Synopses & Reviews
According to his obituary, Wesley Sultan died at the age of 63, leaving behind three children, a wife, an ex-wife, a brother, a sister, and a life-long business career. According to his obituary, Wesley Sultan led a quiet, respectable, and unremarkable life. Our narrator, however, is about to discover that nothing could be further from the truth.
Using Sultans obituary as a road map to the unknown terrain of the man himself, our narrator discovers dead-ends, wrong turns, and unexpected destinations in every line. As he travels from the bleak Michigan winter to the steamy streets of Miami to the idyllic French countryside, in search of those who knew Wesley best, he gradually reconstructs the life of an exceptionally handsome, ambitious, and deceptive man to whom women were everything. And as the margins of the obituary fill with handwritten corrections, as details emerge and facts are revised, our mysterious narrator-whose interest in his quarry is far from random-has no choice but to confront the truth of his own life as well.
Synopsis
From Brad Leithauser, the acclaimed author of Friends of Freeland, comes a fresh and ingenious novel that uses a deceptive obituary to dramatize the inadequacy of any simple attempt to sum up a human life.
According to the official newspaper account, the recently deceased Wesley Sultan led a respectable but unremarkable life. Wesley’s son, Luke, however, is determined to investigate the father he never knew, and what he discovers is a man whose life was far more tangled and ambiguous than the one he presented to the world. Traveling thousands of miles to find those who knew Wesley best, and filling the margins of the obituary with dramatic corrections, Luke is ultimately left with no choice but to confront the truth of his own life as well.
About the Author
Brad Leithauser lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.