Book Review: MY DARLING BOY. John Dufresne takes us on a Journey into a Dark, Drug-Fueled Florida.
- Cully Perlman
- Mar 12
- 11 min read
My Darling Boy – Today we're posting a Book Review for MY DARLING BOY. John Dufresne takes us on a Journey into a Dark, Drug-Fueled Florida.
Review by Cully Perlman
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
288 pages
Florida is a different sort of place. Writers and novelists like Carl Hiaasen, Lauren Groff, Dave Barry, Elmore Leonard, Harry Crews, Karen Russell and others have captured glittering bits and pieces, colorful snapshots of the weird and crazy and outlandish swamplands that have been transformed from sawgrass and peat, muck and clay into miles of ranch homes, Miami Modern, Spanish-tiled McMansions and, of course, the pastel pinks and blues and yellows of Art Deco so prominent on Miami Beach made famous by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in Miami Vice. The state is a maze of drainage, flood, and water storage canals where, on occasion, alligators creep out from the dark waters to snatch blinged-up dogs the size of hamsters into their toothy jaws. Tick-Tock the Crocodile aside, Florida itself is a giant, quirky, fucked-up Costco where writers seeking a little something different to write about lurk in the shadows with their notepads. After reading John Dufresne’s new novel, My Darling Boy, it’s clear this novelist is a hot dog, pizza eating Executive Member of the wholesale retailer with his own chipped white table in the back of the joint where he can watch from relative safety.
The state is a maze of drainage, flood, and water storage canals where, on occasion, alligators creep out from the dark waters to snatch blinged-up dogs the size of hamsters
His new novel, My Darling Boy, is a lot of things, but first and foremost it is a quintessential Florida novel told by someone who knows the place more than most natives do. Olney Kartheizer, a retired newspaperman on a treacherous (and all-to-familiar) journey to save his son, Cully, from the alcohol and rampant illegal and legal drugs he uses to numb the pain weighing him down is our hero. (Yes, I have the pleasure of sharing Cully’s name. No, it’s not me). As you can imagine, things don’t quite work out for Olney the way he hopes they will, especially when it comes to his beloved only son. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
As most parents of addicts know, addiction is a chronic medical condition with recidivism rates holding north of fifty percent. Cully, who has a tattoo of the outline of a horse on his face covering a birthmark (an apt image considering Cully’s galloping from one place to the next), is no different, and Olney, faults and all, is what a true father should be—nonjudgmental, loving, always seeking to prevent the wrong turns and bad decisions his child makes because of his addictions and mental health issues. Of course, we know Olney’s task is a Sisyphean one, and the novel is as much a paean to paternal love as it is a hero’s journey in the vein of Joseph Campbell—Olney’s journey to save his son—but also Cully’s to flee the drug interventions and a potential involuntary institutionalization, which in Florida is known as the Baker Act.
But all that is the blurby, macro view of Darling. The intimate, personal, micro view of the novel is that Olney, a retired columnist and obituary writer who enjoys watching religious shows, works at a putt putt golf dive, is surrounded by a cast of characters straight out of a Wes Anderson movie, and has a girlfriend named Mireille who is fading away of dysphagia (a medical term for someone who has trouble swallowing), reminds us that Olney and Cully could be any one of us, at any time, given the right circumstances. Yet Dufresne, rather than steering the plot toward the melodramatic or even dramatic, turns his novel into an almost satirical play worthy of a run at the Comedy Store. As Dufresne’s omniscient narrator puts it in reference to Olney’s love interest: “[Mireille] is dying of a ‘slow fast.’” It’s a funny line, of course, but it’s an insightful one, given that it’s true.
Phrases like this abound in Darling, creating a funhouse sort of feel to a book that’s not only a warning about depression and illicit drugs but also a wise tale/magical realism-ish chronicling of what happens when the ravages of horrific maladies and addiction blow a family up from the inside. Dufresne proves himself a craftsman of the highest order, and he does it again and again in this novel using precise aphorisms little seen in other works of fiction.
Besides doting dad Olney, Kat, Olney’s ex-wife, and her husband, Elbert Celoso, or “El,” Celoso (which, in Spanish, means “the jealous one,”) are also on Cully’s tail, albeit with less enthusiasm. But family aren’t the only ones helping Olney on his quest. Set in the technicolor state of Florida in a contemporary America failing its children, our hero has an army of alcoholic miscreants and oddballs on his side, some gun-toting, cheap motel-living, end-of-the-world “prepper” types, and more than a few throw-aways with kind hearts and an excess of serious problems of their own. Running around the streets of Darling is a doctor who puffs on Afghan Bull Rider from a red vape pen while doling out advice to Olney, a baseball player whose career we’ve somehow rooted for from the beginning of the novel, Auralee, a friend of Olney’s who is seeking her biological parents, and other strange Sunshine State rejects dropping into Olney’s life like the iguanas that tumble from Florida’s gumbo limbo trees whenever the temperature drops below fifty.
