Your heritage is the love and shit of those you love.

Watching your parents grow older, watching them gradually crumble and become vulnerable, crushed by the weight of an ever-increasing boulder of ailments and illnesses, must be one of the most brutal experiences a person can undergo during the second half of their life: because it confirms the fragility of everything, because you see them suffer and feel the same way, bringing you closer to an ever-closer vulnerability and disappearance. This is true, of course, only in families where the parents have fulfilled their duty as parents and where the children act as children. This is the case of Herman Roth, a Jewish man from Newark, the son of immigrants, a widower, a retired insurance salesman, and his son, Philip, a writer.

And what a writer! Philip Roth was—that the phrase sounds like an advertising cliché doesn't make it any less accurate—one of the greatest novelists of 20th-century American literature, which is to say, of 20th-century world literature. He is also one of those who took (conceived) his literary work in a more intense and radically personal way. The raw material for Philip Roth's novels was his individual experience—his status as a militantly Americanized Jew, his fanatical relationship with writing, his passion for women—and the events of modern American history—anti-Semitism, the Cold War, Vietnam, the counterculture, the moralistic neo-Puritanism of the 1990s.

A Patrimoni, a kind of memoir focused on the last years of his father's life, all of this is there too. But what is present above all, more intensified than ever, is Roth's conception of literature as the starkly personal expression of an individual and their worldview, their sense of morality, their place in society and history, their sense of community, their ties to others, and their dual capacity for nothing alone, nothing alone, only to remember themselves, and at the same time to remember. "To our family, the living and the dead": this is the dedication that begins the book and already gives us the tone, the existential temper, and the precise, naked power that runs through it from beginning to end.

A majestic literary and human exercise

Originally published in 1991, just before Roth began one of the most formidable creative streaks ever seen in a novelist (Operation Shylock, from 1993, Sabbath Theater, from 1995, The American Pastoral, from 1997, I married a communist, of 1998, and The stain of man, 2000), Patrimoni It is a majestic literary and human exercise, where shamelessness and tenderness, devotion and horror, affection and physiology, the directed loyalty of a son willing to do his part and the bewilderment of a father who can do less and less, coexist, the evocative recreation of a full and evocative process of a terminal past. With dynamic and muscular prose, crossed by moral ideas and a vivid sensoriality, Roth narrates his father's illness and pain (a massive brain tumor) with uncompromising crudeness, but also with a vitality that almost makes death inconceivable.

The unexpected and horrifying surprise of the first symptoms, the pessimistic diagnosis, the regular visits to the doctor, the mental and emotional management of the novelty, the progressive adaptation to the new situation, the ravages of the illness... All of this is what Roth recounts, but this is only the medical surface of the matter. Every scene, from a banal telephone conversation about baseball between father and son to the trips to the cemetery to visit the grave of his dead mother, to the operation of cleaning the toilet after his (no longer seeing) father has left it covered in shit, rises to become monuments of manhood. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Patrimoni It is the masterpiece of a colossal writer who here puts all his talent at the service, not so much of literary ambition, but of the desire to explain to everyone that his father was a good man and that he – the free and scandalous writer, the controversial and insatiable man – has always strived to be a good son.