Although the Brooklyn setting of Flesh and Blood appears in many of Hamill's other novels, prose pieces, and memoirs, no other title is directly related. Hamill's heroes often have a mother similar to Kate, and often she is Irish; the remote, distant father is a fictional staple for Hamill. Sexual initiation of a young man by an older woman is a frequently recurring theme as well, although the older woman isn't usually the boy's mother. The incest theme in Flesh and Blood makes psychological implications inescapable, along with the shadows of Oedipus and Hamlet. In Hamill's novel, however, the son seeks to know, not kill, his father, and the impetus is not psychological but naturalistic, a pain-induced response to the barrenness of the characters' surroundings and their emotional prospects.

Bobby Fallon is, in fact, the antithesis of the Hamlet prototype, since Bobby is almost entirely a...