FICTION: THEMES
Dad Novels: 1980s
11 books
The blockbuster decade — bigger books, higher stakes, the technothriller and the epic taking over the airport rack. Ludlum and Clancy built the templates the next twenty years copied; Clavell's Shogun and Wouk's Winds of War are the immersive doorstops. King's Pet Sematary is his most ruthless, Card's Ender's Game the sci-fi that outlived its shelf, and Irving's Garp the literary one that still sold like a thriller. It's Reagan-era abundance in book form, and it's a lot of fun. Start with The Hunt for Red October's older cousin here, Red Storm Rising, or Shogun if you want to disappear for two weeks.
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The Bourne Identity
Robert Ludlum
A man is pulled from the Mediterranean with bullets in his back and no memory of who he is. What he has instead: combat reflexes, six languages, and a Swiss bank account number tattooed on his hip. Ludlum is the defining 80s dad espionage author the way Clancy is the defining 90s version — propulsive, paranoid, and completely addictive. Jason Bourne became one of the great recurring characters in American popular fiction, and this is where he starts. The 2002 Matt Damon film is excellent but strips out most of the Cold War architecture that makes the book interesting. Ludlum wrote two sequels, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, both worth reading if you finish this one in a weekend, which you will.
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Pet Sematary
Stephen King
The Kings move to rural Maine. Their new neighbor is friendly. The road out front is fast and heavy with trucks. There's a pet cemetery in the woods behind the house, and behind that, something older. King originally shelved this manuscript because he thought he'd gone too far — his editor had to talk him into publishing it. That alone should tell you what you're getting into. Where The Green Mile on the 90s Dad list earns its darkness with grace and redemption, Pet Sematary earns its darkness with none. It's King at his most ruthless and probably his scariest book. The 1989 film is decent. The 2019 remake is not. Read this one during the day.
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Shogun
James Clavell
1600. An English navigator named John Blackthorne is shipwrecked on the coast of Japan and stumbles into the middle of a power struggle that will determine who rules the country. Over the next several hundred pages — this is a doorstop — Clavell immerses you so completely in feudal Japanese culture that by the end you're thinking in the logic of bushido and wondering why Western civilization bothered. The 1980 NBC miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain was a genuine national event that sent dads back to the book by the millions. If you want more Clavell after this, Tai-Pan covers the founding of Hong Kong with the same epic scope. Plan about two weeks for Shogun. It earns every page.
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Red Storm Rising
Tom Clancy
The Soviets invade Western Europe. NATO scrambles to hold the line. Unlike the Jack Ryan novels, Red Storm Rising follows a dozen characters across the Atlantic, the Norwegian coast, Iceland, and the North German Plain simultaneously. Clancy co-wrote it with Larry Bond, who designed the naval war game Harpoon, which explains why the tactical detail is almost hallucinatory. If Red October on the 90s Dad list is a chess match between two submarines, Red Storm Rising is the entire Cold War board flipped over. It's Clancy at his most ambitious and his most purely military. No film adaptation exists, which is both a shame and probably a relief given Hollywood's track record with Clancy.
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Glitz
Elmore Leonard
Miami cop Vincent Mora takes a vacation to Atlantic City to recover from a gunshot wound. A woman he once arrested turns up murdered. The man who shot Vincent shows up. Things escalate in the specific Elmore Leonard way — through a series of miscommunications between people who are all slightly stupider than they think they are. Glitz was Leonard's breakthrough with mainstream audiences after twenty years of writing westerns and Detroit crime novels. If you haven't read Leonard before, this is the entry point — tighter than Get Shorty on the 90s Dad list, faster, meaner. The dialogue alone justifies the price of admission. If you blow through this in a weekend and want more, go straight to Freaky Deaky next.
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Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
Earth has survived two alien invasions. To prepare for a third, the military is recruiting and training children — the most gifted strategic minds they can find — at Battle School, a space station where kids fight simulated zero-gravity combat. Ender Wiggin is six years old at the start and possibly the best they've ever seen. Card wrote what is ostensibly a science fiction novel for young adults and produced one of the most morally serious military novels of the decade. The central question — whether the ends justify the means when civilization is at stake — lands harder than it has any right to. Dads read this alongside their kids. The 2013 film starring Harrison Ford is competent but misses the book's moral weight almost entirely.
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Presumed Innocent
Scott Turow
Rusty Sabich is a prosecutor in a midsize midwestern city. When a female colleague he was sleeping with turns up murdered, he's assigned to the case. Then he becomes the case. Turow invented the modern legal thriller two years before Grisham published The Firm, and never quite got the credit he deserved for it. Presumed Innocent is darker and more literary than anything Grisham wrote, and the ending — which I will not spoil — is one of the more audacious conclusions in popular fiction. The 1990 film starring Harrison Ford and Raul Julia is excellent and holds up. The Firm on the 90s Dad list owes this book a significant debt. If you want more Turow after this, go to The Burden of Proof.
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The World According to Garp
John Irving
T.S. Garp is the illegitimate son of a famous feminist and a brain-damaged tail gunner. He becomes a writer, a father, a husband, and a target. Irving's novel is funny, dark, sexually frank, and genuinely moving in ways that sneak up on you. It sold modestly in 1978 and then exploded in paperback, becoming the literary novel that dads who didn't usually read literary novels actually finished. The 1982 film starring Robin Williams and Glenn Close is surprisingly faithful and worth watching after. Garp occupies the slot on this list that Bonfire of the Vanities holds on the 90s Dad list — the entry that's a step above the thrillers in literary ambition without losing the reader in the process.
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The Eye of the Needle
Ken Follett
1944. A German spy known as the Needle — so called for his preferred method of killing — has discovered the Allies' greatest deception and is racing for a U-boat pickup off the Scottish coast. Standing between him and the German high command is a lonely woman on an isolated island whose husband hasn't touched her since the car accident that crippled him. Follett wrote this lean and fast — it's under 400 pages and reads in two or three sittings. The 1981 film starring Donald Sutherland is one of the better WWII thriller adaptations of the era. If you want more Follett, The Fourth Protocol is also on this list, or jump ahead to Pillars of the Earth if you want him at maximum scope.
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The Fourth Protocol
Frederick Forsyth
A Soviet operation to smuggle the components of a nuclear device into England piece by piece, assemble it near an American air base, and detonate it weeks before a British election. The title refers to a secret clause of a non-proliferation agreement everyone has forgotten about. Forsyth is the master of the procedural thriller — his plots work because he researched them to the point where they feel less like fiction and more like a classified briefing someone left on a train. The 1987 film starring Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan is solid. If The Fourth Protocol leaves you wanting more Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal is where he started and where the entire political thriller genre begins — look for it on the 70s Dad list.
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The Winds of War
Herman Wouk
It's 1939. Commander Victor "Pug" Henry is a career Navy officer watching Europe slide toward catastrophe. Wouk follows Pug and his family across Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington as the world comes apart — a structure that lets him put an American witness at nearly every major event of the early war years. The 1983 ABC miniseries starring Robert Mitchum drew 140 million viewers over six nights, one of the most watched television events in American history, and sent dads to the bookstore by the millions. The sequel, War and Remembrance, covers the full war and is arguably the better book — darker, more honest about the Holocaust. Together they're among the most ambitious popular novels ever written. Start here.