UVA Author’s Debut Novel Earns National Recognition

When Kevin Moffett writes about family, he finds beauty in bewilderment. In his debut novel Only Son, set first in Florida in the 1980s and later in suburban California, Moffett tells the story of a boy who grows up haunted by his father’s death and of a man still trying to make sense of the loss decades later. Recently named to the 2025 National Book Awards Longlist, the novel, available November 4^th, confirms Moffett’s arrival as a major voice in contemporary fiction.

An assistant professor in the University of Virginia’s creative writing program, Moffett has earned both a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize for short fiction celebrated for its humor, lyricism and emotional depth. In Only Son, he expands those gifts with a fresh and compelling take on love and loss that blends the best of the coming-of-age novel, the fatherhood novel and the road novel in a way that one critic has described as perfectly capturing “the long ache of fatherhood in all its baffling beauty.”

In the following excerpt, Moffett’s narrator recounts the strangeness of his new home — a Florida development teeming with alligators, snakes and other dangers, both real and imagined. It’s a vivid beginning to a story that ultimately stretches across decades, tracing how the mysteries of childhood reverberate through the long and imperfect education of a father.

Excerpt from Only Son

We move to a new townhouse. The sign at the entrance: LAKEBRIDGE ESTATES: PEACEFUL COASTAL LIVING. To remind us. A dozen tracts of identical gravy-brown townhouses next to a manmade lake. Our unit has a view of a distant windowless building with twenty chimneys, where I’m pretty sure they’re incinerating pets. All the missing dogs and cats in town, this is where they end up. I know it. The air at night always smells kind of scorched and furry. The townhouse is cheaply built. You can’t sneeze without someone knowing. You can’t cry on the toilet without someone knowing. I sleep in a baby’s room beneath a big smiling whale painted on the wall. He looks deranged, like he would destroy your boat just to have someone to play with for a little while. The carpet reeks of stale menthol cigarettes. In the manmade lake are two alligators, Smokey and Kermit. Beneath our back porch is a den of cottonmouths. In the trees are livid owls. The circle of life, below us, above us, hidden in the pores of our bones, invisible. 

A friend gives her a copy of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It sits on a bookshelf in my new room. I scan its title probably a thousand times. It helps me fall asleep if I imagine it as a jingle: Bad things happen to good people in monsoons, hot-air balloons. Ancient tombs, hospital rooms. Did the bad thing happen to my father, I wonder, or is it happening to us? And what makes us particularly good? Not once am I tempted to take the book off the shelf and find out. 

The wildfires come late that summer. Miles north of us, the pinewoods burn for weeks, clotting the coast of Florida with resinous smoke. We’re told to remain indoors. We do as we’re told. Outside the windows pine ash falls and falls, and I play with Star Wars action figures. I’m not allowed to see the movies. I scare too easily. I invent my own story about heroic Darth Vader and his war against the stars. His helmet gives him a sad look: triangle mouth, dead black eyes. I imagine the war is going poorly. A friend tells me that he’s the villain and the Stormtroopers are his henchmen. I reject it. My Star Wars has no bad guys. The action figures fight side-by-side against the stars, always overhead but too distant to attack. They curse them from my bedroom carpet. 

Finally it rains and I’m allowed to go outside again with the other hostile fauna. Friends and I hunt snakes in the palmetto scrub around our townhouse. I come home one night covered in chigger bites, and my mother brushes clear nail polish over the welts. I lie shirtless and miserable as the chiggers suffocate in their hidey-holes. My body is a decoy, a trap made of meat. I scratch off the scabs of dried polish one by one. I watch the retired bail bondsman next door decapitate a cottonmouth with a shovel. The snake’s severed head keeps snapping while its headless body slithers away, and the retired bail bondsman grins and gestures with the shovel as if he’s orchestrated this educational display just for me. 

I watch television until it feels like a punishment. I watch soap operas, religious cartoons, after-school specials. All my favorite movies depict growing up as a blossoming, a slow unveiling of what’s already there. Maybe it is for some. For me it is work, the daily chore of fashioning myself into something I can live with. So little to excavate, so much to bury. I watch The Terry Fox Story whenever it comes on, scene after scene of that beleaguered Canadian running through the provinces on a prosthetic leg. Running a marathon a day after his cancer diagnosis to raise money for research. I know I could do something remarkable if I went blind or found out I was dying or had to have one of my limbs amputated, but maybe under no other circumstances.