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Roth Plus Roth
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18533 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
1,520 Words |
| Author
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Lionel Abel
Lionel Abel is professor emeritus at the State University of
New York at Buffalo and the author of Metatheatre and The
Intellectual Follies. |
PATRIMONY
A True Story
Philip Roth
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990
238 pp., $ 19.95
In this moving yet often humorous memoir of the last years of his father, Herman Roth, Philip Roth has brought off, I think, nothing less than a minor masterpiece and of a kind few of us anticipated. We expected the author of Portnoy, Zuckerman Unbound, Goodbye, Columbus, and The Facts to be amusingly mordant about middle-class Jews and their peculiar problems, also amusingly mordant about the peculiar problems of the author himself, having chosen to write about middle-class Jews. We all expect Roth to make us laugh, and he does indeed in this memoir--and as effortlessly as in his novels and other reminiscences, in which his father is not the protagonist. But in Patrimony, he exposes his intimate feelings of distress at his father's physical collapse, and the effect is unusual for Roth: He touched this reader's heart, which I have to assume is not too different from the hearts of others.
We follow the course of Herman Roth's demise from the moment when, still strong and self-willed at eighty-six, he insists on carrying his bags from the West Palm Beach airport to the cab that will take him to the apartment of Lillian Beloff, with whom he became romantically involved after his wife's death. The details of his physical diminishment from that point on are most unpleasant. First his right cheek is paralyzed; this pulls down the lower lid of the eye above it. Then he loses the hearing of his right ear. Back in Newark, a medical examination by Dr. Meyerson, a neurosurgeon, reveals the cause: a brain tumor. It is certain to kill him if not removed by surgery, but the operation will have to be long, difficult, and he may die on the operating table.
Here is Roth's description of his father's deportment right after this revelation:
At the apartment Lil went into the kitchenette to prepare some Campbell's soup for lunch. My father went in after her ... and I sat in the living room trying to envision how Meyerson was going to lift my father's brain without damaging it. ...
Lil was apparently using the manual opener screwed to the wall beside the sink, because I heard my father telling her, "Hold the can from the bottom. You're not holding it from the
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