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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Thus formed the bonds of father and son", 15 April 2006
Although Bernard Cooper's memoir The Bill From My Father may be about his fraught and often difficult relationship with his father, Edward Cooper, the book is just as much about thirty-something Bernard's own life, forced to cope with his own insecurities, whilst also struggling to become a published writer. It's an exquisitely written account of the formative years of Bernard's life, where he desired and even sort out approval, from his cantankerous, argumentative and often irritable old man.
The Bill From My Father is a very personal history of the man who raised Bernard, who ate at the family table, paid out the utility bills, and slept in the same bed as his mother, "were we father and son I sometimes wondered, or merely strangers who answered to those terms." Edward was certainly a man who loved life and aimed to get the most out of it. Strangely enigmatic, he possessed many contradictions, he thought nothing of being unfaithful to his first wife - Bernard's mother - yet he was remarkably accepting of his son's sexual orientation, even later in life befriending Brian, Bernard's therapist partner.
It wasn't that Bernard's father was particularly ornery, although he was prone to bouts of explosive and childish rage. But more than anything else, his anger was perhaps a product of his uncontrollable eccentricity. He could rally a bullish strength whenever he felt threatened, and he was not so much a humorless man, but he new his mischief forward and back, and he always got the line between antics and madness exactly right. Beneath his truculence, Edward even had a heart and championed underdog - a crusader for civil rights, he fought for the the right of a San Bernadino housewife to charge people admission to tale a peek at her living chicken dinner, or the right of parents to keep their underage daughter locked in her bedroom.
Of course, the great audacity is that Bernard ultimately receives retribution from his father in the form of a supposed bill, an actual invoice for $2 million-his rough estimate of what his son's life cost him through age 28. It's the final insult in a long career of incidents and occurrences that portray Edward as unkind and penny-pinching. And he believed that paying even the smallest bill might make him appear weak or defeated, "debt rather than humiliating him, proved his triumph over the importunings of authority, and over the great tyranny of money itself."
As Edward's health gradually declines, and his father's emotional well-being gradually slipping away, much of the narrative centers on Bernard's efforts to care for him. With the death of his three sons, Edward's losses - combined with his failed marriages - almost mentally deform him, and he settles ever more deeply into brooding silence, a silence breached infrequently and only by explosive and unpredictable raging.
What emerges in The Bill From My Father is a complex portrait of a man who seemed to replace grief with a full-time vendetta, and "whose shapeless rage was divided into files." All that is left for Bernard is a brusque, evasive and almost callus sort of love that often proved to difficult for him to bear for too long. Reader's will readily empathise with the author's frustration, afterall, this was a father, who from the outset, looked down on his youngest son's literary ambitions and disparaged him for not being interested in a "ligitimate" job.
This complex memoir is mostly about the importance of love and the endurance of family bonds. Edward and Bernard, whether they liked it or not, were both entangled as father and son, caught up in an unlimited net of human failings where truth floats in a misty limbo, dormant until it is spoken aloud.
Bernard is often puzzled how he can love such a man and even after Edward has passed on, his "brusque rejoinders and knotty logic" continue to thrive in his son's mind. This is a lovely, eloquently written memoir about a father and son at critical moments in their lives, either unaware or often unable to acknowledge their own self-destructive impulses. And the fact that Bernard Cooper can weave such a lyrical tale of the small dramas from such mundane and everyday events is a testament to his ineffable talent as a writer and as a novelist. Mike Leonard April 06.
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