Philip Roth's memoir "Patrimony"--a book I return to again and again--reads like a thriller. The nemesis is introduced to us in the first sentence. It's a strange condition that causes half of Roth's father's face to cave in on itself.
Roth was heavily influenced by Kakfa, and there's a Kafka-esque quality to this opening. "He woke up and found his face was gone." You think of Gregor, in "The Metamorphosis," waking to discover that he is a cockroach. Or the guy in "The Trial," realizing he is under threat of persecution, and no one can explain what he has done wrong.
That's life!
People get breathless about "American Pastoral," but there's a substantial minority of critics arguing that this isn't Roth's best work. Daphne Merkin and Lorrie Moore are in this minority. Merkin prefers Roth's more personal writing; she cites "My Life as a Man." Moore likes the intellectual playfulness of "Operation Shylock." Both Moore and Merkin are wild about "Patrimony," and Tobias Wolff called it one of Roth's best works.
It's strange, then, that many people haven't read this book.
Moore says that a good memoir should have a sense of advocacy--and it does seem that Roth is thinking of his reader as he tells his tale. There isn't lecturing, but Roth seems to be saying, "Look, we all may end up cleaning shit out of crevices with a toothbrush." "Look, we all may find ourselves wagging a finger at a once-formidable parent and saying, Do as I say." "We all may have weird and irrational grief over an inheritance." (There's comfort in discovering that there's really nothing extraordinary about your own pain.)
Another notable aspect of "Patrimony" is Roth's sense of uneasiness about his own project. "A writer is someone with a chip of ice in his heart," said Anonymous. "All journalism is morally indefensible," said Janet Malcolm, more or less. Roth assists his father with obvious love and care--and yet, all the while, he is scribbling notes in a small notebook, in secret. After his father's death, Roth is haunted by a final decision: "Do I bury him in a shroud or in a suit?" He comes to understand that this question has weight because it's a metaphor for something else: "Have I represented him properly, in print?" (Is this book a shroud or a suit, and is it really the thing that best-fits the corpse I'm talking about?)
Mostly, I recommend this book because it has a sense of white-hot intensity. There seems to be a life-and-death struggle behind every sentence. After finishing, I picked up Dave Holmes's cute and well-regarded memoir, "Party of One," and I couldn't get very far, because it seemed so trivial after Roth.
Mary Karr says a memoir should have a sense of "the Divided Self," and you see that on every page, in "Patrimony." Roth finds his father's bullheaded imperiousness exhausting--and yet it's that same imperiousness and stubbornness that ended up passed down, via genes, of course. It's that same stubbornness that explains why we have "The Ghost Writer," "Nemesis," etc. Roth feels exasperated by his father's lack of sentimentality--how Roth, Sr., will give away his son's Phi Beta Kappa key, without pausing to think--and yet Roth also feels so much love for his father, he views college as a "two-birds-in-one-stone" process. (He will somehow ingest all of that knowledge both for himself *and* for his father, who did not make it beyond the eighth grade.)
Roth is unsparing in his account of the way his father bullied his mother, and yet he also takes time to note Roth, Sr's anguish in his final months on Earth. It's not really anguish at the thought of dying: It's anguish that grows from the knowledge that he couldn't be present for his son's bypass surgery. ("I should have been there. I should have been there.")
I wish that more people would read this book--it's funny and harrowing and universal in its relevance--and I'm glad that the chorus of Roth supporters seems to get bigger and bigger (Isaac Mizrahi, Ann Patchett, Lena Dunham, Tom Perrotta, Janet Malcolm, and Harlan Coben, to name a few).
My favorite Roth story is that--when he was starting out--he couldn't find a topic. He found himself describing to a friend, in great detail, a doomed effort to "get in someone's pants." He simply couldn't seduce this date, and the failed seduction became a great comic monologue. The friend listened, and said, "There. That's your book." And so we were given "Goodbye, Columbus." And the rest was history.
