A Good Doctor's Son

by Steven Schwartz

Outside Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1960, the burning of a black family’s home causes David Nachman to decide, “I was going to be a doctor, a good doctor like my father.” It is, however, a very different future that awaits David. In a single moment his life changes forever in this stunning new book from the author of the acclaimed novel Therapy.

The son of a dedicated doctor and a fragile artistic mother, David grows up feeling an outsider as a Jew in a gentile neighborhood, but struggles to fit in. He becomes friends with a group of teenagers who play poker for high stakes, ride around in fast cars, and crack jokes about sex that leave fifteen-year-old (and still prepubescent) David laughing along in hidden pain. “For better or worse, much worse perhaps, I followed Vic, Chuckie, and Crow up Rynard Road… I thought of these guys as my family: glue-haired Crow Randazzo, sweet-potato-grin Vic Quint, and croupier Chuckie Halbert.” A sudden challenge from his friends results in a horrifying accident, plunging David into a future far beyond any troubles he or his family could have ever imagined.

Told retrospectively, with clarity and gentle wit, David’s story unfolds with mesmerizing intensity. His slow agonizing steps to become part of the world again form the basis of his search for a reconstructed self: a quest that buffets him from social protests to religious pursuits to headlong romance.

A Good Doctor’s Son is David’s story and his family’s, but it is also a tale of remembrance for David’s victim, a three-year-old girl, and her family and their anguish. At its center is a story that examines the grainy area between the good intentions of people and the unexpected ways they actually wind up living their lives—a gap that David must bridge to make his life whole.

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 4, 1998

About the author

Steven Schwartz is the author of four story collections To Leningrad in Winter (University of Missouri), Lives of the Fathers (University of Illinois), Little Raw Souls (Autumn House), Madagascar: New and Selected Stories and two novels, Therapy(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and A Good Doctor’s Son (William Morrow). His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, the Cohen Award, the Colorado Book Award for the Novel, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Bread Loaf. He has taught in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and the MFA program at Colorado State University, where he serves as fiction editor for the Colorado Review. His latest novel is The Tenderest of Strings from Regal House.

Reviews

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is excellent. The story is somber, sometimes harrowing. I have read Part I, but I can't bring myself to read the rest of the book. The guilt that David Nachman felt after the car accident where he killed a child, I feel, will of necessity pervade the rest of the story. It is too excruciating, even if David could manage to put it aside for a time.

And that accident is not the only harrowing thing. David's relationship with his friends, the members of his family are all fraught. What will it be like if/when he meets girls?

I'm sorry to set it aside. Maybe later, when Part I has been "set aside," I can come back to this and finish it.

[Colleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

author is an Ass. Prof at CSU. Jew in gentile neighborhood, teenage hoods, fatal car accident. The story examines the area between the good intentions of people and the unexpected ways they end up spending their lives.

[Noreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-written with compassion, humor the story is compelling from start to finish.