Ben Tanzer’s My Father’s House: A review by J. A. Tyler

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how much of my life slips into my fiction. If I look back on a previous manuscript I can see in it rhythms of songs I was listening to at the time, snippets of dialogue or phrasing I recall hearing, echoes of significant and immaterial events happening to or around me. I don’t do this on purpose and usually I don’t even recognize it until the writing is complete and there is distance between myself and the work. No matter what I am writing, it is cathartic, and there is no doubt a strong relationship between my contentment while writing and the involuntary embedding of one’s own existence into the text.

This notion of our personal life unintentionally inhabiting our books, is an idea I keep coming back to in Ben Tanzer’s latest novella My Father’s House. This is a book that thrives on sadness and intimacy, following a father’s journey to death and his son’s somewhat reluctant trailing behind, putting both cancer and relationships on vibrant display. And while Tanzer is best known for his pop-culture references and quirky dialogue, My Father’s House is much more straight-laced in its approach, more refined in its handling of a narrative that is entirely genuine.

It’s all so confusing and somewhat deceiving, self-deceiving anyway, being here with him. Because aside from the thinning hair and the need for all of us to constantly wash our heads and avoid kissing him on the lips, he looks a lot better than he has been looking, almost normal really. His energy seems up. His fatigue somewhat lessened.

And I just can’t help but get wrapped up in speculation about how much of this book comes from Tanzer’s personal life – which is not to say I am morbidly fascinated by a father’s death, no, not at all – I want to know because My Father’s House has the ring of testament, the sound and feel and grip of a book that was born from truth, of stories that were as much written as they were experienced. Rest assured, fans of Tanzer, that there are still a handful of spliced music lyrics and bouts of clever dialogue in My Father’s House, but the overall tone is more serious than eccentric, more grounded than irreverent, and I was happy to be caught up in the grief for a little while.

I want to believe that means something and maybe it does, especially when he wakes up in the hospital and looks happy to se me. But then as he looks up at the television, he gets nostalgic as we listen to a news report about the Outer Banks in North Carolina because it takes him back to a long ago family trip, and a beat-up ferry that had a hot dog stand. And the memory makes him sad, and the tears start to well-up, first for him, and then for me, and then it’s not so deceiving. Reality hits and I Have to ask, or at least wonder, how long do we really have, because it can’t be too much longer.

My Father’s House is available from Main Street Rag Publishing Company.

J. A. Tyler’s reviews have appeared in The Colorado Review, Rumpus, and Tarpaulin Sky, and his most recent novel A Shiny, Unused Heart is now available from Black Coffee Press. For more, visit: chokeonthesewords.com.