Richard Stern, who died in 2013, is said to be one of those sadly neglected "writers' writers." Before this I had only read - and loved - OTHER MEN'S DAUGHTERS, probably his best known and most successful novel. Now, having read this one, A FATHER'S WORDS, I appreciate his craft even more, because this is, quite simply, a damn good book. It's about being a father, about selfishness and compromise and other difficulties of love and marriage, about filial love, losing one's parents and mortality. In short, this is a novel about all the important issues of being a human being.

Yes, deep stuff. Even war gets its due: "Is war essential to industrial capitalism, the only sufficiently rapid consumer of goods? ... A nation's a nation when it has weapons. Without them you have bad feelings, not corpses."

But fatherhood is the central subject here, represented mainly in the prickly and difficult relationship between protagonist/narrator Cy Reimer and his slacker son, Jack. Cy is a writer, Jack seems to pride himself on being nothing, a taker. Tension, guilt, anger, disgust - a soup of emotions results.

And on his own father, dead at 92 of dementia, Cy says -

"Ten years before his death, when his mind was still all right, I gave him a Woolworth notebook and suggested he write his autobiography. [telling him] 'You've had a wonderful life and you're a wonderful fellow. Everybody's life is precious. Things that no one else has ever known will disappear from the world when you do. It doesn't have to be a great book. Anything you write, I'll love. So will the children.'..."

This hit me right in the heart. I proposed the same thing to my mother when she was ninety. She started to write, got nearly 40 pages in, then stopped and never started again. She died at 96, but I will treasure those pieces of her life that she did write down. I wonder if this interest in our parents' lives always comes too late. In another scene, Cy meets a middle-aged woman on a plane, flying to visit her aged and ill father -

"... she was going to get him to talk into a tape recorder about his life. 'I'll have his voice, his life.'..."

Cy Reimer, divorced and living with a much younger woman, has two sons, two daughters. A writer who values his solitude and privacy, his relationships wit his ex-wife, his sons, his daughters are all fraught with complexity - guilt is a constant.

"A father's words" are so important - what he says, how he says it. Words have lasting effects that reverberate through lives, down through generations even.

Damn, this was a good book! HIGHLY recommended. And now on to an even older Stern novel, IN ANY CASE. Stay tuned. ( )