She told him, "When I was in college I read a folktale about a father pursuing a son who'd run far away, from one world to the next. The father called to him, 'Please come back!' But his son looked across the great gulf between them and shouted to him, 'I can't go that far!' So his father yelled to his son, 'Then just come back halfway!' But his boy replied, 'I can't go back halfway!' And finally his father shouted, 'Walk back as far as you can! I'll go the rest of the way!'" - Atticus

Sixty-seven-year-old oilman and rancher Atticus Cody returns home one day before Christmas just in time to see a yellow taxicab heading away from his white two-story house. Yelling "Who's there?" but receiving no reply, he enters to find his forty-year-old son, with sunburnt face and hair bleached platinum by the sun, sitting in his father's green wingback chair. "Merry Christmas," Scott says to his astonished father.

So begins this novel of separation and return, hurt and forgiveness. An alcoholic wanderer and artist, Scott has recently settled into a life of reckless partying and drinking among a group of expatriates and Mexicans living in the town of ResurrecciÛn on the Caribbean coast. It is a parasitic existence, in stark contrast to the lives of his upright father and older brother Frank, a highly regarded state senator with a perfect wife and four children.

Not long after Scott returns to Mexico, Atticus receives a phone call from Renata Isaacs, Scott's former girlfriend, telling him that Scott has committed suicide. Atticus goes down alone to ResurrecciÛn to recover Scott's body. Yet as his journey unfolds, Atticus's memories of and longing for his son become interwoven with his search for answers to why his son died and, ultimately, who his son was. In Resurreccion, Atticus and Scott achieve a reconciliation of abiding love and forgiveness that, as Hansen suggests, is what keeps our world from falling apart.

"The goal of writing is [to be] as clear and beautiful as possible, trying to produce symmetry and harmony out of chaos--like medieval carvers who were trying to imitate what angels would do on earth." - Ron Hansen