The Sleeping Father (Today Show Book Club #20) [Paperback]

Matthew Sharpe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 28, 2003

A divorced dad of two teenagers inadvertently combines two incompatible antidepressant medications, goes into a coma, has a stroke, and emerges with brain damage. His teenage son and daughter, Chris and Cathy, inherit some money and decide to rehabilitate their father on their own. The Sleeping Father is about the shift in the way Americans think about mental health — from regarding personality as being shaped by one’s upbringing to its being shaped by the bloodstream’s hormone levels. In focusing on one family in crisis, Sharpe addresses the larger crisis in faith and authority in contemporary American life. Ultimately, this is a weird but wonderful story about two children who, not having an adequate father, decide to make one.

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.

Review

"And my favorite this week is a fresh, funny, quirky book called `The Sleeping Father,' by Matthew Sharpe ..." Anne Tyler -- New York Times, Feb 16, 2004

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Product Details

• Paperback: 291 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press; 1 edition (July 28, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193236000X
• ISBN-13: 978-1932360004
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,447,434 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.