Gilead - Margaret Robinson

 This book is a reflection on a man's life, and a message to his son. A father approaches death, reflecting on his life as a minister and the son and grandson of: ministers. He tells the story of his estrangement from his father, a pacifist, who broke from his own father, an abolitionist in Kansas after the Civil War. He writes to his own young son, the product of a late life marriage to a younger woman. The book won a pulitzer prize. It got high praises from reviewers, for its reflections on the relationships of fathers & sons. I didn't care for it, got bored as the story went nowhere.  

Quotes.

"I don't know exactly what covetes is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it."

"Every single one of us is a civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable-which I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to be. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be active likeness."

Published: 2004  Read: October 2024  Genre: Fiction, Philosophy

Shtum - Jem Lester

This is the story told by the father of a severely autistic son.  Jonah is about 9 or 10 years old and does not speak, dress or bathe himself and still wears diapers.  He lives in England where a case must be made to have him placed in a special live-in school for autistic children.  His father, Ben, is guilt ridden over his conflicting feelings over his son.  His mother, Emma, is leaving them to create a single family household that she claims will increase their chances of a placement.  Jonah and Ben go to live with Ben's father.  He is grandfather stoic and gruff with his son, but shares stories of his youth with Jonah as he struggles with his own illness.

These are all hurting people with no end in site for the pain.  The intimate, inside look at life with an autistic child is heartbreaking and horrifying.  The toll on Ben and Emma's marriage, the relationship between fathers and sons are laid out in stark, biting conversations between people trying to figure out how to live with their reality.

The author in real life is the father of an autistic child.  I initially was irritated and put off by the self-pity of the father who drinks himself into stupors.  I finished the book with a deeper empathy for people struggling to live life in impossible situations with no end in sight. 

Published:  2016  Read: December 2017  Genre: Fictionalized biography