Sleeping Father [Paperback]

Matthew Sharpe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 11, 2005

At a Halloween party that neither Bernie or his two children really want to be at, Bernie collapses and falls into a coma bought on by the accidental combination of two anti-depressants. He emerges from the coma to find his son Chris, the perpetual smart-ass, and his daughter Cathy, a Jewish teen turned self-martyred Catholic, stumbling headlong toward trauma-induced maturity. His ex-wife, his nurse, his nurses' father and his son's best friend are also drawn into the bizarre, frustrating and touching world that surrounds the job of rehabilitating Bernie. The "Sleeping Father" is about the loss of innocence, the disorientating experience of a second childhood and the nature of love and meaning. But most of all it's about the Schwartzs, a singular American family, making their way the best way they know how.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 (Nothing Is Terrible; Stories from the Tube) shows little mercy for his characters; even as he lovingly catalogues their every idiosyncrasy, he dumps on them one humiliating circumstance after another. Upon waking from the coma, Bernard is physically and mentally compromised, and Chris, who's in charge of his rehabilitation, takes advantage of this role reversal with mixed results. He dresses his father in age-inappropriate clothing and openly mocks Bernard's attempts at readjustment-but he's dutiful, too, and Bernard takes solace in some of his unorthodox teaching exercises, like the naming of trees. The family dynamics culminate in unexpected and dramatic ways at the novel's end, a needed jolt after some mild plot stagnation sets in midway. Readers of alternative and literary fiction should appreciate Sharpe's clearly drawn characters and his thoughtful, if withering, examination of the contemporary hierarchies of family and authority.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

'Spiced with sweet-sour humour' -- Sunday Times 'Fresh, funny, quirky' Anne Tyler, New York Times 'Like fellow US cult hit A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, it's funny, flippant and likely to irritate some. But we well and truly fell for its mix of tenderness and shocking farce' -- Heat 'Fluent and funny, clever and wise...it slowly becomes sad without you noticing and then frightening and then funny again' Colm Toibin 'Smart, eccentric...generous...a rare find: an ironist who actually seems to like other people' New York Times Book Review 'Fresh, original and very funny, funny in the way that occasionally makes you sob, original in the way that makes you look at everything...in a new and kinder light' George Saunders 'It is a triumph of tone and dialogue and often wincingly vivid...Sharpe has a gimlet eye for the intensity and anxiety of growing up' -- Time Out

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Sceptre (April 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0340837780
• ISBN-13: 978-0340837788
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,321,398 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Six Stars, January 13, 2004

By 

A. Vernick - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sleeping Father (Today Show Book Club #20) (Paperback)

I've given five stars to other books in the past, and now I'm sorry. I wish I had a sixth star to give to The Sleeping Father. This is the top of the line.

There is something lurking beneath the surface of this book that is so funny and true and understated and delicious. The point of view is bizarre to great effect. We are sometimes zoomed in, given glimpes of characters' deepest feelings and thoughts and other times zoomed way out to a very broad, distant description. Sharpe uses this technique brilliantly.

You will remember this book's characters--ascerbic, deeply teenaged Chris, Cathy the Jewish Catholic-wannabe, their father, Bernard who is the living personification of funny and sad all at once.

You may not realize that the plot is moving forward. It might feel like you're ambling through the pages, enjoying scalding commentary on modern life, but you're actually heading somewhere.

Enjoy the ride.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Small Gem!, January 16, 2004

By 

Mark Phillips (Marin, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sleeping Father (Today Show Book Club #20) (Paperback)

This could be the surprise novel of the year. It's from a small publisher and has received almost no publicity. If not for a wonderful NY Times Review I would have never heard of it. It is a first rate black comedy about a contemporary dysfunctional family, about the absurdities of life in the early 21st century, and about timeless human foibles. Sharpe is brilliant at satiring characters he also clearly loves, not an easy feat.

It is also a deceptively easy read, moves quickly, draws you in. and as another reviewer noted, it does alot of what DeLillo does, but funnier and warmer.

Don't miss this one!

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Combines Humor and Deep Humanity, February 27, 2004

By 

M. JEFFREY MCMAHON "herculodge" (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sleeping Father (Today Show Book Club #20) (Paperback)

Chris Schwartz is a seventeen-year-old loveable malcontent, full of anger at the world, more specifically, the jocks at high school who persecute him because he is not, like them, a cookie cutter personality; he's mad at his divorced parents who seem to relish in their dysfunctional states; he's mad at his sister, a Catholic convert who uses her religiosity as a guise to bully others and try to gain control of her chaotic world; and Chris is mad at himself for being such an awkward idiotic friend to the boy he admires so much, his caustic, precocious genius classmate Frank, one of a handful of African Americans who lives in the white suburbs. Amazingly, every paragraph in this novel is an unforced lozenge of irony and contradictions, layers of humor and tenderness side by side. Never sentimental, this novel propels forward with a deep love of its characters even as it satirizes modern life, a truly rare achievement.

I picked up this novel only because Anne Tyler, author of The Accidental Tourist, said she enjoyed it in a recent interview. I have her to thank for discovering this masterpiece. Now I must buy and read Matthew Sharpe's other books.