Ed King by David Guterson
Bloomsbury $36.99
This is such a clever idea for a novel that it's a wonder no one has thought of it before. Or if they had, perhaps they would have decided against it, because it's so hard to pull off. David Guterson, author of the best-selling and much-loved Snow Falling on Cedars, has written the 21st-century novel of Oedipus Rex, a "myth for our times". Ed King: get what he did with the title? It's the story of a baby boy given up for adoption, who goes on to become one of the world's richest and most powerful men. While, of course, killing his father and sleeping with his mother along the way.
Most of all, though, it's a tale of human error and hilarious idiocy. Ed's father, Walter Cousins, illustrates this beautifully: he's a self-deluding, well-meaning actuary who ends up sleeping with the au pair when his wife is hospitalised with a nervous breakdown. Oedipus, sorry, Ed, is conceived. The au pair, Diane, is no schmuck, however. She dumps the baby on a doorstep but manages to convince Walter that she is raising the child as a single mother. He coughs up. Walter's hush money allows her to maintain herself in the manner to which she would like to become accustomed. (Quite literally - she ends up having a lot of plastic surgery, allowing her to become young enough to seduce a man her son's age. Clever, eh?)
The baby is adopted by a lovely Jewish couple, Alice and Dan, who name him Edward Aaron King: "Dan, especially, was an Elvis fan." Ed has a relatively normal, if slightly smothering, all-American childhood. He annoys and is annoyed by his brother Simon and spends his barmitzvah money on a 1966 Pontiac GTO, complete with racing stripes, which he paints on himself. It is while in this car that he has an altercation with another driver, an irritating middle-aged man, whom he runs off the road. The man is Walter, who breaks his neck in the ensuing crash.
By this point, we are starting to get the whiff of inevitability, especially as Diane has been quietly remodelling herself for several years now and can easily pass as the sort of woman Ed might go for. Ed himself is destined to become - what else? - king of internet domain Pythia, a search engine. He takes in Stanford on the way and a succession of therapists, who attempt to diagnose his malaise: "And who are you?" "I'm me." "And who is 'me'?"
