As Good As Can Be - William A. Glass

As Good As Can Be is one of those coming-of-age novels with which people of a certain age find it so easy to identify. If your own coming-of-age spans the fifties and sixties (as mine did), the novel is almost certain to get you thinking about your own experiences during those years. But that’s far from all that William A. Glass’s As Good As Can Be has going for it because Dave Knight’s growing-up story turns out to be quite an adventure. Before this one is over, we spend time with the Knight family in Iran, follow the military family from one army post to another, and get a long look at what it was liked to be stationed in South Korea almost two decades after the dust settled on the Korean War.

And Dave Knight lives on the edge the whole time, never making it easy on anyone who cares for him – or, for that matter, on anyone forced to deal with him by circumstance, be they teachers, superior officers, or employers.

Today, Dave would likely be one of those kids said to be suffering from ADD, kids who are often very bright but just can’t sit still long enough to concentrate on their studies. But in the fifties, Dave is diagnosed simply as a pain in the butt by his teachers and, more importantly, by his strict Army officer father who sees him as an embarrassing failure. Dave is such an avid reader that reading is pretty much all he wants to do, no matter what class he is in or how far ahead of his reading class he might already be. Otherwise, he cannot sit still and he cannot shut up, neither of which do anything to endear him to his teachers. The pattern is set early in his life, and Dave’s father gives up on him just as early.

William A. Glass

That tells you a lot about Lieutenant Colonel David S. Knight Jr., Dave’s father, but it doesn’t tell you just how often, or how tragically, the colonel lets down his wife and children. Dave and his brothers and sisters spend most of their time trying either to please their demanding father or to avoid him altogether. They usually fail at both – sometimes with life-scarring consequences.

Dave, though, is a survivor, and this is his story.

Bottom Line: As Good As Can Be may be primarily a coming-of-age story, but it is also quite the page-turner, and it’s easy to get caught up in the Knight family’s tragic story, a story largely written by the family’s alcoholic patriarch, a man unwilling ever to put his wife and children above his own military ambitions. This one is one hell of a ride.

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