FICTION: THEMES
Dad Novels: 1970s
12 books
The paranoid, propulsive decade — Watergate, Vietnam winding down, the thriller coming into its own. Forsyth, le Carré, and Higgins perfected the political and spy novel here; Benchley and Blatty gave the seventies their two great primal fears. Wolfe's Right Stuff and Michener's Centennial are the doorstops that earned their length, and Puzo's Godfather is the crime novel that became a national myth. It's the strongest of the dad-novel decades, and the one that shaped the modern bestseller. Start with The Day of the Jackal or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, depending on how much patience you brought.
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Jaws
Peter Benchley
A great white shark starts killing swimmers off a Long Island beach town. The police chief wants to close the beaches. The mayor doesn't. You know the rest because Spielberg's 1975 film essentially invented the summer blockbuster and permanently altered the relationship between Americans and the ocean. What you may not know is that the novel is darker and more cynical than the film — there's a subplot about the police chief's wife and the marine biologist that Spielberg wisely cut, and the shark feels less like a supernatural force and more like an indifferent killing machine. Benchley reportedly felt guilty for the rest of his life about what the book did to public perception of sharks. Read it at the beach. If you dare.
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The Day of the Jackal
Frederick Forsyth
A professional assassin known only as the Jackal is hired by a French nationalist organization to kill Charles de Gaulle. A French detective has to find him before he does it. Forsyth built this novel the way an engineer builds a bridge — every piece precisely placed, every procedure researched to the point of documentary accuracy. The result is the template for every political thriller written since. What makes it work despite knowing de Gaulle wasn't actually assassinated is the same thing that makes watching Apollo 13 with your heart in your throat work — Forsyth makes you forget what you know. The 1973 film starring Edward Fox is one of the great thriller adaptations. Look for The Fourth Protocol on the 80s Dad list if you want more Forsyth.
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The Exorcist
William Peter Blatty
A twelve-year-old girl in Georgetown starts behaving strangely. Her mother, a successful actress, exhausts every medical explanation before a young Jesuit priest suggests the one nobody wants to consider. Blatty's novel is scarier than the 1973 film, which is saying something given that the film is one of the most terrifying movies ever made. What the book has that the film can't quite replicate is time — Blatty takes his time building the case for what is happening, and by the time the exorcism arrives you've been so thoroughly prepared that it lands like a physical blow. It was the bestselling novel of 1971. Dads who read it kept it off the shelf where the kids couldn't reach it. Some rules exist for good reasons.
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Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone
Vietnam correspondent John Converse arranges to smuggle three kilos of heroin back to California using his friend Ray Hicks, a Marine. It goes wrong immediately and keeps going wrong. Stone's National Book Award winner is the great 70s paranoia novel — post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, set in an America that feels like it's coming apart at the seams. Hicks is one of the great American fictional characters of the decade: a man shaped entirely by violence trying to find something worth protecting. The 1978 film Who'll Stop the Rain, starring Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld, captures the book's mood better than most adaptations manage. If The Things They Carried on the 90s Dad list is Vietnam processed with grace, Dog Soldiers is Vietnam processed with none.
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Deliverance
James Dickey
Four Atlanta businessmen — soft, suburban, vaguely dissatisfied — canoe a north Georgia river before a dam floods it forever. What happens to them on that river became permanently lodged in American cultural memory in ways that are not entirely comfortable to examine. Dickey was a poet first and it shows — the prose is precise and physical in ways that most thriller writers can't touch. The 1972 John Boorman film starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight is excellent and faithful, which means it's also extremely difficult to watch in places. The novel asks a question about what men are capable of — and what they discover they're capable of — that it never quite answers. That's the point. One of the genuinely great American novels of the decade dressed up as an adventure story.
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The Eagle Has Landed
Jack Higgins
November 1943. German intelligence discovers that Winston Churchill will spend a quiet weekend at a small Norfolk village. A German colonel named Steiner is given an impossible mission: take a small force of paratroopers disguised as Polish soldiers, get to England, and bring Churchill back alive. Higgins wrote pure entertainment and was completely honest about it, which is why The Eagle Has Landed became one of the bestselling novels of 1975 and why the 1976 Michael Caine film holds up as well as it does. The German characters are treated with enough complexity that the novel has some moral weight without ever getting preachy about it. If you want more Higgins, go to The Valhalla Exchange next. Nobody else on any of these lists does exactly what Higgins does.
