of his son’s true whereabouts. Holding a few dozen assorted strangers at bay with an old hand grenade is no great feat, but will it do any good? It may well, for soon enough Dutch is negotiating with a retired Marine Corps colonel who claims that Jom has just been released from a Hanoi prison and is in a naval hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. Can he be trusted? Or is it all too good to be true? Any old soldier knows that luck is not a reliable ally, but sometimes it can help to carry the day. Is Dutch lucky, then, or crazy?

A poor start, frankly: two-dimensional characters, wooden dialogue, and a painfully transparent ending provide few variations on the standard MIA story