The Doctor's Son

Book excerpt: Secrets emerge as a fearsome contagion in this long autobiographical story set in small-town Pennsylvania amid the influenza pandemic of 1918. “The Doctor’s Son” concerns James "Jimmy" Malloy, a teenager on the uncertain edge of manhood, confronted by sudden death and the loss of illusions. Having worked himself to exhaustion, his father, Doctor Mike Malloy enlists “Doctor” Myers, a medical student, to treat his patients until he has recovered and fifteen-year-old Jimmy drives Myers around the county on his rounds. O’Hara’s earliest account of his fraught relationship with his formidable father, this classic tale is, in the words of New York Times cultural critic Charles McGrath, "a love story, really, if a frustrated, unrequited one." It is also a fascinating record of the social effects of America's first great confrontation with a global pandemic.