A Calling for Charlie Barnes

Meet Charlie Barnes, known as “Steady Boy” to his friends: a failed inventor, failed businessman, perpetual dreamer, father to three (or four?) adult children, and, as of October 2008, almost certainly dying of pancreatic cancer. He lives with his fifth wife, Barbara Ledeux (not to be confused with his second wife, Barbara Lefurst), while under the watch of one of his sons, a middling novelist named Jake who’s writing “a strictly factual account” of his father’s life. But what is “factual” here is left to readers to work out; Jake offers up life-altering events and unforgettable family members that those involved later tell him never happened and don’t exist. And so Ferris’s fourth novel (after a short story collection, The Dinner Party), a metafictional counterlife presented within the frame of a family dramedy, becomes his most formally audacious since the first-person plural acrobatics of his debut, Then We Came to the End, and nearly as memorable. Like John Irving did for T. S. Garp, Ferris (through Jake) sends this perfectly ordinary man on a hero’s journey, giving Steady Boy the happy ending he was unable to create for himself.