Book review: Big Ray, By Michael Kimball

"I wonder," says Daniel, the grieving narrator of this slim, haunting novel, "if I am making him in to something more than he was because he was my father."

Like unhappy families, all father and son relationships are fraught in their own ways, so we never tire of reading about them.

Daniel's meditations on his dead father achieve the precision of poetry. New details emerge with re-reading so that, like the process of making sense of formative events, you never really finish Big Ray.

The ending itself is far-fetched but as Daniel says: "I wish I was making some of this up."