A Thing You'll Never Do

When his neighbor asks how he acquired a signed copy of Jimmy Carter’s memoir, Roman begins not with his father, the much-celebrated radio broadcaster to whom the book is inscribed, but with a young musician he met decades earlier, when he was a middle-aged and not quite-talented-enough professional violinist struggling to outgrow the sphere of his father’s influence. Yet despite his efforts to distance himself from his father’s professional legacy and personal habits, Roman’s pursuit of the beautiful violinist quickly turns into obsession and he must come to terms with the vulnerability and doubt the two men share. An elegant meditation on the complex relationships between fathers and sons and the things that come between them—love, age, loyalty, and individuation—A Thing You’ll Never Do is a moving examination of modern masculinity.