Review of Noah Hawley's "The Good Father" in the Dallas Morning News

So here’s my review of Noah Hawley’s new novel, The Good Father, published Sunday in the Dallas Morning News (click the hyperlink ‘review’). I liked the novel, even if it’s ultimately a downer story, of a father searching for the innocence of his son, only to discover that this innocence is lost, and his son is too. Hawley is a screenwriter, and has worked on various TV shows (Bones, My Generation, The Unusuals), which is an interesting dynamic, in that usually you hear of novelists who spend some time (or make some money) writing screenplays now and then—Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men first as a screenplay, but when he couldn’t find a buyer for it (or someone to produce it), he wrote the novel—and the rest, as they say, is history, with the Coen Brothers film No Country for Old Men (2007) winning Best Picture in 2008. (McCarthy has also recently sold a new screenplay, as I reported not long ago.) But Hawley’s career seems the flip side of that. I mention in the review that the novel bears more than a passing resemblance to the plotlines of both Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which is an interesting combination.