Every so often, an author writes a poignant, incisive portrayal that accurately captures the disillusionment of a free-spirited rebel who grows up to find him- or herself living in the suburbs, saddled with a mortgage and trying to navigate the treacherous path of raising children without losing touch with the child within.

Rocket Man, by William Elliot Hazelgrove, is not one of those books.

The opening pages introduce us to our protagonist, Dale Hammer: a dried-up novelist who is a petty, self-absorbed ass tilting at windmills of his own creation to avoid facing the possibility his creative well may have run dry.

While fuming over his own father’s neglect throughout his childhood — an emotional wound reopened when his ne’er-do-well father moves in with him — our “hero” in turn both neglects and humiliates his own wife and child. This, miraculously, comes clear to him in a climactic scene that was predictable from the first third of the book. But is he changed by it? We’ll never know, as the book’s final scenes make clear that Dale continues to take pride in the same misconduct he’d engaged in at the start of the book.

There are, I’ve heard, some authors who possess the talent of making an irritating, ordinarily unlikeable main character somewhat endearing to readers. Unfortunately, Hazelgrove fell far short of that mark with Rocket Man. Rather than finding myself charmed by Dale Hammer, I simply wish he’d blast off.

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