A ROUGH WAY TO GO

A murder victim prompts a stay-at-home dad to play gumshoe in this darkly comic yarn.

Peter Greene, the narrator of Garonzik’s debut novel, is disheartened. A recent layoff from his finance job has left him with little to do but ferry his 3-year-old son, Luke, to appointments and run an endless-seeming series of errands for his wife, Lauren. At Lauren’s prompting, they’ve left city life for a coastal town whose sole virtue is the opportunity to indulge his love of surfing. On the beach he meets Robert Townsend, a former colleague, who turns up dead on the sand a week later. With few places to apply his analytical skill and feeling emasculated by his employment status, he begins following leads. What kinds of nefarious deeds was his old firm up to, what brought Robert to that wind-wracked beach, and why are so many people trying to keep him from asking questions? Garonzik strives to make Pete into the kind of sad-sack dad who’s populated novels by Sam Lipsyte, Gary Shteyngart, and Teddy Wayne, capturing the adult male put upon by daily responsibilities; a request from Lauren to pick up milk prompts a catastrophic overreaction: “Chernobyl. All is lost. Game over.” And he sees the comic absurdities of parenting a toddler, a feeling intensified by Pete’s taking Luke to grown-up locales like bars and police stations. In time, Pete learns that Robert’s fate is simpler and sadder than his earnest dot-connecting effort suggests, but by that point Garonzik has still struggled to establish a voice for the novel, which sits awkwardly between detective story and man-child bildungsroman. Pete’s complaints about Lauren are meant to comically expose a certain narcissism, but she rarely rises above a hectoring harridan. Plotlines about the finance world slow the pace, and the mood of self-deprecation tends to devolve into general sourness.

An ambitious if awkward attempt at genre hopping.