Word: roth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Patrimony is an account of how Roth cared for his 86-year-old father during the last stages of the parent's incurable brain tumor. The trick of it is that there are no tricks, just a masterly demonstration of narrative control and emotional clarity...
There are laughs where only Roth can find them: a nutty Auschwitz survivor hustling his pornographic Holocaust novel. But elsewhere, readers may find themselves close to tears. Looking at the magnetic-resonance images of the growth that is killing his father, Roth thinks, "This was the tissue that had manufactured his set of endless worries and sustained for more than eight decades his stubborn self-discipline, the source of everything that had so frustrated me as his adolescent son." And also powered Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint...
...Herman Roth was a retired Newark insurance man. Until his illness, he was a vigorous and dapper widower, a catch for the golden girls of West Palm Beach, Fla. He spent part of his winters there. The rest of the year he lived in a modest Elizabeth, N.J., apartment where he washed his own socks and underwear in the bathroom sink rather than use the coin-operated laundry in the basement...
...father's unnecessary frugality annoys the successful son, but it is also % the source of affectionate amusement. "Among the more distressing economies was his refusal to buy his own New York Times," writes Roth. "He worshiped that paper and loved to spend the morning reading it through, but now, instead of buying his own, he waited all day long to have a copy passed on to him by somebody in his building who had been feckless enough to fork over the 35 cents...
...disease progresses, and the son becomes parent to the father. "Maybe you want to go in first and do something about your socks. You've got two different colors on. And I don't know if that checked shirt goes with those plaid trousers." Roth and his brother agonize about whether or not to let the doctors remove the tumor, an operation that may prolong their father's life but could also remove whatever it is that made Herman Roth Herman Roth. "Will I be a zombie?" he asks...