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April 22, 2004 #
TOP Rarely Says Anything Nice, So Here's Some Warm and Fuzzy about The Sleeping Father. Now go to Hell. by Chris Gage This is not a literary site. Or even a literary-ish site. Though both members of its Panty-Raid and Oversight Committee can, in fact, read, they rarely make it past the Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker. (How much can one man read on the can? Even with alternating tempestuous and stubborn bowels.) Esquire interviews are considered weighty, the sex advice column of TimeOut New York makes us wish we had bothered to finish Dick and Jane back in the second grade. Maybe we'd get more of the half-assed ass-and-dick jokes. That goes for the TO column and kid lit. But lo, every now and then something enters our peripheral vision where, like a passing tightly jean-clad butt standing in line at Piano's velvet rope (lame simile, hot ass), we note it. Soon, if we're lucky, this "similed" butt slides from peripheral vision to right-in-front-of-us vision. This happens once a year or so, most recently with Jonathan Safran Foer's book Everything Is Illuminated. (We're such a fucking cliché sometimes. But we needed to be able to read something on those infrequent L Train forays without looking like a non-hipster.) Now, let it be known, it's happened again: The Sleeping Father, by Matthew Sharpe. Despite an amazingly inane and "madcap" blurb by one Eileen Myles (of whom I know not whom I speak of in the least, nor would I care to) on the back, I beseech unto you to read it. The prose seems to have no truck with rules. Simultaneous. It makes our head hurt as we shift perspective from Bernie (the father in a coma, oh my!), Chris (the angry / Romantic son), Cathy (the Christian Jew, hurray!), Frank (the wordsmithy best friend who I think is black but I'd have to go back and look and so nevermind), and assorted minor characters -- many of whom Chris wants to sleep with or get blowjobs from (he is a teen, though maybe the urge never leaves). Just dig these telling excerpts, people. Revel in the unalloyed honesty of being a teen. Chris Schwartz entered American History at 9:22 A.M. and sat in the back corner where he hoped no one would see him. He was still in his half-conscious youth. Sometimes he saw more than he was able to feel; sometimes he felt more than he was able to see; sometimes neither. During the course of any several minutes he could think of something important, forget it, think of it again, forget it again, his memory a short-circuited strobe light in the dark discotheque of his consciousness. Or this:
Chris Schwartz met Frank Dial in the road. "Frank Dial" had become Chris's shorthand for joy itself; tough joy -- Frank was acerbic and dark and quick. He had a word for everything, and often not a nice one; justly so, thought Chris, for the world was often not a nice place. But it was nice for Chris to have a good friend who was accurate in speech. Chris himself was not accurate or even truthful a lot of the time. He kidded a lot in a haphazard way -- kidding without meaning it -- and he lied as well. He had a stern principle about accuracy and honesty in speech that he said he took pride in not living up to. Anyway he didn't have to live up to it because Frank Dial lived up to it for him.
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