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by Adam Wilson
A pair of estranged brothers drive their father's cryonically frozen body across a divided America to its final resting place in this darkly comic novel about masculinity and grief—a 21st century update of As I Lay Dying—from the author of Flatscreen.
When Scott Platt's brother, Nick, calls to ask him to fly to Arizona and retrieve their father's body from the Cryo Center where it's been frozen since the nineties, the timing couldn't be worse: He's forty, unemployed, and spiraling as he and his wife await the birth of their first child. Nick's as tightly wound as Scott is adrift, and the brothers have never gotten along. But the Cryo Center's shutting down, and they've got six days to haul their father's frozen body to a new facility in Massachusetts—without letting it thaw past –109°. And Scott needs to get back home to New York before his wife goes into labor.
It's the summer of 2022. The country's still reeling from the pandemic. And driving a corpse cross-country in a U-Haul through Red State America proves predictably chaotic. Nick insists on wearing a KN95 the entire time. They pass through deserts, mountains, and plains, encountering Aryan cops, ex-Mormon hitchhikers, a Gen Z commune, and MAGA-hat-wearing Walmart clerks. They play blackjack, take shrooms, and swim under the stars—all while trying to keep the body frozen and their relationship from melting down.
Fail Sons is a brilliant exploration of masculinity, grief, and the ways we carry the dead—and each other—across a divided America.
"Hilarious and humane. Adam Wilson is so funny and readable that the depth of his work almost sneaks up on you. Fail Sons weighs prolonged adolescence against true adulthood, in a road trip novel that begins in cynicism and ends in tenderness. It actually made me hopeful for men." —Erin Somers, author of The Ten Year Affair
"What begins as a stoner road-trip comedy evolves into something closer to John Williams's Stoner: a poignant meditation on midlife masculinity, perfectionism, and failure, shot through with Adam Wilson's signature wit, pathos, and crystalline language." —Teddy Wayne, author of The Winner
This information about Fail Sons was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Adam Wilson is the author of the short story collection What's Important Is Feeling, and the novels Sensation Machines and Flatscreen, which was an Indie Next Pick and a National Jewish Book Award finalist. In 2012, Wilson received The Paris Review's Terry Southern Prize for Humor. His work has appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Tin House, Bookforum, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories among many other publications. Wilson has t aught in the creative writing programs at Columbia University and NYU. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two sons.
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