Father's Day

by William Goldman

An awe inspiring book!

Genres: Fiction

215 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College in 1952 and an MA degree at Columbia University in 1956.His brother was the late James Goldman, author and playwright.

William Goldman had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. Several of his novels he later used as the foundation for his screenplays.

In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood (in one of these he famously remarked that "Nobody knows anything"). He then returned to writing novels. He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriting.

Goldman won two Academy Awards: an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men. He also won two Edgar Awards, from the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Motion Picture Screenplay: for Harper in 1967, and for Magic (adapted from his own 1976 novel) in 1979.

Goldman died in New York City on November 16, 2018, due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia. He was eighty-seven years old.

Reviews

[Aaron Martz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very funny and very sad, and although it is at times disjointed and goes off the rails toward the end, it is well worth reading. The main character, Amos McCracken, is one of the most desperate losers I've come across in literature - so pitiful and unfortunate you almost want to feel sorry for him, if he wasn't also self-serving. His relationship with his daughter, which forms the spine of the book, is wholly believable, and their journey, which takes all of a day, is at times heart-warming and more often terrifying as McCracken begins to fall apart.

[Mid-Sized SeDan · Rating 3 out of 5]

On Father's Day 2025, I found myself looking through my stacks of books for something new to read. I decided to avoid the temptation of another science fiction or crime story, to branch out a bit. Eventually, I spotted a book serendipitously named Father's Day. I do not remember purchasing this book, I could not even guess where. The cover was cool, and the author had written some great screenplays, so I figured why not.

Very quickly, I began to regret it. The novel opens with the nominal hero going through a divorce, and I'm only a couple months removed from a breakup that's left me feeling pretty terrible. Granted, I've never been married, and the man is unrelatable enough that it's hard to feel any direct resonance, but it's still not the kind of material I'm keen to experience. But c'mon, it's called Father's Day and I spotted it on Father's Day. I kept going.

Then came the next hurdle: this guy sucks. Protagonist Amos McCracken is a hack Broadway songwriter who is deeply insecure about his own talents, demeaning to everyone around him, entitled, pompous, acidic, and all around unpleasant (God, I hope this isn't how people see me). His two saving graces are the love he has for his daughter, and that his biting wit is often pretty funny through both dialogue and internal narration. Credit where it's due, Goldman shows a gift in not only jokecraft, but in using the shape of the prose to accentuate both comedy and emotion. A run-on sentence lasting almost an entire page can convey both the absurd neuroticism of a creative or the desperate thinking of a man out of his depth; Goldman employs them to both both, and much more.

At first, I worried that the author was unaware of how off-putting Amos was, that he was sympathetic to his plight. To a certain degree, he is, and in fairness the character is so pathetic that it's tempting to feel sorry for him... until the next horrible decision he makes, of which there are many. As the plot unravels, it's clear that this is a portrait of a man whose fragile sense of self and maniacal self-interest serve as the root cause of all his problems, and so we journey with him on one long day as his many flaws and mistake compound on one another. By the end of the book, it takes on the frantic energy of a Safdie brothers film, as all his bad decisions come to a head, and the result is as exhilarating as it is nauseating.

Yet this short book did end up taking me over a month to work through. The fact is that it's not very fun to occupy the headspace of a character like this, no matter how fleshed out, how funny, how propulsive. Actually reading the book is a breeze, but picking it up and flipping back to where I was always felt like a chore. It feels wrong to fault the novel for successfully managing to get the internal thoughts of a man like this onto page, but the result is a book that is hard to work through, and I'm rather glad to be done with it. Maybe a book about psychic mutants next time.

I had to finish the last chapter on a PDF, because I cannot find my paperback. So if you come across William Goldman's 1971 novel Father's Day, sorry, that's mine.

[Ronnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure when, exactly, I realized Amos was having a mental breakdown. I remember thinking "he wasn't likeable in The Thing if It Is... but he wasn't completely detestable either." And then I thought I was going crazy, or that this book was starting to jump the shark. And then I realized what was happening.

Goldman, through the use of run-on sentences and his seamless transitions between Amos' "fantasies", which get more and more morbid ("Do you know what morbid means? Nice foreshadowing!) as time goes on, does an expert job in making sure the reader is right there with Amos as he goes deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. It was disquieting and disorienting, and made me feel like I was losing it too.

Toward the beginning of the novel, its mentioned that Pierre saved them, and I don't think I got it at the time (he convinced Jessica to eat, but he didn't save their marriage or anything else), but it's wonderful that he's who saved them in the end too. It was brilliant of Jessica to know what that was what both she and her father needed to bring him back to reality too.

The more I thinking about it the better this book becomes. It's a shame it wasn't better known. William Goldman truly was a master storyteller.