The Sleeping Father
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Book Overview
Absent an adequate father, the children decide to make one, bringing with it a host of difficulties and opportunities. Chris tries everything from sex to capitalism in his search for guidance on the path to adulthood and Cathy, believing her secular Jewishness inadequate in the provision of a benign & divine Father, looks to Catholicism for solace and meaning.
The Sleeping Father explores the shift in the way Americans think about mental health: away from regarding ourselves as being shaped by our upbringings and toward regarding ourselves as being shaped by the chemicals in our bloodstreams. The American family, in this novel, emerges as a microcosm of larger social institutions; Moms and Dads as in-home teachers, priests, presidents, and CEOs. In focusing on the Schwartz family in crisis, Sharpe addresses the larger crisis in faith and authority in contemporary American life.
Customer Reviews
Rated 5 starsdark and hilarious
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,...
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Rated 5 starsCombines Humor and Deep Humanity
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...
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Rated 5 starsA Small Gem!
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...
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Rated 5 starsSix Stars
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...
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Rated 5 starsAngst-happy in Connecticut
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...
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