Review: "The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill" by James Charlesworth

The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, the debut novel of author James Charlesworth that works both in spite of and because of it’s glaring flaws. It is overwritten but beautiful because of it, its timeline is confusing but creates a strange sense of mystery to the book’s proceedings, and its central, eponymous character is so ghoulish, so outside the realm of reliability or sympathy that it works to the book’s advantage, making this trek across the middle of the 20^thcentury and the four battered lives of a relentless, merciless American man feel less like an indictment of traditional masculinity (as the book’s blurbs consistently point out) and more something to akin to the recent spat of art house horror films where nothing is more perverse or terrifying than the idea of family. I’ve read a few reviews not so kind to this book, but its oddball qualities and its dreamlike progression to an inevitable final act had me beguiled and consistently searching for answers, to the dark crazy heart of this dark and crazy story. The first fifty pages, where the life of the title character is laid out are the best part of the book, where we learn about GBH’s sad beginnings, the pressure his father put on him to always be acting, to always looking for a way to get ahead, his first marriage to the failed beauty queen Mary, the birth of his first two sons George Jr. and Jamie, Mary’s shocking act of self harm that signaled the end of their marriage and the chance encounter in the backroom of one of the first ever fast food restaurants that he, and everyone he told, feels is the key to his future success. It is the one section where we get to know GBH deeply and his Charlesworth only attempt to understand the character’s pathologies. The majority of the book takes places in the ashes of 9/11 as GBH’s four children, George Jr., Jamie and the twins from his marriage to Annabelle, Max and Maddie, navigate their shattered world as they are all headed for a collision course with their monstrous father, whose own well publicized immoral business measures have been temporarily forgotten in the wake of the towers falling. George Jr. is reeling from a divorce and the death of his daughter, Jamie is caught between a world of make believe and very real horror in sections riddled with paranoia and events and people who may or may not be real, Max, a pilot in Alaska, lives a lonely life in the wake of not one, but two separate manslaughter charges and Maddie eeks out a living as a Vegas hustler, still waiting for her friend, who disappeared a decade earlier, to come back. There is a mysterious package, a gun in a baseball bat carrier and lots of regret and resentment boiling to the surface as both past and present intermingle and the reader is left with a vague sense of what is going on but can easily feel great undercurrents of longing and hope in every phrase, even the corny final line. This might be a personal favorite, but it comes highly recommended from me. 

Rating: 5/5