Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
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Parents.
We love them. We idolize them. We question them. We leave them. We miss them.
Parents.
We comprehend them. We value them. We lose them. We mourn them. We become them.
All these compelling and confounding responses to parents ebb and flow through Bernard Cooper's new memoir, "The Bill From My Father." There is much stern stuff, as well as barbed humor, when the prize-winning writer from Los Angeles recalls his troubled relationship with his cantankerous father, an arch figure of such spite and distance that he is often repellant.
What else can one say about a man who sends his son an itemized bill for all that he has cost him during his first 28 years, a staggering sum "in the neighborhood of $2 million." What else can one say about a man who wastes a decade suing his two widowed stepdaughters over "borrowed money" received by his sons during their lives. What else can one say about a man whose chosen epitaph was: "You finally got me."
The writer-son has a daunting task in understanding his attorney father, let alone viewing him with any empathy even after his death. Yet "The Bill From My Father" still disappoints on both counts because of the narrow focus of this book -- Cooper's father, and especially his motivations or rationalizations for his obnoxious behavior, remain mysterious to the author and the reader.
As Cooper himself concedes, "My knowledge of my father had always been confined to what I'd experienced in his presence, including the flood of hunches and deductions that his smallest gesture -- lifting an eyebrow, folding his arms -- set off within me. I don't think I would have been nearly as alert to the minutiae of his behavior had there been more information, more clues to choose from. So this limitation also defined him..."
It also defines, sad to report, "The Bill From My Father." Cooper shirks his authorial research duties, except for two brief, aborted attempts. He tries to interview his father late in his life, but gets nowhere, as could surely have been expected. He also tries the Internet in hopes of ascertaining something beyond the bare bones of family history, emigration from somewhere in Russia, arrival at Ellis Island where the family's Jewish surname was switched to Cooper.
Cooper does not bother to interview his stepsisters in order to share their insights or those of his late brothers. Cooper does not bother to interview his father's second wife or his nurse who becomes the last great companion of his long life.
So what the reader experiences is a series of tense and frustrating set-piece encounters between Cooper and his father. "The Bill From My Father" is akin to being locked in the closet with these two contestants sparring for the final word in an endless debate. In the book's rare respites from their verbal fisticuffs, Cooper dwells at length upon his own feelings, his own fears, his own misgivings, his own obsessive wonderings.
The son offers only passing suggestions about the source of his father's driven, often-abhorrent behavior: What it takes to succeed as a first-generation immigrant. The daily toll of a long, acrid marriage that is damaging to both spouses. How his three eldest sons join his low-rung law firm, only to successively depart amid acrimony. How the three eldest sons die before he does. The physical and emotional ravages of old age.
There are just passing glimpses of another father buried beneath the gruff bluster. A father who is so proud of his son's first major literary award that he flies from L.A. to New York to show up unexpectedly for the ceremony. A father who is largely accepting of his son's homosexuality and his partner.
One of the problems with "The Bill From My Father" may well be its derivation and structure. Many of the chapters were originally separate essays published in magazines, but they do not readily coalesce into a satisfying whole with an arc of narrative.
There is no doubt that Cooper is a fine literary writer, with a powerful command of drama, incident, dialogue. But his terribly flawed and frustrating relationship with his father seems to have hamstrung his abilities as a memoirist just as it hamstrung his better instincts as a son.
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