The Sleeping Father

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, family, religion and civilization as a whole are rendered so truthfully-- you may laugh, you may cry, I don't know how you deal with those things, but I can almost guarantee you'll cringe repeatedly. Every character screws up in the most recognizable and inevitable ways... and everyone does such a ridiculous misguided job of trying to compensate... it's just a really really good book. Really.

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 world; and Chris is mad at himself for being such an awkward idiotic friend to the boy he admires so much, his caustic, precocious genius classmate Frank, one of a handful of African Americans who lives in the white suburbs. Amazingly, every paragraph in this novel is an unforced lozenge of irony and contradictions, layers of humor and tenderness side by side. Never sentimental, this novel propels forward with a deep love of its characters even as it satirizes modern life, a truly rare achievement. I picked up this novel only because Anne Tyler, author of The Accidental Tourist, said she enjoyed it in a recent interview. I have her to thank for discovering this masterpiece. Now I must buy and read Matthew Sharpe's other books.

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 feat.It is also a deceptively easy read, moves quickly, draws you in. and as another reviewer noted, it does alot of what DeLillo does, but funnier and warmer.Don't miss this one!

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 way out to a very broad, distant description. Sharpe uses this technique brilliantly.You will remember this book's characters--ascerbic, deeply teenaged Chris, Cathy the Jewish Catholic-wannabe, their father, Bernard who is the living personification of funny and sad all at once. You may not realize that the plot is moving forward. It might feel like you're ambling through the pages, enjoying scalding commentary on modern life, but you're actually heading somewhere.Enjoy the ride.

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 first novel (Nothing Is Terrible), is disturbing and provocative, and damned clever. A fabulous read.My mother would hate it; I love it.