22 S UNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2022MY FATHER’S DIET
By Adrian Nathan West
173 pp. And Other Stories. Paper, $16.95.
“What’s the point of my life on this planet?”
A big question, but the one at the core of
West’s “My Father’s Diet,” a novel about a
father who, recently divorced and looking
for something to do, enters a bodybuilding
contest. His son, the book’s narrator, decides
to help him train, an agreement that offers
an opportunity for the two to reconnect after years
apart. As in real life, opportunities are easily wasted.
“My Father’s Diet” is a compact and stirring, if un-
even, portrait of transgenerational hesitation. At its best,
the novel showcases the recognizable confusion of a
changing world. Actions no longer earn their predictable
reactions. When the narrator’s father tells his fitness
instructor that “rest and recovery is just as important as
working out,” for instance, the instructor responds not
by disagreeing but by lobbing a volley of obscenities.
And while eavesdropping on a young couple, the narra-
tor notes that they speak “disjointedly, with what psy-
chologists call ‘poverty of affect,’ their conversations less
like those of acquaintances or strangers than the dia-
logues from a first-year foreign language textbook.” Is
this really all there is? West not only captures this es-
trangement for the narrator’s middle-aged father, but for
the narrator himself — alienated before he’s even 21.
West has an eye for detail, like when he cannily de-
scribes a confusing rush of German language as resem-
bling “the odd proper word bobbing to the surface like a
soup bone in a pot of roiling broth.” But not all of his
descriptions land, like when a bus floor is “grooved pink
plastic, with white marbling, like a cut of bacon.” In these
more jarring moments, the novel tests its way forward,
exhibiting an uncertainty that the bodybuilding plot,
introduced halfway through the book, seems to reinforce.
But back to the big question: life on this planet and all
that. While helping his father, the narrator (who is inac-
tive, unambitious, friendless) thinks of “the future, when
I might do something interesting and my life’s character
would cease to feel provisional and take on what people
call meaning or direction.” But the world of the book, and
the example set by the narrator’s father, convinces us
this is a delusion: Let he who has learned from his fa-
ther’s failures believe nakedly in his own ambitions.
DON’T CRY FOR ME
By Daniel Black
301 pp. Hanover Square. $26.99.Black’s sad and gripping new novel is an
example of how fiction is not just a form of
literature but a place. We go there for
lessons on how to live, how to change and,
most important, how to forgive and seek
forgiveness.
The book — written as a series of letters
from a dying father to his estranged gay son — opens
with an author’s note that explains the genesis of the
novel: Black’s own father was diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s in 2013 and his memory began to fade before
they could “hash things out.” That meant the conversa-
tions he hoped to have with his father “could happen
only in my imagination.” “Don’t Cry for Me” is the result
of that imagining.
The novel’s father, Jacob, was cruel to his son, Isaac,
and now, through the letters that make up the book, he is
trying to contextualize his life and his choices, a life in
which love “wasn’t a man’s achievement.” In this way,
“Don’t Cry for Me” rides the rickety line between trage-
dy and melodrama. But despite its sentimental risks — it
features an obsessive, cloying focus on family meals
(“Grandma’s food was the best I’ve ever tasted”), for
example, and repeats the assertion that simply telling
the story or getting it off one’s chest will make a differ-
ence — a theme emerges: “Don’t Cry for Me” is a novel
about novels, a story about stories.
Part of what motivates Jacob to write is, in fact, read-
ing. After “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Jacob
declares: “I’d never known I could decide how to live,
how to be in this world. Never knew I had the right.”
After “The Color Purple,” he concludes, “What we’d once
called a man was actually a monster.” It is reading, too,
that brings Isaac into a more accepting world, out of his
father’s reach: “You were a reader, you lived in your
imagination.” And it is reading that gives Jacob a tool by
which he might apologize for his abuses and transform
his image in his son’s eye, letter by letter.
With its limited perspective, “Don’t Cry for Me” has no
access to Isaac’s imagination. We’re left only with Ja-
cob’s last letters, his last, unanswered plea: “Just re-
member that, although we were flawed, we were marvel-
ous, too.” The great risk he takes, as the reader well
knows, is that Isaac may not want to remember at all.THE DEATH OF MY FATHER THE POPE
By Obed Silva
292 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.A third of the way into his debut memoir,
Silva riffs on “The Sopranos”: “Tony So-
prano remarks that ‘remember when... ’ is
the lowest form of conversation.” But Silva
disagrees. For a drunk like his father, “‘Re-
member when’ is the only form of conversa-
tion. The past is the only subject he is capa-
ble of discussing at length, and there is no future there.”
It’s perhaps fitting, then, that “The Death of My Father
the Pope” calls to mind a drunken man alone in a bar
who wants to “remember when” with you about each of
his scars. His tales are moving. They are also exhaust-
ing.
The fugue is a delicate form, particularly for a memoir
about a wake and funeral. Over and over, Silva snaps
from the present action of this memorial back into the
past to explore his father’s life. Through these flash-
backs, Silva gives an impressionistic, appropriately
chaotic view of his father: Not only was he a drunk, he
was also an artist who abandoned his talent. He beat his
wives and children, and he started and dropped families
like hobbies. He “loved us in the way that only a sick
man can love anybody: indelicately,” Silva says.
Throughout the memoir, Silva explains that his family
is not like others: “No black-and-white American-dream
family.” Instead, “violence is in our blood,” he says, as if
it’s a mythological curse to bear and not systemic harm
done to and perpetuated by people. The violence Silva
describes is disturbing; and though he seems to ac-
knowledge the chauvinistic aspects of being raised in a
family that believes violence is its inheritance, it’s still
hard not to cringe at some of the casual misogyny in the
book — a dismissive description of an art buyer as
“some uppity lawyer lady,” for example, or a man being
a “victim” to a woman’s hypnotizing eyes — especially in
a story haunted by rape.
Silva seems to be trying to humanize someone who
caused immense pain, to understand someone whose
crimes, literal and moral, have hurt generations of his
family. It’s a grand and necessary undertaking, particu-
larly at such an ethically binary moment in history —
when it has become too easy to erase or ignore the good
parts of people because they have done terrible things as
well. However, the memoir’s exuberance pushes it closer
to legend than literature: that is, further out of reach.ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALLPATRICK NATHANis the author of “Some Hell” and “Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist.”
(^) The Shortlist/Family Complications/By Patrick Nathan