An Excerpt from To Live in the Center of the Moment

By Barbara Frey Waxman

Philip Roth: Aging and Mortality for Father and Son

Early in November I99I,I was reading Philip Roth's autobiographical narrative of his father Herman's final years and battle against a brain tumor while my own father, Oscar Frey, was dying. I did not know that my father was battling terminal cancer until one week after I had finished reading Patrimony. Roth’s book became interwoven with my life and helped me to get through the three weeks of my father's hospitalization and his death. The book is affectionate, medically sophisticated, psychologically penetrating, philosophically energizing, and warmly Jewish. In it Roth unravels the complexity of his love and other strong feelings for his father. He describes spiritual moments of oneness with his father and explains his reasons for writing about them. He creates a lifelike characterization of Herman interacting with others, especially with the narrator, by reconstructing vivid dialogues with his and conversations with other family and friends about his father. He analyzes the control and power issues of the father-son relationship, portraying the disturbing changes in its dynamics as a father enters frail old age.

Roth also offers unflinching descriptions of the aged body's deterioration and of his own ordeal with major surgery in middle age. He gives I an account of his anxious negotiations with the medical profession and his dealings with living wills. He deliberates, while surveying the history of his father's life, on what constitutes a meaningful existence and how one's work creates life's meaning. These are the outstanding elements of Philip Roth's portrait of Herman Roth and of himself as Herman's good son.

Roth's stoical probing into what one of his friends calls the "horrible" loss of a parent—in which "Half, or more, of life goes. You feel poorer" (I27)— has strengthened me in my new poverty, as a person having lost her second parent, and helped me to sound the psychological and philosophical depths of what I and my family endured that November and December of I99I. This is the backdrop for my strongly felt response to Roth's text. Patrimony had extraordinary power o

An Excerpt from From the Hearth to the Open Road

By Barbara Frey Waxman

Beginning the Journey to Selfhood in Middle Age

"Middle-age spread," "fat and forty," "middle-age depression," "empty nest syndrome," "middle-age crisis," "lonely middle-aged widow": these stereotypical associations with middle age suggest stagnation; the loss of physical vitality, attractiveness, and usefulness to others; diminishing self-pride; and increasing isolation. Americans, Britons, and Canadians may attempt to slough off the negatives with redoubled efforts at jogging and aerobic exercise classes or with jokes about dieting, facelifts, and hair color, but despair often hovers behind the sweating and the levity.

In contrast, much contemporary fiction by women is challenging these stereotypes by helping readers to see the potential in middle age for discovery and new activities, for continuing the reifung, or emotional and philosophical ripening begun in youth. Reifungsromane enable readers to experience vicariously the lives and thoughts of middle-aged heroines who glow in self-knowledge and energy and change the direction of their lives. The London based Doris Lessing has created two such middle-aged heroines in, Kate Brown of The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and Jane Somers of The Diaries of Jane Somers (1983). The San Francisco-based Alice Adams explores American versions of the adventurous middle-aged heroine in three short stories from To See You Again (1982). Both authors present middle age as a time to take to the open road, often literally, when their heroines discover who they are and where they want to go for the rest of their lives. Both authors also undermine the polarity between youth and age by presenting "youthfully" passionate and active middle-aged women.

ver me at that time in my life. I knew I would eventually have to return to this text to write about it and about my intense, grateful embrace of it.

My psychological and historical situatedness in rereading Patrimony one year after Oscar Frey's death, so imbued with the experiences of mourning for my father, colors and determines my analysis of the text in this ch

An Excerpt from From the Hearth to the Open Road

By Barbara Frey Waxman

Beginning the Journey to Selfhood in Middle Age

"Middle-age spread," "fat and forty," "middle-age depression," "empty nest syndrome," "middle-age crisis," "lonely middle-aged widow": these stereotypical associations with middle age suggest stagnation; the loss of physical vitality, attractiveness, and usefulness to others; diminishing self-pride; and increasing isolation. Americans, Britons, and Canadians may attempt to slough off the negatives with redoubled efforts at jogging and aerobic exercise classes or with jokes about dieting, facelifts, and hair color, but despair often hovers behind the sweating and the levity.