Sacrifice - Hardcover

Gitlin, Todd

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805060324 ISBN 13: 9780805060324

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 1999

Synopsis

A beautiful, elegiac novel of a father, a son, and the secrets that divide generations.

In the seventy-fifth year of his life, on a sweltering August afternoon, Chester Garland, the distinguished psychiatrist, author, and campaigner for human rights, is struck by a subway train and dies. Soon after, his son Paul receives a thoroughly unexpected inheritance: three diaries written decades earlier, in the year when Garland, on a trip to France,unaccountably walked out on his family and his profession.

As cool, detached Paul, a cyberspace cartoonist, reads the diaries, he finally faces the event that has shadowed his life since childhood. He embarks, as his father had a quarter century earlier, on a pilgrimage of love and grief, of passions-religious, erotic, and intellectual-and of discovery that is as unexpected as it is moving.

With grace and precision, Gitlin takes us on a journey not just across an ocean or across decades, but into the secret depths of two men's lives, which were forever changed in the aftermath of that tumultuous decade now known as "the sixties." A memorable portrait of a father and son locked in a biblical embrace, Sacrifice builds with quiet elegance to its shocking conclusion.

About this title

About the Author

Todd Gitlin is the author of The Twilight of Common Dreams (Owl Books, 0-8050- 4091-9), The Sixties, and a novel, The Murder of Albert Einstein. A columnist for the New York Observer, he teaches culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University.

Reviews

Culture-critic Gitlin takes another stab at fiction (The Murder of Albert Einstein, 1992), surpassing his earlier effort with the story of a long-strained father-son relationship, fathomed only after the father's suicide. Seventy-six-year-old Chester Garland, a respected psychiatrist, set the process of understanding in motion one August day, when he abruptly dropped in front of a subway train at Grand Central Station. His son Paul, respected for his work as a pornographic cartoonist (in the spirit of R. Crumb), is duly summoned to the office of Chester's lawyer and handed his fathers journals, which date from the time years ago when Chester went to Paris to give a paper at a psychoanalytic congress, then failed to come home as promised. As Paul turns the pages, he learns of a man frustrated in his career and his personal life, a man who impulsively decided to make a quick trip to Chartres to see the cathedralbut got on the wrong train. A woman he meets on the train, a Czech refugee with a small boy of her own, implicitly offers him an intangible something that he can't explain (but knows he needs), and they quickly begin an idyllic affair in her town on the coast of Brittany. The liaison lasts for months, dissolving his marriage, ruining his relationship with Paul, and earning the disapproval of his friends. Only a catastrophe can bring Chester back to a semblance of his former life. Its the long shadow of that event that finally leads him to his lonely perch on the subway platform. Paul's part in this fractured tale is often heavy-going, but Chester's journals and the world they evoke provide a fine portrait of a tortured soul who, wholly by accident and only for a moment, found paradise. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In the wake of his psychiatrist father's apparent suicide, Paul Gurevitch (n? Michael Garland) sifts through the evidence of Dr. Garland's life. He reads from his father's book on the father-son relationships suffered by the biblical Abraham, Isaac, and Esau, a book Paul resisted opening during his father's life. He also reads through three journals that his father's lawyer bestows upon him after Dr. Garland's funeral. Cultural critic and novelist Gitlin (The Twilight of Common Dreams, Holt, 1996) gives readers a surprisingly cerebral, not-quite-failed cartoonist for a central character and lets Paul discover for us, as well as for himself, what made his father into the emotionally unavailable man he became when Paul was a young child. The interwoven texts of Paul's present, Dr. Garland's published biblical gloss, and his secret journals cohere nicely. Only the changes in Gitlin's female characters seem unrealisticAbut perhaps we see them too completely through Dr. Garland's and Paul's eyes. For all collections where serious fiction is popular.AFrancisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805060324
• ISBN 13: 9780805060324
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 229