Imperfect as his friends may be, each one of them helps Olney on the most important mission of his life: to save Cully before his vices, before his disease, before the cruel world and his damaged mind, take him from Olney forever. While everyone in Darling may be hopeful (well, almost everyone), and despite their mountains of baggage, they’re a pragmatic, driven crew, Cully included, and we know this because we’re allowed a backstage pass to everyone’s thoughts.
Dufresne’s use of an omniscient narrator, which feels more connected to the novel’s characters than most omniscient narrators I’ve come across, strips back any ambiguities we may have regarding character motivations and intentions, but in particular the necessary rationalizations the characters make with themselves for the actions they must take, however noble or self-destructive, life-altering or paranoia driven. As readers, the narrator allows us unfettered access to everyone—to Olney and Cully as they fight the difficult fight of a parent’s futile attempt at getting his kid off drugs, to Mireille and her quiet tragedies over the last few days of her life, to Cully’s wandering AA sponsor Lip O’Brien, and into the minds of the blind octogenarian Silpher twins from Barbados and to the unforgettable Pixie, who makes an ethereal entrance into the novel as she walks out of the ocean glowing with bioluminescent algae to become Cully’s girlfriend.
Like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, we have no lack of memorable characters, each making their own impact. But it is Olney, our hero, who we learn (although I think we’ve always known) is, deep down, just a good guy trying to do right by his boy. He is a man in the waning years of his life who tells stories to people who can’t hear them: to Mireille at hospice, who is in a coma; to his son, Cully, who is tossed around by a never-ending hurricane of drugs, alcohol, and denial. To divorced neighbors who remain living together because where else would they go? We learn quickly that each of Dufresne’s characters are instruments finely tuned, Dufresne their precise conductor. “We are all,” Olney explains at one point, “hurtling away from each other at the speed of light, until that one day when we will be, every one of us, alone.” After recognizing a little bit of ourselves in each character, we get the sense he is right.
In an interview with Robert Birnbaum on the website Identity theory back in 2002, Birnbaum asked Dufresne if Deep in the Shade of Paradise, his third novel and fourth book, was intended to mirror Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dufresne: “Not when I began it. Somewhere in the middle of it when all these people showed up at Paradise . . . that's when it occurred to me . . . but I kept the little play.” Twenty-three years later, My Darling Boy feels like Dufrene’s picked the play back up, only this time with a liberal shake of Caribbean hot sauce and a heaping splash of folly.
To be clear, the Shakespeare reference I make is not meant to be cheeky. If we know anything about Shakespeare’s comedies, we know that they are intelligent, and that they’re funny. There’s plenty of romance and long-lost twins in Darling, adventures undertaken, mistaken identities, and puns and magical wordplay, just like in Shakespeare’s Comedies. Dufresne, like the Bard, scatters these conventions throughout his novel, yet he does so so deftly, so subtly, that they’re easy to miss. But there’s more to it than just his rhetorical magic tricks—Dufresne’s version of the Bard’s Comedies is a modernized and restructured movie version populated with neon lights, obscure musical references, and plenty of tender loving moments that punch holes through your chest to dig right into your heart. The cleverness in Dufresne’s writing is pretty spectacular.
In 2009, writer and National Book Award winning novelist Julia Glass called Dufresne’s Love Warps the Mind a Little “a masterpiece of the genre that writers call the ‘funny-sad novel,’ where humor both defies and gives shape to grief,” and this is exactly what My Darling Boy is—a funny-sad novel that gives shape to grief. That grief is personified by Olney Kartheizer and the real helplessness he feels in his quest to save Cully. Dufresne, as you’ve probably concluded by now, knows his subject matter well, and it shows via the shrewd comments and street-smart actions of his characters. But as Dufresne himself says, fiction is “the lie that tells a truth.” There’s an abundance of humor here, but just beyond where the smiles break are rivers made of tears. That the reader isn’t overwhelmed by the vastness of Dufresne’s verbal voodoo—the pushing and pulling of our thoughts from tragedy to comedy to introspection—is a testament to Dufresne’s meticulously honed narrative abilities.
