As road trips go, this one's a doozy: two adult brothers have six days to drive across the U.S. with their cryonically frozen father before his body thaws. That's the premise of Fail Sons, Adam Wilson's gruesomely funny novel.
It's 2022. Forty-year-old Scott Platt lives in Brooklyn with his pregnant wife. He worked at a magazine for 15 years until he got laid off. Now he can't get another job and has a surfeit of ailments, including back pain and pelvic floor problems. San Francisco-based Nick, who's never without his KN95 mask, is "one of those dudes who sprinkles powdered casein on his protein yogurt, works eleven-hour days at a standing desk, snacks on dried seaweed and unsalted almonds, [and] rarely poops." They meet in Arizona to pick up their father, who had himself cryonically frozen 25 years ago after a cancer diagnosis, and bring him east now that the cryo center is closing. The catch: they can't let their father get warmer than -109° Fahrenheit, or "he would need to be placed back into cryonic suspension."
The brothers traverse much of "Red State America," including a stop in an Iowa Walmart that sells "multipurpose firearms" and "sale-priced stars-and-stripes crap." They meet others on the journey, too, including an old flame of Nick's and two young ex-Mormons. What Wilson (Flatscreen; Sensation Machines) really explores is disappointment: white men who feel like underachievers and a country that hasn't lived up to its stated ideals. Fail sons, indeed. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer