DIVER

Buzbee’s novel presents a man’s loving homage to his father, as told in a series of impressionistic remembrances.

Robert Macoby grows up idolizing his father, Elwell, a tough but tender man who lived a remarkably dramatic life. Elwell spent time at an orphanage as a child—his parents struggled to afford the costs of child-raising—and there, he gained the tougher nickname “Mac,” which he earned by fighting off bullies. Mac’s father, a counterfeiter who spent time in prison, abandons the family when Mac is in seventh grade, forcing him to end his education and find work to support his mother and siblings. In 1936, at the age of 15, he joins the U.S. Navy and became a master diver, a remarkable accomplishment of which Robert is very proud. In 1964, when Robert is 7, Mac suffers his first heart attack, a massive one from which he never fully recovers. In 1970, he dies after his last cardiac event; this devastates his teenage son, who’d considered his dad his “best buddy.” Buzbee affectingly relates the heartache in Robert’s narration: “Was it the fatigue of your life, all that roaming, constantly, that ever roaming and uncertain youth of yours, followed then by the discipline and uniform boundaries of the Navy, the brass of that diving helmet, the pressures of the deep you swam through, the constant labor of welding and re-welding? Was it simply too much work for one life?” This fictional remembrance is structured as a scattered assemblage of vignettes, and these episodic portraits of Mac feel tenderly admiring without being hagiographic. The author’s writing style is generally informal, casually anecdotal, and intimately candid, and it has the effect of gently transforming the reader into Robert’s confidant. Buzbee achieves a complex amalgam of celebration and lament; his narrator adores his father and sees his “heroic life” as a model of manhood, but precisely because of this adoration, he experiences his dad’s loss as a catastrophe blow. Overall, it’s an admirably meditative exploration of the depths and travails of a father-son relationships.

A thoughtful and moving, but artfully unsentimental, depiction of a son’s love.