The Schwartz (the Sleeping Father)
(Matthew Sharpe)
"The Schwartz" is part of what is now a proper American narrative genre, born with the big success of "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen, and comprehending also important authors like Sedaris and Burroughs; central in these novels, is always a critical and merciless analysis of the middle-class American family, narrated with irony and a touch of lightness. The original title of the novel is The Sleeping Father. Bernard Schwartz, the sleeping father, is cronically depressed, is the one who, by mistake, exchange his antedepressant pills with the ones of another patient in his psychiatrist's studio, obtaining an original cocktail which send him directly on a terrible coma. He will wake up astonished, like a retarded child who will have to learn everything from the beginning and who will completely depend on his seventeen years old son, Chris. Chris, on his turn, in the middle of an ormonal explotion which push him to eroticize every woman, tries his best and makes his father, that man "transformed into a smudging idiot", a sort of laboratory for his readucational experiments. The mother is absent, she is gone and is dedicating herself to "casual" sex, until she meets the father of the neurologist who is curing Bernard, the man who will follow her until the end. The daughter, Cathy, is absorbed by mysticism, she desperately wants to convert to Hebraism and she completely dedicates herself to this task, until she become pregnant by Frank, Chris' black friend. This is not just another American Beauty and is not a serious novel, but it offers a cynical vision of the world, a world gone mad and glamourous, desperatly incurable and desperatly ridiculous. We are the clowns of ourselves.
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