Patrimony

February 4, 1991
Alter ego Nathan Zuckerman doesn't appear in these pages, and neither is there any sleight of hand blurring the line between literature and life. Instead, here is Roth (NBCC Award-winning The Counterlife ) at his most humane as he pens a kaddish to his recently deceased father, Herman. A vigorous 86-year-old, Roth pere wakes up one morning and half his face is paralyzed; soon he is deaf in one ear and the verdict is a benign brain tumor. Surgery is ruled out for the octogenarian, and the author is a helpless, horrified witness to his father's humiliating demise, ``utterly isolated within a body that had become a terrifying escape-proof enclosure, the holding pen in a slaughterhouse.'' In a fast-paced, cogent memoir, Roth, whose filial devotion and awe are tempered with clear-eyed observational powers, ranges far afield and discusses the anti-Semitism of the insurance firm that employed Herman Roth for 40 years; Herman's perfectionism and his latter-day disregard for his wife whom he nevertheless elevated to quasi-sainthood after death; Herman's abandonment of his phylacteries in a locker at the local YMHA; the author's quintuple bypass surgery weeks before his father's death; and Herman's incontinence and the ample size of his genitals. BOMC alternate.

Philip Roth's "death of a life insurance salesman" won the National Book Critic's Circle Award in 1991. The insurance salesman was his father. This great work is made greater still by George Guidall's magnificent performance. Guidall plays the dying father with an outrage that is both heroic and slightly absurd. The novelist is horrified by the old man, but also deeply in love. Losing life, Herm Roth decides to save cash. He fires the cleaning lady and stops the newspaper. Robbed at gunpoint, he advises the escaping felon: "Now don't go spend it on crap." This clear-eyed but adoring book asks a single question: "Why should a man die at all?" When the man helps the boy, they both laugh. When the boy helps the man, they both cry. B.H.C. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine