Strictly coincidental, the selection of two books to be read one after the other, so different on the surface in what they relate, but in both there resounds a recurring theme, an undercurrent of human emotion and human suffering, and in both, one a novel, the other a memoir, the bleak image of a child struggling within an adult psyche to overcome a father's influence. The influence of a father - actually a number of fathers within both books, whose early deaths, or casual misunderstanding of a child's emotional needs, shaped the adult that child would become, and not in positive ways.

First, there was a Governor General's award-winning novel, The Underpainter published in 1997 by Jane Urquhart, a Canadian novelist, a period piece exploring the character of an artist whose life has been impressed by his American father's turn-of-the-century mining plans for a small Ontario town, and whose travels take him repeatedly back to small towns adjacent the shores of Lakes Ontario and Superior. And how the issues and sacrifices surrounding the First World War impacted the lives of Canadians with whom he interacts, sent overseas to serve in France, returning as fragile and incapacitated human beings.

The other, the reminiscences of a still-young man who is an American war correspondent. His book, published a decade later titled Dispatches From the Edge describes a happy early childhood overlaid with the most supreme of tragedies, the death of his father when he was ten years of age, and the subsequent shattering of his world, complicated by the death by suicide of his mentally troubled older brother years afterward, these accounts interlacing his travels to document foreign conflicts and natural disasters. Anderson Cooper dedicates his book: "To my mom and dad, and the spark of recognition that brought them together."

In both the novel and the memoir, the protagonist and the author respectively have closed themselves off to any further incursions by human emotion and deep intimate contact that stirred tamped-down memories of their early lives. In the novel the story's aloof and manipulative narrator admits his selfish iciness and unwillingness to love a woman whom he has exploited for too many years to satisfy both his own personal and painterly needs, leaving us with the distaste we feel recoiling from his final cruel abandonment of her needs.

In the memoir, Anderson Cooper interlaces his personal search for equilibrium and life-assurances with the inner struggle that haunts him of having failed his brother in his need for emotional strength and reassurance, the inner vacuum he experiences and his consuming need to place himself in personally dangerous exposure to death in his pursuit of human interest stories to convey to his wide public, eager to consume stories of far-off disasters. He searches for his own 'spark of recognition', but never overtly.

In the background of both the novel and the memoir, the destructive influences of war on survivors and combatants and observers is meticulously recounted in the dysfunctionality of those who were involved, and the recounting of how they attempt to make sense of their lives and find fulfillment - where failure stalks them relentlessly along with the spectre of death - the all-too-human story of human fallibility is present.