By Edward Docx
EDWARD DOCX’S FOURTH NOVEL is a love story—not between a young couple but between Larry Lasker, a “courageous but cowardly, wonderful but terrible” man in his late 60s, and his youngest son, Lou. Lou is the child of Larry’s happy second marriage and able to overlook his father’s shortcomings. But Ralph and Jack, the sons of Larry’s first wife, cannot forgive their father for his brutal abandonment of their mother. They long to excavate the past, to force their father to admit how cruelly he behaved. Now time is running out. Larry is in the late stages of a motor neuron disease and has resolved to end his life at Dignitas, a Swiss nonprofit that assists terminally ill patients with suicide.
Let Go My Hand covers four days during which Larry and his sons travel in a cramped camper van through Europe to Switzerland, constantly interacting, thrashing out the past and examining, in Docx’s words, all the “complex crosscurrents of love in a family and, within those currents, all kinds of human emotion, ranging from hero worship to detestation.” Docx’s choice of setting was deliberate. “As well as a love story, I wanted to write a road movie,” he says, speaking on the phone from Crete. “They seem two very diferent things, but oddly they came together nicely. Ever since The Canterbury Tales—perhaps the first road movie—writers have understood the advantages of conining characters in a given space.”