Dufresne’s version of the Bard’s Comedies is a modernized and restructured movie version populated with neon lights, obscure musical references, and plenty of tender loving moments
By building upon his themes with chapter titles like “And Here we are in Heaven,” “I Would Take You Home,” “I Think I Heard a Moan,” “So Tired of On-My-Own,” and “If I Could Start Again,” Dufresne turns the heartache and volume up ever so slightly for the reader to hear the cry of The Grateful Dead, Eidos and Paul Kelly’s haunting If I Could Start Today Again, and Al Green’s Tired of Being Alone. The title itself, My Darling Boy, comes from Mark Knopfler’s All That Matters. If you know the song, you’re probably already humming slowly to the pain in Knopfler’s voice, the lyrics of the song being as profound as the message:
My darling boy, my darling boy
All of my sunshine and all of my joy
You're all that matters
You're all that matters
Well, I can't stop the pain
When it calls, I'm a man
And I can't stop the rain
When it falls my darling, who can?
This is Olney Kartheizer’s trouble and the unrelenting force that drives him forward when time and again everything seems lost: his “darling boy” Cully is all that matters, but Olney can’t stop Cully’s pain, and he can’t stop the rain (flashes of lightning and crashing thunder over the Intracoastal loom ominous, as do other unpredictable storms familiar to anyone living in Florida), a literal storm to Cully’s figurative one. Cully’s mental health issues and drugs are a runaway train Olney can’t seem to slow down, much less stop, but we feel for him and his unwavering efforts. While Cully may have been able to juggle three balls by the age of nine, Olney struggles with just one: how to disperse the cloud that follows his son around like the one forever hovering over Joe Btfsplk in the old comic strip Li’l Abner.
While Dufresne inserts himself into the social conversation of mental health and drug abuse plaguing contemporary times through the same conventions Shakespeare used in his Comedies, there’s another writer whose novel I cannot avoid mentioning here, because the plot of that writer’s novel echoes, in my opinion, the underpinnings of Dufresne’s Darling. Besides the clear relationships to Shakespeare’s Comedies, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea has too many similarities to Darling that to brush them aside would be critical malpractice. Hemingway’s fisherman Santiago’s desperate pursuit and battle with the giant marlin he hooks but never really catches is the easiest comparison to make. While Olney chases after his ever-elusive son, Santiago chases his ever-elusive marlin. In addition to the chase, there are also references to baseball in both novels; in Dufresne’s Darling the baseball references act as a subplot, while in Old Man Santiago views Joe DiMaggio as the ultimate man’s man—strong, committed, successful. While these parallels likely pass by unnoticed by the casual reader, the similarities are too many to dismiss once you’re aware of them, just like those maddening stereograms where you stare at a picture to find the hidden picture within, only to never be able to unsee them afterwards, as if they’re burned in your memory. As readers, we fear Olney will catch Cully, but, like Santiago’s marlin, we also fear that all that will be left for Olney is a skeleton of cartilage and loss and the memories and reminders of what could have been had life been kinder to all parties involved. Dufresne makes you want to laugh and cry, and he makes you want to do it at the same time. He does this to the reader at will.
Cully, in a moment of self-reflection and facing death as he runs constantly away from his father and everything good in his life, and in one of his pseudo-philosophical moments of clarity, declares this: “. . . the thing about life—you shouldn’t go judging people until you have all the facts, because nothing is ever as it seems, not even the facts,” and that, we learn, is true about everything in My Darling Boy. As I write this today, I learned that a friend and colleague of mine succumbed to his addictions on December 3, 2024. He was 33. The last time I saw him was on a golf course in Louisville, Colorado, where three of us were smoking joints and hitting quadruple bogeys when we weren’t doing donuts in our golf carts. I wasn’t aware my friend had a problem; maybe he developed it later. Either way it’s a shame. Cully’s story of addiction and the pain it causes his loved ones isn’t a new one; it’s Dufresne’s delivery we haven’t read before, and if I can say anything about the writing is that Dufresne does justice to the reality of what it means to watch a loved one plunge from the heights of possibility to the depths and dangers of substance abuse.
At the end of My Darling Boy, and once more on his son’s trail, a woman named Destiny tells Olney that Cully took a road that forks on the way out of town. “One way to Whynot, the other to Gracious,” Destiny says. But we already know which path Cully will take, and we know the cast and crew who’ll be right there behind him—Olney’s circus troop of damaged, irreparable lost souls and hang arounds, who have no other options given who they are, given who they’ll ever be. Pack your bags, folks. Whynot, here we come!
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. Email: Cullyperlman@gmail.com
Ok, I’m in. Solid review.