The Sleeping Father FROM THE PUBLISHER
Bernard Schwartz has lost his wife, his career, and finally, thanks to the accidental combination of two classes of antidepressants, his consciousness. He emerges from a coma to find his son Chris, the perpetual smart-ass, and his daughter Cathy, a Jewish teen turned self-martyred Catholic, stumbling headlong toward trauma-induced maturity. The Sleeping Father is about the loss of innocence, the disorienting innocence of second childhood, the biochemical mechanics of sanity and love, the nature of language and meaning, and the spirituality of selfhood. But most of all it is about the Schwartzes, a singular yet typical American family, making their way the best way they know how in a small town called Bellwether, Connecticut.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
Sharpe's arch tone is charmingly at odds with the sprawling, inclusive structure of The Sleeping Father. His raised-eyebrow formality suggests a host surveying unwanted guests, yet he keeps waving more and more characters in the front door. He's a rare find: an ironist who actually seems to like other people.
— Claire Dederer
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. (Nov.) Forecast: An eight-city author tour and blurbs from George Saunders and Colm Toibin should help this small press standout get off the ground. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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