Review: Teenage boys and big events
By L.D. Meagher
CNN
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Story Tools
| 'Secret Father' |
• By James Carroll
• Houghton Mifflin
• Fiction
• 344 pages
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(CNN) -- The thriller genre attracts writers with a wide range of literary sensibilities, from the cerebral John le Carré to the plot masters like Robert Ludlum to the pyrotechnical Tom Clancy. Perhaps its breadth is what occasionally draws in authors of a deeply literate bent.
The results might be called "quiet thrillers."
One such practitioner is National Book Award winner James Carroll, who offers a richly nuanced take on spy fiction in "Secret Father." The book examines some of the themes that won his memoir "An American Requiem" acclaim -- the inescapable conflicts between a father and his son -- set against the background of the Cold War's darkest days.
In 1961 Germany, three teenagers set off from their American school to take in the May Day festivities on the Communist side of divided Berlin and promptly run afoul of East German authorities.
The story is told alternately by Paul Montgomery, a banker, and his son Michael, one of the students, as they recall the events decades later. This device allows Carroll to frame each character in the thoughts, passions and fears of the other. The book focuses on a very small, even intimate, story that unfolds in the midst of events that are shaking the entire world.
Carroll masterfully catches tiny, telling moments, as when Paul has his first encounter with an East German functionary.
"There was razor wire in the way the man looked at us," the author writes. "He never uttered a word. Then he stood and disappeared with our papers through an adjacent door. Some moments passed. I became aware of a faint, acrid aroma in the air. I worked to identify it -- the smell of stale ash, the blowback of an aged coal burner, cinders falling from the sky, the aftermath of some inflamed astonishment -- or not. Something mundane, more likely," Carroll writes.
"Secret Father" takes the familiar ingredients of thriller fiction -- danger, suspense, even sex -- and fashions them into an achingly personal journey of a father and his son, caught up in events, public and private, that threaten to careen out of control. The result is a richly rewarding novel that elevates the genre.
