THE SLEEPING FATHER
Matthew Sharpe, . . Soft Skull, $14 (200pp) ISBN 978-1-932360-00-4
At once tragic and madcap, Sharpe's second novel offers an acidly funny portrait of a "diminished nuclear unit" coping with its patriarch's pharmacologically induced stroke. Divorced, depressed Bernard Schwartz is taking Prozac, but the accidental ingestion of another antidepressant lands him in a coma. His adolescent children, the conflicted and caustically witty Chris, and the serious, earnestly spiritual Cathy, must muddle through their father's helplessness in this character-driven tale. In one of the novel's best scenes, Chris, devastated but true to his trademark hostile sense of humor, adorns his unconscious father's face with drawn-on "make-up," which includes rosy cheeks and a Hitler mustache. It's moments like this—when fear induces laughter, and humor invites pathos—that make this tonally skillful novel dazzling but also difficult. Sharpe (
Reviewed on: 11/03/2003
Genre: Fiction