When Fathers Fail

What would you get if you paired a tale about a bratty prince and a streetwise whipping boy with a fictional portrait of America in the 1930s? You would get a study of the father-son relationship that is so compelling it would make the powerful weapons of the Second Punic War seem like oversized toys. This study, one that compares the adolescent males in The Whipping Boy with the narrator in Invisible Man, presents every male child's odyssey to adulthood. It describes each male's striving, ...