A good son is a raw novel of formation in which Pascal Bruckner proposes, through his own biography, a tour of the French culture of the second half of the 20th century.
A good son is the story of an impossible love. Love for a despicable individual. An authoritarian fascist and womanizer who is both a cultured man and firm convictions, and who turns out to be the father of Bruckner himself. Such filial conflict gives way to a wonderful novel of formation, personal and intellectual, of who is one of the most solid and controversial writers of the current panorama of the French letters. The adult son faces in first person and without any type of narrative mask to a personage by which he feels, at the same time, rejection and compassion, in a story that is born of the hate but that takes on an unexpected and comforting tint of tenderness. Such a turn ends by surprising the narrator himself. Bruckner can not finish his particular condemnation of the father, and he sees how the inspiring grudge begins to melt to give way to a timid affection, not understanding, and to the definite certainty that it is not possible to judge in an absolute way the behavior of others.