Toby Lichtig
The Boy Is Back In Town
From Ancient Greece to Mills & Boon, the turbulent return of the love child has been a fertile literary motif. In Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, Spurio cuckolds his father and eventually contributes to his murder; in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the king’s bastard son Mordred foments a civil war. The afterlife of past dalliances may not be as ruinous in Jonathan Buckley’s new novel, but it is no less gratifying for it.
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