• At its core, this literary fiction is a debate about benefits and penalties of modernity as it evolves between the years 1926 and 2057. Questions of virtue, religion, science, democracy, and capitalism are subplots to the main thrust of Western civilization’s trajectory, through the vehicle of a multigenerational family saga.
• Offensive? Portions of The Father are not for the faint of heart. Some scenes contain graphic violence. On rare occasions the book’s hard-bitten character employs profanity, and insults individuals, associations or groups - though more generally toward the human race of which, of course, he is a part. Avoiding gratuitous use of such incidents this was considered a requirement of the character, reflective of certain aspects of social development in America and Western Civilization over the time period considered.
• The crescendo chapter includes characterizations of people (appearance, ideas, speech) in the extreme (though from today’s news) to emphasize contrast between the story’s beginning and end, and as metaphor for self-destructive excesses of civilization in 2057. More on this essential nature of writing can be found here. Themes and philosophical sources of The Father are provided.
• Dialect. In Part 1 of The Father several characters speak a “country dialect.” For example, they employ contractions such as “gonna” instead of “going to.” If Tony Morrison’s Beloved (African American, slave-era dialect), or Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses (cowboy dialect) were hard to understand (purely a matter of preference), please realize a similar type of speech will be encountered in Part 1 of The Father. You can sample this dialect with a "Look Inside" the book at Amazon.
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