“What we have here is a lack of communication.” Some of the critical action centers around one key day in which some magical realism crops up as all three get involved at different times and in different places with the same group of thugs and some with the hypnotist. The author uses an interesting technique in showing us conversation from both sides: first we see it from the perspective of the brother who made the call, for example, and then from the perspective of the brother who received the call. Each wrestles with the daily tension of living their fraudulent lives. We follow the three men as they occasionally interact with each other and as their father pops into their lives unexpectedly for a day a year and then disappears again. It’s a nihilist treatise: I don’t exist and neither do you. His latest book, My Name is No One, is all the rage. In the intervening years the father has become a famous author. The straight man is a financial advisor running a Ponzi scheme and dependent on a fistful of pharmaceuticals to get through the day the other is an art forger. The two twins still look alike and often have identical thoughts but one is straight and one is gay. One is fat (there’s another F) he’s a timid, faithless priest who is still waiting one day to believe. We find out that F is for fraud, faithless and forgery. We fast-forward to their life when the boys are now middle aged. Shortly afterwards the father abandons the boys and their mothers and disappears.

He and one of the boys end up on stage in what turns out to be a frightening and embarrassing experience. He’s an occasional dad and one day takes the three boys to a hypnotist.

The man is basically a doofus, a dreamer, a would-be writer who doesn’t write. He has identical twins by his current wife. A German man has three sons by two women.

F by daniel kehlmann