A Father's Words
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A tale of the battles between a father and son by an author whose novels are "robustly intelligent, very funny, and beguilingly humane" (Philip Roth).
Cy Riemer is the patriarch of a successful and loving Chicago family. But not all is copacetic in Cy's world. The scientific newsletter he publishes is foundering financially, his ex-wife still relies on him for money and intimacy, and he can never seem to find the time or the wherewithal to relax. Much of Cy's stress is caused by the trouble he has with his brilliant and duplicitous son, Jack.
With a mixture of humor, grief, and astonishment, Cy becomes our tour guide to the Riemer family's museum of triumphs and tragedies. A comic and clear-eyed portrait of the quintessential worried father and the son who lives to torture him, A Father's Words is packed with Richard Stern's trademark wit, compassion, and insight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pithy, witty, written in sharply honed prose, Stern's novels (Other Men's Daughters, Natural Shocks are always intelligent and provocative. Here his focus is middle-aged Chicagoan Cy Riemer, publisher of a respected science newsletter, divorced, father of four who are now adults, lover of a woman young enough to be his daughter. In a distinctively cranky but endearing voice, Riemer relates a typical paternal complaint: his children are afflicting him with frustrations and heartaches. His major concern is his bright, charming but feckless son Jack, who seems devoted to a life of downward mobility. Riemer's running disquisition on the anxieties of fatherhood is humorous, philosophic, laced with literary apothegms. There is comic irony in the way he repeatedly sees his children's quests for independence as criticism of their father. Stern has a sharp eye for the nuances of family relationships, and an equal gift for evoking the urban neighborhoods of Chicago and New York. The novel ends in a rush, however, with a truncated quality that is disconcerting.
