NOW BEACON, NOW SEA

An aggrieved son reveals family strife.

In his debut memoir, novelist Sorrentino, a National Book Award finalist, creates an unvarnished portrait of a family characterized by “recrimination, sadness, jealousy, grief, despair.” Growing up, he saw his father, award-winning novelist and poet Gilbert Sorrentino (1929-2006), as “patient, charismatic, and outrageously funny, the life of the party that began for me as soon as he disengaged himself from his work each day.” His mother, Victoria Ortiz, on the other hand, was impatient, sour, and angry. “My mother’s anger,” writes the author, “was the latent condition of our household, awaiting its moment to jet, boiling, from the place where she kept it ready.” Anyone and anything could enrage her: neighbors, her son’s friends, an object misplaced, a digression from the detailed daily schedule she posted (including “the time of day [she] had set aside for my bowel movement”), and Christopher’s attitudes and behavior. At 16, the therapist he saw each week pointed out to him “the tone of voice I apparently habitually used—hostile, suspicious, mocking.” He sounded like his mother, and he fears, even now, that he has inherited her “eerie fatalism” and “need to blame.” Venting about his mother’s abuse—and, he came to realize, his father’s complicity—Sorrentino tries to understand the woman who was “unfathomable” to him: “now beacon, now sea.” Identified as Black on her birth certificate, she had rejected her heritage, running “from every implication that might attach to being a Puerto Rican girl from the South Bronx.” She felt her life had ended at 25, when Christopher was born, and she isolated herself from family and made no friends. As the author writes, trapped “inside my father’s particular neediness, her refusal to refuse him even as she showered him with her contempt and anger, will remain a mystery.” Neither parent emerges as sympathetic in a well-written memoir that betrays enduring resentment.

A sharp, sad tale of bitterness and regret.