Terrible things will surely be said about 1991, but let’s remember that within its first week it did produce a first-rate book. In fact, “Patrimony,” an artful, moving and at times very funny narrative, is Philip Roth’s best effort in more than a decade. If his recent novels have seemed overly schematic and complaining - as if Roth had exhausted the experiences he could turn into fiction - his new book develops from a new upheaval in his life. For about 18 months in 1987 and 1988, Roth found himself obliged to oversee his father’s death. A writer knows instantly what such an event means: it means a new book. “In keeping with the unseemliness of my profession,” Roth confesses, “I had been writing [it] all the while he was ill and dying.” If that sounds callous, it isn’t, really: the sliver of ice embedded in every good writer’s heart allowed Roth to raise this wise and loving monument.
We first met Herman Roth in his son’s autobiography, “The Facts.” In “Patrimony,” a memoir, the elder Roth is 86, a widower in disrepair. His right eye no longer functions; the right side of his face is sunk in paralysis. Tests reveal a massive brain tumor that has seized possession of his skull’s interior, wrapping itself around vital conduits. A ghastly operation, lasting many hours, may help, or it may kill the old man; either way, he’ll never be himself again. Somehow the son must find a way to explain all this to his father. Sons are never prepared for such burdens, but others were to follow.
Roth’s enforced intimacy with his father in his time of crisis prompted a series of reassessments. Herman Roth, a retired insurance man with an eighth-grade education, was not the kind of man about whom books are written. Obsessively stubborn, bossy and cruel, he can be made interesting only through the art of his son’s remembrance. To this end, Roth shrewdly avoids the temptation to fiction. “Patrimony” could not have survived any more of Roth’s denials that his books are about himself. It works precisely because Roth acknowledges that, yes, this is his real self: adjusting, fearing, coming to understand his father on his own terms and realizing that his father’s outrageous behavior is what has kept the old man going.
His father’s tumor, Roth observes, was “as obdurate and gristly as he was.” Herman Roth abused the last woman he loved, insisting she couldn’t open a soup can properly. He meant only to educate her. “I never argue. If I tell her something, I only tell it to her for her own good.” He had, his son explains, a “peremptory personality.” He also insisted on remembering aloud the Newark he had known in 1912: on this corner, such a store, and across the street, so-and-so’s apartment. Herman Roth’s doctors paled at his historical digressions. “He understood, like the rest of us,” his son reports, “only what he understood, though that he understood fiercely.” And though he doesn’t say so, that obsessiveness became his son’s inheritance: it’s always been the engine that propels Roth’s best novels and stories.
Without hope that his father’s condition would improve, Roth found himself having to take charge of the man who had tyrannized him when young. He managed to say what sons should never tell their fathers - “Do as I say” - and, when his father lost control of his bowels, Roth set to work. “You clean up your father’s shit because it has to be cleaned up. Once you sidestep disgust and ignore nausea and plunge past those phobias that are fortified like taboos, there’s an awful lot of life to cherish.” As his father sank toward death, Roth nearly died: he found himself in the awkward position of trying to conceal from his father that he had himself just had an emergency quintuple bypass operation.
Life is “a vale of soul-making,” John Keats wrote - and it’s the soul-making, expressed in some of the best writing that Roth has ever done, that makes “Patrimony” so engrossing. Despite its subject, there’s some of Roth’s best wild flights of comedy here. In one hilarious set piece, Roth finds himself in a taxi, offering psychotherapy to the driver, a wild-eyed mastodon who brags that he once broke his father’s teeth. A book about fathers, then, and how to treat them. “He taught me the vernacular,” Roth says of his. “He was the vernacular, unpoetic and expressive and point-blank, with all the vernacular’s glaring limitations and all its durable force.”
