You have to read this book: Patrimony, by Phillip Roth. I have been walking around for weeks, running my fingers across my bookshelves…waiting for a book to choose me, a great great book that I can’t put down, can’t stop talking about (remember the Shadow Divers summer? how I couldn’t stop pushing that book? hocking Kurson, hock hock hock. Remember the cod phase? my pirate phase? and that whole Pilgrims thing?) I love nothing more than being completely obsessed and colonized, seduced, haunted, taken in, and completely defragged and reconfigured by A New Book.

Patrimony by Phillip Roth isn’t new. It’s from 1991. 1991!  What were you doing that year, the year this book won prizes? Before you got email from amazon.com and before you spent your reading lunchtime on facebook?

A friend of mine loves Phillip Roth and so I wanted to read some Phillip Roth, having not read him at all since he was assigned to me by Doug Fowler in American Lit. I read about Roth’s books and Patrimony sounded like the shortest, easiest, least intense.

Oh

My

Goodness

Phillip’s dad is dying, and the way he describes the difficulty and beauty and weirdness of having a father, of having a dramatic hilarious very very old strong weak father, the way he describes what it is to watch a person trying to put a life together, at the very end of life–I read and reread each page…I’m only on p 62 and I am dreading the book being over. I never want it to end. I love this book. I love this book.  You have to read this book.  If you have a father or love anyone.  You will find something in this book.

And his sentences!

That’s a whole other topic.

I’ll probably stil be obsessing on this in November. February.Forever.

I love this book and I love how it makes me see my dad, how it outlines the love I have for him, and fills it in some too.