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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "FATHER AND SON ODD-COUPLE!", June 1, 2008
The author, Bob Morris's mother died in 2002 after suffering for ten years with a rare, debilitating blood condition. His Father Joe, is a seventy-nine-year-old retired lawyer and administrative law judge for the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. He is also a little too slovenly for Bob's taste. Joe's house has bills, brochures, magazines, and toothpicks everywhere you look, along with rotting food in the refrigerator, and his car is a nuclear waste site, with everything from half-eaten sandwiches, old socks and who knows what else on the seats. Bob still carries inner anguish at the way his Dad would go about his normal life playing tennis, playing bridge, etc., while leaving his two sons with most of the "heavy-lifting" during his Mother's final years of suffering.
About a month after his Mother's passing, Bob and Joe go to visit his Mother's grave. The following single sentence is an absolute literary powerhouse: "WE SHIFT ON OUR FEET, A FATHER AND SON WITH EVERYTHING TO TALK ABOUT AND NOTHING TO SAY TO EACH OTHER." Sometime after, Joe tells his son he wants to start dating again. Bob is incredulous. After fifty years of marriage, with his Mom only gone for a little over a month, his seventy-nine year old Father wants to start dating? This activates and sets in motion all the uneasiness that Bob has internalized about his Father for years. AND THEN... his Dad asks him to help him pick out women. This might be the time to mention to potential readers that Bob is a forty-four-year-old gay man who has never had a successful relationship himself. Bob surmises that his Dad basically wants him to become a pimp for him! The author thinks about his Father to himself: "So how can he just go dismissing all of it now-all of that-after fifty years of marriage? Who knows? But the old man seems to need a mate again, and I guess, now that Mom is gone, the only question at hand is, who would love a poorly dressed, irascible, but sweet and well-meaning suburban Republican like him? I don't know. But I guess I should try to help him out. Because if he's happy, then I don't have to worry about his being lonely, and then I can have some peace and be left alone to my life."
What follows is a touching and humorous journey with a Father and son learning about each other, bothering each other, and periodically surprising each other, with how deeply they truly care about each other, in ways they never thought possible. The search for love ranges from Bob making calls for his Father from personal ads in Jewish magazines to calling people who respond to a newspaper article Bob wrote. This "mission-of-love" engulfs New York, New Jersey and Florida. Periodically Father and Son have debriefings to see if they agree before any hasty decisions are made: "RITA IS A DISAPPOINTMENT TO HIM BECAUSE SHE DOESN'T SMILE ENOUGH. SHE'S NO DINAH SHORE, HE SAYS. IF I CAN'T GET A SMILE OUT OF HER, THERE'S NO POINT IN MOVING FORWARD. SELMA, WHO IS A LITTLE PLUMP FOR HIS TASTE, WANTS TO TALK ABOUT THE KAMA SUTRA AND GET HIM TO TAKE A WORKSHOP IN THE POCONOS. ATTRACTIVE BUT A NUT, A JEWISH SHIRLEY MACLAINE, HE SAYS. LORNA USED TO BE A SOCIALIST. WHEN SHE TOLD ME THAT, I ASKED FOR THE CHECK AND SENT HER HOME."
With the graying of America continuing as "Baby-Boomers" get older, this is a story that should be of interest to more people every day. For those of you who enjoy "FATHER AND SON" stories this is a very unique perspective.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Surprisingly powerful, September 13, 2008
Bob Morris's father (not the guy on the book's cover!) is pushing eighty when Assisted Loving opens. He's a youthful eighty, though, and newly widowed, a retired traffic judge, so he's a hot commodity among senior singles. Not one to mourn over-much, he is ready only months after his wife of fifty-plus years died (in 2002) to start the search for a new mate. He enlists his son to help him, and the younger Morris chronicles his fathers re-emergence on the dating scenes of Palm Beach and New York. That's the plot of the book, but the dates merely serve as the framework onto which Morris packs a meatier story about his relationship with his father and about growing up. At book's end, Joe Morris remains the man he was at the beginning: happy-go-lucky, exasperating, utterly devoted to his son. It's Bob Morris who emerges from the experience a changed (to a degree) man.
It's difficult to like Bob Morris for the first third of his book. His father may be legitimately annoying--most parents are--but at forty-four the younger Morris still acts like a teenager around him: pouting and saying just the wrong thing and not having much patience for the eccentricities of an old man. Worse, Morris is a superficial, elitist jerk. He's embarrassed by his old neighborhood, turns up his nose at his father's kitsch. He's irritated that visits with his father take him away from his usual party-hopping. Morris's mother had been very ill for years before her death. Morris was disappointed during that period because she lost interest in her appearance. He was ashamed to be seen with a dying woman who wasn't fashionable: "It was hard, watching her in her hopelessness. It was even harder seeing her thin, bruised arms and neck because she dressed in the most unflattering T-shirts." He dragged her out to Macy's to buy her new clothes--blouses, and hats to cover her thinning hair. He claims it made her happy, but it sure sounds like the new wardrobe was for him more than her.
Morris may be a jerk, but he's also self-aware. He is, after all, drawing attention to his bad behavior and, largely, condemning it. In the course of hanging out with his father during the dating period, the younger Morris becomes a better man--still, it seems, someone whose instinct is to be impressed by the superficial, but a better man. It is impressive that Morris is able to alienate the reader at the beginning of his book yet still bring us around by the end so that he seems likable. Also impressive is the portrait Morris paints of his father. The initial image we get of Joe Morris is a negative one, a man as seen through the eyes of a son who has little sympathy for him and is still harboring adolescent resentments. But as the book progresses we are given more insight into the older Morris, who turns out to be more supportive than many parents are and wiser than we might at first have supposed. It's a powerful portrait. And Assisted Loving is a well-written, funny, and surprisingly affecting book.
-- Debra Hamel
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tears, Laughter and Love, January 26, 2009
I loved this book so much that I have given it as a gift to many friends. Everyone has a similar reaction....it's simply great! Once you start reading, it is impossible to put down. The premise is unusual; the words are lyrical. This book does not disappoint......it is warm and funny and poignant....and speaks to relationships that we can all understand.
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