Customer Reviews

Sleeping Father

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I'm not going to write a dissertation here, but I have to plug this book. It's the best read I've found in a long time. I had read Nothing Is Terrible, his excellent and weird modern-day Jane Eyre first novel, and was so pleased to see his second one at the bookstore. The Sleeping Father is so successful as a serious and as a comic novel-- the ambivalences and fraught silences and cruelties and faux pas that bedevil friendship, family, religion and civilization as a whole are rendered so truthfully-- you may laugh, you may cry, I don't know how you deal with those things, but I can almost guarantee you'll cringe repeatedly. Every character screws up in the most recognizable and inevitable ways... and everyone does such a ridiculous misguided job of trying to compensate... it's just a really really good book. Really.

This is a lovingly scathing account of contemporary suburban family life; it is also a story of that most unlikely of loves, between father and son.

Matt Sharpe reminds me of a young American Roddy Doyle, for this book deftly leaps from funny-and I mean literally laugh-out-loud funny-to gaspingly dire and back again, tackling profound themes in a disarmingly facile way, all in magnificent prose. The Sleeping Father, like Sharpe's first novel (Nothing Is Terrible), is disturbing and provocative, and damned clever. A fabulous read.

My mother would hate it; I love it.

I admit, I approach many of these television book club selections with a bit of caution. Many of them, while good, start to all sound alike, which is why I found The Sleeping Father. Bernard is the father in question who unwittingly takes the wrong anti-depressant and falls into a coma. While in the coma, and then in recovery, his teenaged children, Chris and Cathy, are left to cope with not only their father's recovery, but also the normal trials and tribulations of contemporary teens. This novel is quirky, as are Chris and Cathy. Some of their undertakings must be taken with a grain of salt, seen as fantasy rather than reality. All in all, I think this novel is a departure from the typical book club selection. Enjoy.

Slowly creeping through Delillo's world in White Noise, I felt I was caught up in the midst of an apocalypse where acerbic wit teetered on everyone's tongue and everyone was comfortably uncomfortable. So close it was to the typical Updike tale of a family enduring crisis independently and as a collective infused with Delillo's politics and vision of the technologically obsessed society. Television is the collective unconscious, and the family competes to out-wit one another. In the end, I shielded myself with my radioactive blanket and prayed for a simpler world of beanstalks and freesia instead of one where mankind was slowly committing mass suicide.

I had a similar feeling while reading Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father, however, I will dare to say that Sharpe is more successful than Delillo's (although incredibly brilliant) work in so far as they novel delivers a quieter message about the crumbling nuclear family without the fanfare and confetti of toxic gas and gas masks. Here, divorced and depressed Bernard Schwartz, unhappily medicated on Prozac, manages to take another anti-depressant which chemically reacts to induce a coma. While he lies in a hospital bed, he is surrounded by his gifted and utterly sad children that need him to sustain. Chris Schwartz is a man that only drinks when he knows he will drive and his younger sister, Cathy, fascinated by the Jewish martyr turned saint, Edith Stein, earnestly cloaks herself with holy water, prayer and ritual in order to unfold her identity and aid in her coping with a mute father, a mother that Cathy caught in a compromising position while she was married to Bernie and a brother that both angers and comforts her. Although Sharpe is merciless in his dialogue between characters, arming them with caustic wit, he undoes them with moments that his characters themselves can only own. Alone in the hospital bed, Chris proceeds to draw a Hitler moustache on his father's sleeping face and after he's seen his work, he crumbles and huddles under his father's bed to be closer to him. After rebuffing Chris's best friend and fellow embittered partner-in-crime, Frank Dial's lyric about her moist palms, she is soon drawn closer to Frank and ultimately, they seek to create a new family outside of their withering own. Somewhat oblivious to their own privilege, Sharpe is careful about rendering his characters sympathetic, not sentimental. After donating an inheritance to a battered woman's shelter, Cathy befriends a victim who consequently robs their home so that her family, too, can start another life.

All the characters, albeit, Dr. Danmeyer, mother Lila Munroe, Moe Danmeyer, Frank Dial seek something other in Sharpe's brilliantly constructed novel. However, they find that the one thing that remains, that binds them together is Bernie, who after waking from his comma, finds his family completely fallen apart, his ex-wife with another man and is limited by his own capacity to speak and construct words. Again, Sharpe veers away from the over-sentimentality by infusing some of Bernie's own wit into the most honest narrative in the entire work. Cloaked by his illness, he has been given license to react truthfully and sometimes tactless - this serves to continuously challenge the surrounding characters that ironically enough, are mentally superior. Although he is compromised by his illness, he is not compromised as a fully-realized and endearing character.

There are some truly hysterical moments in a novel that involves a coma, a beating, a divorce, a robbery, pistol-whipping, however they are uplifted by the individual characters unraveling themselves and redefining family in their own particular way. The laughter comes from a real place - one of fear, of love.

The only criticism that I can offer is ironically what I loved most about the tale Sharpe weaves. All of the characters are too finely tuned, everyone knows exactly what to say at any given moment and they are all armed with their own brand of barbs and witticisms. It may have fared more successful (than the novel already is) if a character other than Bernie was somehow calmer, less ready to react for at times, the characters' dialogue echoed too close to one another. A small note on an otherwise searing portrait.

I am amazed by the amount of vitriol in some of the reviews of this book. It's sharp and witty at turns, yes, but ultimately the author treats his characters on the whole more gently than, say, Evelyn Waugh or Jane Austen. I have read there's a movie in the works, and even as I was reading the book I found myself casting it in my mind (paging Jake Gyllenhaal). I would also say that this book has more in common with the movies American Beauty and The Ice Storm than with any other recent novels that come to mind. So, if you liked either of those films, I can recommend this novel to you without reservation. It's not particularly experimental in technique, so it all really comes down to the tightness of the writing and the humanity of the characters, who will live in your head for a long while after you've finished the book.

Three books that you must read if you're interested in a good story, excellent writing, and a wonderful literary experience: THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET, THE BARK OF THE DOGWOOD, and THE SLEEPING FATHER. All three are excellent and worth the time spent.

I'm not one to follow the trends, so when I saw that this was a Today Show book club pick, I ran the other way. But after hearing such great things about it from my friends I decided to try it. A great read with insight into the human condition (or lack thereof), this is a book you'll want to pass on to anyone who likes a great story.

Also recommended: McCrae's BARK OF THE DOGWOOD and THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET

Small, taut, darkly comic gem of a novel that received no publicity. Balances bleak social satire with deeply empathatic characters, which most comic novels cannot do. Funny and smart about human relationships. Oddly enough, I also love a small, non-hyped, funny nonfiction book about fatherhood, "I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets," by Bruce Stockler. Funny and compassionate and insightful, also, but delightful rather than dark.