Allison Moorer reviews Inherited Disorders {Stories & Syndromes} by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
(Regan Arts, 263 pp. Publication Date May 03, 2016)
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There are countless theories about relationships between fathers and sons. Not one, however, successfully explains the nuances of bond that exist between them. Not one successfully explains the pride, guilt, hope, jealousy, resentment, annoyance, dependence, admiration, understanding, misunderstanding, obligation, obliviousness, deception, fear, and love that can exist between a man and his male offspring, and how those things can complicate life for both.
Not one successfully explains a son’s simultaneous need to defend and defeat his legacy.
In Inherited Disorders, Adam Ehrlich Sachs shows us rather than tries to explain this struggle that is as old as time. In 117 short stories, most of them quite funny, he explores the struggle of sons to become their own men, either through the aping of their fathers’ work and the conscious, or more interestingly, sub-conscious destroying of it, or through the refusal to acknowledge it at all.
In “The Chimney Sweep,” Sachs tells the story of Henry Hobson Fowler, the son of a London chimney sweep who overcame his working class past to become a Professor of Logic at Oxford University in 1919. Three or four years after his installation there, he began “to speak of his approach to philosophy as ‘a kind of logico-linguistic chimney sweeping’ and over time construed this metaphor in an increasingly literal fashion.” This leaning got progressively worse. He, by the fall of 1928, was giving his students brushes and scrapers, asking them to raise either when arguing a philosophical point. The brush for “dislodging loose logico-linguistic soot,” or the scraper for “chipping away at solid logico-linguistic soot.” Then, with his “long, adjustable, articulated rod with a brush head affixed to one end,” he declared they would “clear out the philosophical flue.” Some thought Fowler a genius; others thought him mad, “not so much wielding his past as being wielded by it.” He eventually had his students clearing chimneys around Oxford. His body was found stuck in a flue in 1953. Ironic.
In “Obligation,” two men introduced by a mutual friend commiserate over feeling they had to “fulfill his father’s legacy” and attempt their feats. One father was a mountaineer who died while attempting a climb; one was a sea kayaker who died trying to cross an ocean. Upon discovering that the mountaineer’s son loved the sea, and the sea kayaker’s son loved the mountains, they agreed to, while getting drunk and involving another friend of the mutual friend, the son of the man who attempted the world’s highest skydive, “ensure that his father’s legacy is fulfilled, but without merely following in his father’s footsteps. Each will at the same time honor his dad and strike out in a new, literally a new, direction from him — the mountaineer’s son moving across rather than up, the skydiver’s son up rather than down, and the sea kayaker’s son down rather than across.” The mountaineer’s son would cross the sea, the skydiver’s son would climb the mountain, and the sea kayaker’s son would skydive. The orchestrator of the introductions among the three daredevils was the son of “a great connector of people and facilitator of conversations who was always putting interesting people in a room together.” Inventive.
The stories in Inherited Disorders are not always humorous, ironic, or inventive. Sometimes they are just sad, and reveal how deeply grounded a family tree can keep a man, even when he wants to branch out. In “Regret,” Sachs describes a son who had done everything he could to keep from taking up his father’s profession, but upon his ever seeing a pregnant dog, thought, “I wish I could help you. (His father was a dog obstetrician.)”
Sachs, of course, dedicates the book to his father.
Photo: Flickr/Rolands Lakis