cover image A Good Doctor's Son

A Good Doctor's Son

Steven Schwartz. William Morrow & Company, $24 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-688-15401-1

Grief courses through Schwartz's somber second novel (after Therapy). Rebellious and running with a bad crowd, David Nachman, the 16-year-old son of the town doctor in Chester, Pa., brings disaster upon himself when, on a whim, he enters a drag race with the local tough. During the race, he accidentally runs over a three-year-old girl, killing her. Schwartz icily captures the eeriest moments of David's solitary confrontation with guilt, and he also evocatively situates David's predicament in a small, smug American town in the 1960s. The second half of the book charts David's path into the late-1960s and the era's causes, including civil rights, and his attempted relationships with a couple of girlfriends. Unfortunately, the supporting cast is too thin to sustain reader interest in David's ""post-traumatic"" life. In fact, as the intensity of David's self-condemnation fades and becomes a dull ache lurking behind the rest of his life, the novel squanders its sense of moral urgency in the comparatively cliched and prosaically rendered events of David's coming-of-age story. (Feb.)