A dreamer’s storytelling son reworks his father’s life in Ferris’s daring and very funny latest
Any novelist is fiercely impelled to give their story a shape, to mould a satisfying journey along which ends are tied and consequences paid out. And yet part of the genius of this shape-shifting fourth novel from the Booker-shortlisted Ferris is that – just like his protagonist Charlie Barnes’s life – it’s a sprawling, confounding mess.
Five wives, four children, at least 40 jobs, constant debt, no end of wash-outs: you will know him by his trail of bankruptcies. And yet Charlie still believes in himself and, against all the odds, he believes in his next big thing. Because, yes, Charlie is another of those American dreamers, obsessed with becoming a self-made man rather than just a man, convinced that his every crazy new scheme is the one that will, this time, make him crazy rich.