Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his eighty-six-year-old father—famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections—battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father’s long, stubborn engagement with life.
Philip Roth is hailed by many as the reigning king of American fiction. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this memoir about love, survival, and memory is one of his most intimate books, but also one of his most intellectually vigorous. Patrimony is Roth’s elegy to his father, written with piercing observation and wit at the height of his literary prowess.
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"This is the first Philip Roth book I've read, and I picked it up at the library because I recognized his name. The book is about Roth taking care of his dying father. Usually books about old people dying destroy me, but Roth perfectly balances the tone of his writing between honesty and caring. He uses simple, straightforward language - "You clean up your father's shit because it has to be cleaned up, but in the aftermath of cleaning it up, everything that's there to feel is felt as it never was before." That kind of stuff, but you also feel how much he cares about his father. There's only one section of about five pages that seemed superfluous to the story. And there's a great, simple paragraph on the fourth to last page of the book that sums of the rest of it perfectly. Thanks Mr. Roth for a book about dying that made me feel without making me sob uncontrollably."
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Kelly (5 out of 5 stars)