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John le Carré
Retired spymaster George Smiley is quietly brought back to find a Soviet mole at the very top of British intelligence. Le Carré is the anti-Ludlum — no car chases, no action sequences, just two men in a room carefully not saying what they mean, and the accumulated weight of institutional betrayal. Where The Bourne Identity on the 80s Dad list is about a man with no past, Smiley is a man who can't escape his. The 1979 BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness is one of the finest things British television ever produced and worth watching after. This is the most demanding novel on this list — it rewards patience — and the most purely literary. If the Cold War spy genre interests you at all, nothing else comes close.
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Centennial
James Michener
Michener starts with the geology of northeastern Colorado — the actual rocks, formed over hundreds of millions of years — and works forward to the present through Native American tribes, French trappers, cattle drives, homesteaders, and irrigation farmers. It's 1,100 pages and earns every one of them. The 1978 NBC miniseries ran twenty-six hours over several weeks and was one of the most ambitious television productions of its era, which sent dads back to the bookstore in enormous numbers. Michener was the master of the doorstop historical epic — Chesapeake and Hawaii operate on the same scale — but Centennial is his most purely American novel. Plan three weeks. Start on a weekend when you have nothing else going on, because the first hundred pages are literally about rocks and somehow completely compelling.
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The Forever War
Joe Haldeman
Earth sends soldiers through collapsars — black holes used as faster-than-light transport — to fight an alien enemy nobody understands. The problem is relativity: soldiers deployed for two years of subjective time return home to find decades have passed. Haldeman wrote this as a direct response to his own service in Vietnam, and the allegory is clear without being heavy-handed — soldiers shaped by a war their society has moved past, returning to a home that no longer recognizes them. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and deserved both. Nothing on the 80s or 90s Dad lists touches military science fiction with this much moral seriousness. If Ender's Game on the 80s list is about the making of a soldier, The Forever War is about what that costs.
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The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe
Wolfe follows the test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base — Chuck Yeager chief among them — through the breaking of the sound barrier and into the selection of the Mercury Seven astronauts, asking the whole time what exactly the right stuff is and whether the astronauts, strapped into capsules and shot into space like human cannonballs, actually have it compared to Yeager, who was never invited to the party. It's nonfiction, which makes it the deliberate outlier on this list the way Colin Powell's autobiography is on the 90s Dad list, and like that book it reads faster than most novels. The 1983 Philip Kaufman film is one of the great American movies and a faithful adaptation. Among the best books Tom Wolfe ever wrote, which is saying something given the competition.
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Shibumi
Trevanian
Nicholai Hel is the greatest assassin in the world — raised in occupied Japan by a White Russian father figure, trained in a cave in the Basque country, master of a form of martial arts so advanced it has no name. Trevanian wrote Shibumi as a satire of the spy thriller genre and somehow produced one of the best spy thrillers ever written in the process. The novel's portrait of American corporate power — the CIA is essentially a subsidiary of a multinational oil consortium — reads less like 1979 paranoia and more like a plausible org chart. It has a devoted cult following among dads who wanted something weirder and more literary than Ludlum. Nobody ever got a sequel. The ending explains why.
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The Godfather
Mario Puzo
Vito Corleone is the head of one of New York's five organized crime families — not a violent man by preference, a man who believes in favors and loyalty and the proper order of things. When he's shot down in the street for refusing a narcotics deal, his youngest son Michael — a war hero, a civilian, the one who was supposed to be clean — starts down a road nobody can pull him back from. Puzo wrote the great American novel about power, family, and what men are willing to do to protect both, and dressed it up as a gangster story so it would sell. The 1972 Coppola film is the rare adaptation that improves on the source material — possibly the greatest American film ever made. Read the novel first anyway. The Godfather Part II novelization by Puzo is worth tracking down after.