A GOOD BOY is the fascinating and riveting story of a likeable, and often confused, young man’s quest to become “a worthy human being” that plunges the reader into the underside of social normalcy, American excess, sociopathic behaviors, greed, depravity, suspense, and the nature of friendship.
With rising tension, John Birkhoff’s journey to acquire understanding and to be “morally straight,” is challenged at every turn by John’s boyhood nemesis and sometime pal, Tom Jensen, who has a habit of intruding on his life at inopportune moments and interfering with John’s goal to adhere to the high standards and personal values set before him by his parents and influencing adult society of the 50’s and 60’s.
His ingenious and occasionally likeable friend easily sways John, a perennial “Boy Scout” and a Good Samaritan who does not wish to offend anyone. Their lives are forever changed when, through a misunderstanding that John informed the police, Jensen goes to prison for six years, while the ethical Birkhoff embarks on a path of moral solidarity and conservative middle class ethics in a dysfunctional suburban neighborhood in Southern California. Jensen never forgets or forgives Birkhoff. While in prison, he is sexually brutalized and becomes involved with profit-oriented religious cultism that he continues to pursue upon his release. Jensen’s style of revenge is influenced by his prison experience. He is a member of a fascist right-wing spiritual organization, the Religious Alliance of The Guiding Light, headed by his cellmate, Tex Trucseder, a former Green Beret, who has become a multi-millionaire through religious fraud.
At the center of a web of immorality, Jensen and another criminal inmate, Mitchell Walls, plot the destruction of John Birkhoff. Married and the father of an 18 month old daughter, John and his young family live in a middle income suburb in a starter home next to a blue collar family, the Brackens.
The neighborhood is plagued by a resident gang of white teenagers who break and enter houses to support their small-time use of drugs. Mitchell Walls uses the kids to infiltrate the neighborhood and Jensen finds work nearby as a live-in handyman for an elderly couple whose life savings he embezzles.
Upon losing his job as an aerospace assembly worker, John’s neighbor, Mike Bracken, falls into a mid-life crisis that becomes progressively worse and splits his family, as he struggles to restore his self-esteem and make some substance out of his shattered security.
Mike’s wife, Betty Bracken, temporarily moves to an apartment and takes a job. She becomes acquainted with Kyle Evans, an emotionally unstable young man whose life purpose is centered on hate motivated crimes promoted by a Southern California coalition of the Religious Alliance of The Guiding Light, influenced and lead by Tom Jensen and Mitchell Walls. As Jensen and Walls execute the final stages of revenge, they discover that the balance of life can tilt in an unanticipated way.
Blending suspense with telling character portraiture and a strong sense of how people grow into themselves, the novel opens with Tom, after years in jail, aiming for nothing less “to destroy meaning for [John Birkoff] just as Birkhoff, by a single act had destroyed meaning for” him. Tucker offers a gritty, persuasive account of the terrors of life behind the bars, and skillfully lays bare both characters’ perspectives, revealing, in tense scenes, why Tom blames John—and all that middle-class John has to lose as Tom schemes. The mens’ future is as complex as their pasts, especially as Tom falls in with a militarized Christian cult, finding the senses of power and belonging he’s lacked.
As the story builds toward inevitable violence, Tucker weaves these lives together in surprising, suspenseful ways, with failures of empathy reverberating across years. The novel abounds in striking and clever parallels—the way a parole hearing echoes an appearance before the Eagle Scouts’ Board of Review is ironic without being cute. Whether this pained dyad is doomed to tragedy will keep readers of character-driven literary fiction engaged, especially as Tucker keeps challenging assumptions of what the idea of a “Good Boy” even means.
Takeaway: The suspenseful, character-rich story of a convict’s life entwining with a respected man’s.
Great for fans of: Thomas Berger’s Neighbors, T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done.
Production grades
Cover: C+
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
