Douglas Stuart’s John of John—there is a moment when John is waiting for his son, Cal, to come home.

Cal has been away in Edinburgh at university studying art. John worries about his son, doesn’t know exactly where he is or what he’s up to. He often wonders whether he will ever return home and, even if he does, whether he will stay in Falabay, a remote community on the Isle of Harris. Before I knew very much about John, I had already begun to recognise my father in him.

“I want my boy home. I want to sit with him and stare at him for a long time.”

This sentence keeps coming back to me every so often.

While reading the novel, it is quite difficult for us to see John as a tender man, given that he is stubborn, extremely religious and deeply attached to the small island community where he has spent his entire life. He has a set template for how Cal should behave and what his future ought to look like. Cal, on the other hand, has been on the mainland and has seen enough of another life to know that the one waiting for him at home might not fit.

Although John never confesses it to him, he misses Cal. It is definitely not in an I miss you way. He just wants his boy to come home so that he can sit and look at him. Surprisingly, the distance between what John feels and what he is capable of saying became one of the things I loved most about the novel.

The relationship between the father and son would be much easier to understand if their feelings for each other were simpler, but they aren’t.

Cal, on the other hand, adores his father in a slightly uncomfortable way. At one point, watching John after he has dropped him off, Cal thinks of his father as his “first love,” the mould against which he has measured other men. Men who are too weak, too talkative or too effeminate are quickly discarded in Cal’s private calculations.

It’s an inheritance. An inheritance of a strange kind.

Cal has left the island and entered a world his father doesn’t entirely understand, but John has travelled with him internally all the way. Whether Cal likes it or not, his idea of masculinity has been imprinted on him by John. He wants to resist John but still resembles him. No matter how far he goes, John never ceases to exist within his internal framework.

Reading them made me think of my own father.

My father owns a tractor workshop in a small town. He’s so good at his job that people call him a doctor for tractors. When I was younger, he wanted me to work with him. It was physical work, unusually hot and dirty, tons of sweating, and I hated everything about it. Eventually, my father told me I was too delicate to work with him. I knew exactly what he meant. I wasn’t man enough for the kind of work he understood.

I thought about this incident while reading Cal. There are two kinds of things when it comes to fathers and sons: things fathers tell their sons directly, and things their sons pick up simply by watching them. Things like what counts as strength, what kind of work has value, how a man should carry himself, what can and cannot embarrass a man, and what he should never admit to wanting.

Over the years, Cal has absorbed more of his father than either of them seems to be aware of. And yet the longer John of John goes on, the less certain we become that Cal actually knows his father.

On the outside, Cal knows his father as someone who crofts, is respected in the community and by church members alike, weaves and takes care of the house. But by the end, John’s relationship with his lover Innes, his desires, his faith, his shame and the compromises he has made between them all gradually reveal a person who is considerably harder to recognise than the father Cal has known his entire life.

There is a beautiful moment later in the novel when father and son have been working outside together. John takes off his shirt, and Cal watches him. Stuart writes that Cal could count on one hand the number of times he had seen his father’s body. He studies the marks that years of physical work have left on him and, suddenly overwhelmed, begins to cry.

“Dad, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” John tells him.

Then John turns away, keeping himself busy so that he can cry without his son seeing.

I found that scene unexpectedly moving because nothing is properly resolved. John doesn’t embrace him or suddenly become a different kind of father. They don’t have the conversation the reader might want them to have. Instead, father and son feel something neither seems capable of properly saying.

The feeling is there, but the language for it isn’t. I know exactly what this is.

My father and I aren’t emotionally close. We cannot sit together and discuss our feelings, and I absolutely cannot imagine asking him the questions that John of John has made me want to ask him.

I don’t know what my father wanted when he was young. I know for a fact that he grew up with little and left school when he was young to work and support the family. He’s good at his work and is extremely proud of it. But I don’t know what he imagined for himself before work and family became his life.

I don’t know if there was something else, and I have to resist inventing it.

It would make for a convenient essay if I discovered that my father had once wanted to paint or travel or become something wildly different. I could write about the dreams our parents sacrifice for us and arrive at some generous adult understanding of the difficult father of my childhood.

But I don’t know that any of it is true. Well, maybe the workshop was the dream.

This uncertainty is something John of John handles beautifully. John doesn’t become sympathetic because the novel produces an explanation that excuses him. If anything, knowing more about him makes him harder to understand. We see desire existing alongside repression, tenderness beside cruelty, faith beside contradiction.

Cal has to live with all of those versions of his father at once, and so does John.

There was another memory of my father that came back to me while reading. When I was a teenager, he once caught me reading a book instead of doing my homework. He took the book and tore it because “literature isn’t going to help, and you better do your homework before the consequences arrive.”

The memory is vivid, and I cannot recall the book I was reading, but there’s one thing I am sure about. This incident confirmed something I already believed about us. My father didn’t understand me. He worked with machines; I liked books. He wanted a son who wasn’t afraid of sweat and dirt; he got me.

I still think some of that is true. But John of John made me wonder whether knowing how someone failed to understand you is the same thing as understanding them.

Children know their parents in peculiar ways.

We know their footsteps. We can tell from the sound of a door closing what mood they’re in. We know when to ask for something and when not to bother. We know the phrases they repeat, the things that annoy them, what they consider wasteful. We become experts in reading them because, for a long time, our lives depend on them.

But we meet them halfway through their lives.

Cal knows John as his dad. But we, as readers, get access to a John who existed before and beyond that word. And something is unsettling about seeing the distance between the two.

My father is older now. I can see tenderness in him more easily than I could when I was young. He fusses over his garden because he wants his plants to be exactly right. He drives my mother around, gets her medicines and helps her as she needs. His care tends to arrive as something practical.

But the clearest memory I have of seeing another version of him came when my younger brother died. He cried in my arms, and I believe it was the first time I had ever seen him cry. I remember there wasn’t anything important to say. It simply was that his son had died; he cried, and I held him.

For once, I wasn’t thinking about whether I had disappointed him. I wasn’t the delicate son from the workshop or the teenager whose book he’d torn. And he wasn’t the immovable father I had spent so much of my childhood trying to understand. He was just a man in terrible pain.

I hesitate even writing that because grief shouldn’t have to become a lesson. My brother’s death didn’t reveal the “real” version of my father hiding underneath everything else. The father from my childhood was real too.

This is perhaps where John of John left me.

There is a temptation, when we get older, to revise our parents. We acquire context and begin explaining the people who once frightened or disappointed us. He grew up poor, didn’t know how to express affection. Or their generation was different, and he did the best he could.

Sometimes those things are true. But they also don’t change what it was like to be their child.

What I like about John is that Stuart doesn’t require Cal—or the reader—to choose one version of him. John can hurt his son and love him. He can want Cal close while making it difficult for Cal to remain. He can impose an idea of manhood while privately struggling against the limits of the same world. He can be a father and still possess parts of himself that his son may never fully know.

Perhaps that is why Cal’s description of John as his “first love” feels so important to me. Our fathers can become some of our earliest ideas about men before we have enough distance to decide whether those ideas are ones we actually want.

Some ideas we reject outright. Some we spend years trying to reject, only to discover we’ve carried them with us anyway.

I still don’t know what my father wanted from his life before my mother or I became part of it. I may never know. But I find myself curious in a way that I never was before. This feels like a small thing for a novel to do, or maybe it isn’t.

My father once tore a book from my hands because he thought literature wasn’t going to help me. Nearly twenty years later, I finished John of John and found myself thinking about the man who tore it.

Not forgiving him. Not explaining him.

Just wondering who he was before he was my father.