Diver

“A thoughtful and moving, but artfully unsentimental, depiction of a son’s love. Buzbee achieves a complex amalgam of celebration and lament; his narrator adores his father and sees his ‘heroic life’ as a model of manhood, but precisely because of this adoration, he experiences his dad’s loss as a catastrophic blow. Overall, it’s an admirably meditative exploration of the depths and travails of a father-son relationship.” Kirkus Reviews On the morning that his father, Navy deep-sea diver Mac Macoby, dies of a heart attack, 12-year-old Robert is engulfed by the memories that tie them together. The memories come in fragments, some broken, some incomplete, but together they form the portrait of a man shaped by the tides of history, not a hero’s life but a heroic one, nonetheless. Diver is about one California family in the 1960s, and about every family, a novel about the rigors of military life amid the turbulence of the counterculture movement, a novel of how memory can fail us, serve us, and support us through loss.