The Deal of a Lifetime by Fredrick Backman
Fredrik Backman is one of my favorite authors. And he has done the nearly impossible. Most authors are pigeonholed into one genre of books forever. If you are a mystery writer, your publisher doesn’t want you to write romance or children’s literature. However, Backman has somehow managed to escape this fate.
He authored two of the funniest books that I have ever read, A Man Called Ove and Anxious People. From time to time, Backman also pens some rather serious works including short stories. The Deal of a Lifetime is one of the rather serious short stories.
In The Deal of a Lifetime, while in the hospital, a deadbeat dad contemplates his life and meets a little girl with cancer.
Perhaps I would have enjoyed this more if I did not recently read The Death of Ivan Ilyich which also featured a man approaching death and contemplating his life. Although this short story was decent, it was trying to cover a variety of very important topics in a very short time. For example, the father is back in his hometown, and Backman devoted very little time to this concept.
There is a saying in literature that it is better to show the reader something rather than tell the reader. This short story was so short that it ended up doing much more telling rather than showing. It would have been much more moving to experience the instances of when the father disappointed his son. It would have been more poignant if the man described his experiences as a youth, going without, being ignored.
Given the time constraints, the characters were also underdeveloped. In my opinion, Backman should have expanded The Deal of a Lifetime into a full-length novel.
Overall, this was a decent short story, but it lacked the emotional pull that I expected from an author of this caliber.