One Minute Book Reviews: A family saga of damage

Paul Scheufele, “Damaged Goods: A Novel.” Wolf House Publishing, 2025.
Brendan O’Shay and his “Irish twin” sister Cassie fight about her drinking when his family visits her on Christmas day 2007; furious, she orders them out of her house. The next day, Brendan, who has been called from Vermont to New York City by a crisis at the Global Investment Bank, receives a call from Cassie’s phone. It’s Emily, Cassie’s most trusted friend and Brendan’s long-forgotten high school girlfriend: Cassie has overdosed on painkillers.
At Cassie’s funeral a week later, Emily hands Brendan what Cassie had planned to give him at Christmas: a document that makes him legal custodian of her frozen eggs. Brendan’s wife argues that he should spend what free time he has with her and their son, not with Cassie’s bequest. But Cassie has left a memoir of her life, and having read it, Brendan decides to accept the eggs and “give Cassie a second chance.”
The book’s title comes from Cassie’s memoir, presented in chapters that alternate with Brendan’s memories of their 1970s adolescence in a working class family impoverished by their father’s alcoholism. “Damaged goods!” is a term that O’Shay uses to describe Cassie after a doctor has explained that abnormalities in her uterus make her unable to bear children. To the O’Shays, the diagnosis means that sixteen-year-old Cassie is cut off from the only normal life a woman of her class can expect. She and her ashamed parents keep the secret even from Brendan, and are unable to consider her possibilities—including a college scholarship that her father refuses because their family “doesn’t take charity.” And so, though the journal reveals Cassie’s exceptional talents with animals and fine carpentry, the working-man’s world in which she has to live is one of cruelties and injustices that eventually lead her to the final stages of wretched, grimly-described alcoholism.
Reading the journal, Brendan compares Cassie’s life to his success in the dog-eat-dog world of Wall Street. He is proud of the things he can give his wife and son (two houses, cars, private schools). He feels some guilt, because he escaped their family and town by getting a football scholarship to Painter College in Vermont, which his father did not consider a charity. But the more readers follow Brendan’s narrative, the more they see that he is as deeply damaged as his sister. Dedicated to financial and social success, he has become obsessed with making his son, whom he is seldom home long enough to see, into a better version of himself. And, contrary to the rules that govern egg donations, he tries to insist that he oversee “Cassie’s child” through every step of its life. It takes two major crises, one the 2008 market implosion and the other his family’s near disintegration, to make him realize how controlling his “success” has made him.
"Damaged Goods" is a debut novel. Its power compensates for its stylistic lack of confidence because of its sincere, confessional overtones. The most convincing parts of the book are those that deal with Brendan’s largely-forgotten teenage attraction to Emily and the damage he has accidentally done to Cassie but ignored emotionally. In chronicling Brendan’s history, Scheufele has set himself the difficult task of exposing his character’s failings without making his readers dislike him. Here he largely succeeds, though Brendan’s reaction to the book’s fifth-act revelation incidentally implies (to women readers, at least) the continuing limits of his vision.