Country: USA
Genre: Literary
Pages: 171
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I want to believe, not just be hopeful and positive and supportive, but believe, but can I, really?
It's common practice to have a high body count in today's fiction. Arguably, the most popular works of fiction of our times are cable television crime epics, such as BREAKING BAD, THE WIRE, THE SOPRANOS or even DEXTER. Those series, as awesome as their are, feature litres of blood, tears, dead relatives and sworn vengeances. Whenever death strikes (or looms around the corner, really) in real life and threatens someone you love, it's a different ball game. It grabs you someplace within, stretches you up, makes you tense and squeeze the breath out of you. That's this unromantic but oh-so-real side of death that Ben Tanzer explores in his novella MY FATHER'S HOUSE. While Tanzer doesn't have the most accessible style, his musings come from a honest, painful place. I think Socrates said: "The unexamined life is not worth living", Ben Tanzer takes this idea to heart as he focuses on a difficult part.
The narrator's father is dying. Well, yes and no. He has a rare form of cancer and things aren't looking up. He needs a bone marrow transplant, but finding the right match proves to be difficult. He's also looking towards experimental treatment out of despair. The narrator is married, no kids, works in one of those places where people try to turn themselves around when they fell off the deep end. Homeless, prostitutes, addicts, he sees all the ills of the world during his shift. MY FATHER'S HOUSE is the existential struggle he leads against the death of his father. The mourning of everything he didn't do with him, the abandonment of the idea of truly knowing him and the realization that they aren't so different.
I can't say I relate a hundred percent to MY FATHER'S HOUSE, but I know where it comes from. I understand the feeling of existential void and the places where death takes you. For the longest time, I didn't know what to think of MY FATHER'S HOUSE, until I sat down and read about half of it in one sitting. That's how it's meant to be read. It's deliberately structured to reward patience and I thought it was pretty clever. The evolution of the narrator's trail of thoughts doesn't appear evident if you read ten pages, but if you read forty or fifty, the transformation becomes noticeable. I appreciated this particularly because it's hard to render the concept of time passing in a book, while being fair to the reader. I thought Tanzer found a very creative way to do so. His chapters are short, but resonate with each other. It's textbook dialogism, I suppose but it's applied to such a minimalistic execution, it makes it beautiful and rewarding to read.
"Maybe you need to be confronted to feel things. Is that possible?"
"Sure, " I squeak, barely loud enough to be heard.
"And how does that make you feel?"
I pause. How much of me does she want?
The comparison might appear easy, bordeline oblivious to you, but I could definitively feel an influence of John Irving in Tanzer's prose. Tanzer is more minimalist an philosophical, but both have the same life-affirming quality and most interestingly (from my experience of Irving anyway), both are centered around the problems occured by an alienated narrator's inner life. There are good friends, a loving family and yet and terrible, oppressing loneliness the narrator is trying to transcend. While not being a realist writer per se, it's a variable that has visibly a lot of value to Tanzer. There is no Hollywood ending, but his characters don't go down in flames like in a Greek tragedy either. There is life, there are things to be learned and most time you will never be sure what it is. I appreciated that control, MY FATHER'S HOUSE is not a story of excesses and it stays coherent throughout.
I liked MY FATHER'S HOUSE. It was not a transcending read for me, but I know it will be for some people. I know it will serve its purpose and help some people who have lost a loved one. The reason why it didn't sweep me away is deeply enrooted in me. I was raised in a very rationial, working class household and I was taught to never question the way of things. Things happen, you deal with them the best you can, so you can go on with your life. That straightforwardness is hardcoded in me. MY FATHER'S HOUSE will appeal to a certain type of people, which is both its strength and its weakness. It reads half like fiction, half like philosophical musings. It's a beautiful existential battle that display the vulnerability of human condition and cleverly crafted novella and Ben Tanzer's an interesting new voice. Give him a chance to seduce you.
THREE STARS