At first, the title character completely turned me off, with his five marriages and countless absurd failed business ventures.  I thought this book was going to turn out to be a farce.  However, as the book unfolds, we find that Charlie has redeeming qualities, despite the marital infidelities and poor judgment with regard to building a business.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he has a heart of gold, but neither is he heartless.  At 68 years old, he convinces himself that he has pancreatic cancer and proceeds to alert his children regarding his imminent death.  Apparently this is not the first time that he has diagnosed himself with a terminal illness, and his children are rightfully skeptical.  I don’t know to what degree this novel is autobiographical, but the narrator is Charlie’s son Jake, who is a writer.  Jake holds his father in high esteem, despite his father’s flaws and the uneasy relationship Jake has with Charlie’s current wife, Barbara, who seems to love Charlie more than perhaps he deserves.  Certainly Barbara and Charlie grew on me as the story unfolded, but the book has basically two endings, sort of like Atonement or Life of Pi.   I was not wild about this device in any of these books.  I can understand a need for dual endings if unreliable memories are at play, but that’s not the case.  The author has a different purpose here, and it ties in with Jake having given his father an unfinished draft of a book that Jake has written about Charlie, which is obviously this novel.  Several family members read this draft and uniformly react to it negatively, even denying some of its obvious facts, perhaps giving Jake pause about whether the truth is always the best path.