MY FATHER’S DIET
By Adrian Nathan West
173 pp. And Other Stories. Paper, $16.95.
“What’s the point of my life on this planet?” A big question, but the one at the core of West’s “My Father’s Diet,” a novel about a father who, recently divorced and looking for something to do, enters a bodybuilding contest. His son, the book’s narrator, decides to help him train, an agreement that offers an opportunity for the two to reconnect after years apart. As in real life, opportunities are easily wasted.
“My Father’s Diet” is a compact and stirring, if uneven, portrait of transgenerational hesitation. At its best, the novel showcases the recognizable confusion of a changing world. Actions no longer earn their predictable reactions. When the narrator’s father tells his fitness instructor that “rest and recovery is just as important as working out,” for instance, the instructor responds not by disagreeing but by lobbing a volley of obscenities. And while eavesdropping on a young couple, the narrator notes that they speak “disjointedly, with what psychologists call ‘poverty of affect,’ their conversations less like those of acquaintances or strangers than the dialogues from a first-year foreign language textbook.” Is this really all there is? West not only captures this estrangement for the narrator’s middle-aged father, but for the narrator himself — alienated before he’s even 21.
West has an eye for detail, like when he cannily describes a confusing rush of German language as resembling “the odd proper word bobbing to the surface like a soup bone in a pot of roiling broth.” But not all of his descriptions land, like when a bus floor is “grooved pink plastic, with white marbling, like a cut of bacon.” In these more jarring moments, the novel tests its way forward, exhibiting an uncertainty that the bodybuilding plot, introduced halfway through the book, seems to reinforce.
But back to the big question: life on this planet and all that. While helping his father, the narrator (who is inactive, unambitious, friendless) thinks of “the future, when I might do something interesting and my life’s character would cease to feel provisional and take on what people call meaning or direction.” But the world of the book, and the example set by the narrator’s father, convinces us this is a delusion: Let he who has learned from his father’s failures believe nakedly in his own ambitions.
DON’T CRY FOR ME
By Daniel Black
301 pp. Hanover Square. $26.99.
Black’s sad and gripping new novel is an example of how fiction is not just a form of literature but a place. We go there for lessons on how to live, how to change and, most important, how to forgive and seek forgiveness.
The book — written as a series of letters from a dying father to his estranged gay son — opens with an author’s note that explains the genesis of the novel: Black’s own father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2013 and his memory began to fade before they could “hash things out.” That meant the conversations he hoped to have with his father “could happen only in my imagination.” “Don’t Cry for Me” is the result of that imagining.
The novel’s father, Jacob, was cruel to his son, Isaac, and now, through the letters that make up the book, he is trying to contextualize his life and his choices, a life in which love “wasn’t a man’s achievement.” In this way, “Don’t Cry for Me” rides the rickety line between tragedy and melodrama. But despite its sentimental risks — it features an obsessive, cloying focus on family meals (“Grandma’s food was the best I’ve ever tasted”), for example, and repeats the assertion that simply telling the story or getting it off one’s chest will make a difference — a theme emerges: “Don’t Cry for Me” is a novel about novels, a story about stories.
Part of what motivates Jacob to write is, in fact, reading. After “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Jacob declares: “I’d never known I could decide how to live, how to be in this world. Never knew I had the right.” After “The Color Purple,” he concludes, “What we’d once called a man was actually a monster.” It is reading, too, that brings Isaac into a more accepting world, out of his father’s reach: “You were a reader, you lived in your imagination.” And it is reading that gives Jacob a tool by which he might apologize for his abuses and transform his image in his son’s eye, letter by letter.
With its limited perspective, “Don’t Cry for Me” has no access to Isaac’s imagination. We’re left only with Jacob’s last letters, his last, unanswered plea: “Just remember that, although we were flawed, we were marvelous, too.” The great risk he takes, as the reader well knows, is that Isaac may not want to remember at all.
THE DEATH OF MY FATHER THE POPE
By Obed Silva
292 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
A third of the way into his debut memoir, Silva riffs on “The Sopranos”: “Tony Soprano remarks that ‘remember when…’ is the lowest form of conversation.” But Silva disagrees. For a drunk like his father, “‘Remember when’ is the only form of conversation. The past is the only subject he is capable of discussing at length, and there is no future there.”
It’s perhaps fitting, then, that “The Death of My Father the Pope” calls to mind a drunken man alone in a bar who wants to “remember when” with you about each of his scars. His tales are moving. They are also exhausting.
The fugue is a delicate form, particularly for a memoir about a wake and funeral. Over and over, Silva snaps from the present action of this memorial back into the past to explore his father’s life. Through these flashbacks, Silva gives an impressionistic, appropriately chaotic view of his father: Not only was he a drunk, he was also an artist who abandoned his talent. He beat his wives and children, and he started and dropped families like hobbies. He “loved us in the way that only a sick man can love anybody: indelicately,” Silva says.
Throughout the memoir, Silva explains that his family is not like others: “No black-and-white American-dream family.” Instead, “violence is in our blood,” he says, as if it’s a mythological curse to bear and not systemic harm done to and perpetuated by people. The violence Silva describes is disturbing; and though he seems to acknowledge the chauvinistic aspects of being raised in a family that believes violence is its inheritance, it’s still hard not to cringe at some of the casual misogyny in the book — a dismissive description of an art buyer as “some uppity lawyer lady,” for example, or a man being a “victim” to a woman’s hypnotizing eyes — especially in a story haunted by rape.
Silva seems to be trying to humanize someone who caused immense pain, to understand someone whose crimes, literal and moral, have hurt generations of his family. It’s a grand and necessary undertaking, particularly at such an ethically binary moment in history — when it has become too easy to erase or ignore the good parts of people because they have done terrible things as well. However, the memoir’s exuberance pushes it closer to legend than literature: that is, further out of reach.
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