Keepers: A Memoir

Novelist Nelson (The Pull) opens his blistering memoir by divulging that, in Oklahoma City in 1995, he assisted in the suicide of his 80-year-old mother, Marie, a depressed, seven-times-married recluse suffering from various ailments. This is strong stuff, and so is much of what follows: Nelson's futile attempt to find the killer of his son, Jimmy, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1966; his tumultuous second marriage, which shattered in 1970 when his obsessively jealous wife, Tracy, put a gun to his head; growing up in Texas in the 1950s with his unloving postal-clerk father (Marie abandoned them when the author was five) and a bullying stepmother; splitting the skull of his drunken, wife-beating stepfather with a wrench. Nelson, who was a Dallas advertising executive in the late 1960s, offers a sardonic account of living ""the American Dream"" and of the hollow, manipulative ad world. His rhapsodic if overlong tale of unrequited first love in high school is touching; seldom has teenage heartbreak been rendered so accurately. By turns rueful and irreverently funny, his visceral memoir is studded with reflections on grief, fatherhood, loneliness, sex, love and the craft of fiction. (Apr.)