Just a few thoughts on an already-celebrated American. Not news--but if you treat yourself to "Patrimony," you won't regret it.
Roth was heavily influenced by Kakfa, and there's a Kafka-esque quality to this opening. "He woke up and found his face was gone." You think of Gregor, in "The Metamorphosis," waking to discover that he is a cockroach. Or the guy in "The Trial," realizing he is under threat of persecution, and no one can explain what he has done wrong.
That's life!
People get breathless about "American Pastoral," but there's a substantial minority of critics arguing that this isn't Roth's best work. Daphne Merkin and Lorrie Moore are in this minority. Merkin prefers Roth's more personal writing; she cites "My Life as a Man." Moore likes the intellectual playfulness of "Operation Shylock." Both Moore and Merkin are wild about "Patrimony," and Tobias Wolff called it one of Roth's best works.
It's strange, then, that many people haven't read this book.
Moore says that a good memoir should have a sense of advocacy--and it does seem that Roth is thinking of his reader as he tells his tale. There isn't lecturing, but Roth seems to be saying, "Look, we all may end up cleaning shit out of crevices with a toothbrush." "Look, we all may find ourselves wagging a finger at a once-formidable parent and saying, Do as I say." "We all may have weird and irrational grief over an inheritance." (There's comfort in discovering that there's really nothing extraordinary about your own pain.)
Another notable aspect of "Patrimony" is Roth's sense of uneasiness about his own project. "A writer is someone with a chip of ice in his heart," said Anonymous. "All journalism is morally indefensible," said Janet Malcolm, more or less. Roth assists his father with obvious love and care--and yet, all the while, he is scribbling notes in a small notebook, in secret. After his father's death, Roth is haunted by a final decision: "Do I bury him in a shroud or in a suit?" He comes to understand that this question has weight because it's a metaphor for something else: "Have I represented him properly, in print?" (Is this book a shroud or a suit, and is it really the thing that best-fits the corpse I'm talking about?)
Mostly, I recommend this book because it has a sense of white-hot intensity. There seems to be a life-and-death struggle behind every sentence. After finishing, I picked up Dave Holmes's cute and well-regarded memoir, "Party of One," and I couldn't get very far, because it seemed so trivial after Roth.
Mary Karr says a memoir should have a sense of "the Divided Self," and you see that on every page, in "Patrimony." Roth finds his father's bullheaded imperiousness exhausting--and yet it's that same imperiousness and stubbornness that ended up passed down, via genes, of course. It's that same stubbornness that explains why we have "The Ghost Writer," "Nemesis," etc. Roth feels exasperated by his father's lack of sentimentality--how Roth, Sr., will give away his son's Phi Beta Kappa key, without pausing to think--and yet Roth also feels so much love for his father, he views college as a "two-birds-in-one-stone" process. (He will somehow ingest all of that knowledge both for himself *and* for his father, who did not make it beyond the eighth grade.)
Roth is unsparing in his account of the way his father bullied his mother, and yet he also takes time to note Roth, Sr's anguish in his final months on Earth. It's not really anguish at the thought of dying: It's anguish that grows from the knowledge that he couldn't be present for his son's bypass surgery. ("I should have been there. I should have been there.")
I wish that more people would read this book--it's funny and harrowing and universal in its relevance--and I'm glad that the chorus of Roth supporters seems to get bigger and bigger (Isaac Mizrahi, Ann Patchett, Lena Dunham, Tom Perrotta, Janet Malcolm, and Harlan Coben, to name a few).
My favorite Roth story is that--when he was starting out--he couldn't find a topic. He found himself describing to a friend, in great detail, a doomed effort to "get in someone's pants." He simply couldn't seduce this date, and the failed seduction became a great comic monologue. The friend listened, and said, "There. That's your book." And so we were given "Goodbye, Columbus." And the rest was history.
Just a few thoughts on an already-celebrated American. Not news--but if you treat yourself to "Patrimony," you won't regret it.
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