The Donor

Description of The Donor

In The Donor, a calloused cynic who meets a son he never knew existed ends up casting off his narcissistic fatalism and sacrificing his freedom for the wellbeing of the boy.

The novel is narrated from two alternating points of view.  Sibley Cathright is a 39 year-old collector who works for a Las Vegas loan shark.  Nathan Fontez is a 16 year-old high school student who works part-time at the Minneapolis hotel at which Sibley stays while trying to collect a loan from a delinquent debtor.  Sibley and Nathan provide different perspectives on the events leading up to the discovery of a criminal scheme about to envelope both Nathan and Sibley.  While Nathan narrates with a hopeful and sometimes naïve sense of humor, Sibley conveys a more jaded, cynical humor.

Living on the road, Sibley pursues the debts that out-of-town gamblers incur during their visits to Las Vegas.  To occupy all his time in hotels and airports, Sibley works on a book about his experiences as a repossessor: The Pessimist’s Guide to Success: The 100 Rules of a Repossessor for Profiting from Failure.

                  Rule 17: Getting mad in a negotiation is like shooting yourself on a hunting trip just because you missed the ducks and want to hit something.

The present loan collection brings Sibley back to the city in which he grew up.  He has only returned to Minneapolis once in the last fifteen years, to satisfy a nagging curiosity brought on by a hospital stay in which a preacher in the next bed kept talking about the legacy of moral character in one’s children.  When he got out of the hospital, Sibley traveled to Minneapolis and broke into the records of a fertility clinic to see if anyone had ever used his sample.

Sibley doesn’t believe in free will or moral action.  His anarchist parents taught him that life was simply a matter of fate and that the outcomes in life had nothing to do with how life was lived.  As fugitives wanted for their participation in a 1969 campus bombing, his parents never got caught, even after they became local celebrities for their greeting card business. His belief in fate makes Sibley a good repossessor. He never cares about the people from whom he has to collect; to him, everything is fate.  It was fate that they took out the loan, fate that they couldn’t pay, and fate that he has come to call due their debt.

                  Rule 31: When people give you advice, that’s all they are going to give you.

At his Minneapolis hotel, Sibley meets Nathan, an entrepreneurial boy whose life centers on finding ways to make enough money to support a mother traveling across the country participating in self-actualization conferences.  After two days of conversing with the boy, Sibley notices his absence one morning and discovers that Nathan was arrested for attempted theft at the very same car dealership that Sibley’s debtor had put up for collateral on his loan. Suspecting that the boy is not the innocent kid he pretends to be, Sibley goes to the police station to post bail, only to learn that a priest has already done so. Nathan comes across as a boy eager to grow up and get a job. But Sibley figures this is all a put-on. Sibley’s suspicions heighten when he learns that Nathan has secured a job at the hotel for a friend: Frannie, the daughter of the man from whom Sibley is trying to collect.

                  Rule 58: Just because people are paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not lazy.

The more he focuses on Nathan and Frannie as keys to uncovering the whereabouts of the debtor’s money, the more Sibley comes to like the boy.  He thinks Nathan is an enterprising little con artist running a number of scams and that Nathan works at the hotel just to scout out which guests might be ripe for the picking.  And to have a priest bail you out of jail?  Nice touch, Sibley thinks. On the other hand, Nathan really does seem to have a friendship with the priest, and Nathan really does seem to want to help Frannie.  As Frannie says of Nathan, “he’s the kind of friend you want when you don’t want friends.”  She admires Nathan for his strength and independence: “Kids are scared of Nathan because he doesn’t seem scared of the same stuff they’re all scared of.”

Nathan always talks about how he needs to take care of the house while his mother is gone, but his stories about his father constantly change.  His father died in the war.  His father died in a plane crash while traveling to a foreign mission.  His father died while battling an epidemic as a doctor.  Then one day, when he gives Nathan a ride home, the house and address trigger Sibley’s memories from his break-in at the fertility clinic years earlier, and Sibley realizes that Nathan is his test tube son. This discovery disrupts all Sibley’s beliefs about fate and genetic inevitability. He had always believed he was the way he was because of the way his parents were.  He wasn’t to blame for how he had turned out.

Even after discovering that Nathan had broken into the car lot to help his friend Fannie return money stolen by her father, Sibley refuses to believe that any offspring of his could be as compassionate and considerate as Nathan appears.  So Sibley devises a plan to accomplish two goals: collect his boss’s debt; and test Nathan’s real character.

 Sibley has learned that the car lot is now part of a drug operation.  He figures out how to hijack one of the cars after it has been loaded with cash, and involves Nathan in the scheme by preying on Nathan’s admiration of him.  (Sibley became a hero to Nathan and his friends when he stood up to a group of bullying gang members.)  But as the plan unfolds, Sibley perceives that the drug dealers have changed their schedule, which means Nathan will be walking into a trap.  At the last moment, Sibley calls the cops and rushes in to distract the dealers.  He gets arrested as a suspected drug dealer, but saves Nathan.

His relationship with Nathan inspires a moral transformation in Sibley.  And as Nathan and the priest regularly visit him in prison, Sibley opens himself to their messages of hope and redemption.

                  Rule 100: Just when you think you have it figured out, maybe you don’t.

Reviews of The Donor

Garry’s plot moves quickly through its narrative, picking up speed immediately and never letting up.  The transitions between characters and narrators is strong and avoids any slow down in pace.  Part thriller, part family drama, part mystery, this entertaining novel defies any real genre convention but is a fun and inspired read.  Nathan is extraordinarily sympathetic as a protagonist and his emotions ring true and are deeply felt.
–Booklife

Literary Awards

Independent Press Award, 2022

Somerset Book Award for Literary and Contemporary Fiction

The American Fiction Award