David Shields, _The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead_

THIS BOOK JOINS Art Spiegelman's Maus on the list of fine books about aging, fiercely vital, but exasperating fathers.  Right, yes, I know Spiegelman's book was really about the Holocaust, but do you remember anything about the book better than you remember Vladek, and is the Vladek of Rego Park one whit less memorable than the Vladek of Auschwitz?

Shields's book is largely about the waxing and waning of the human body over the life cycle, the infant body, the child body, the adolescent body, the youthful body in its reproductive prime, and the lengthy, inevitable, and really not very enjoyable decline once that prime is past.  Shields does this with numbers, mainly -- statistics assembled and presented as they might be by an actuary who happened to be a superb prose stylist. But there are also stories of Shields's own body, its bout with acne, its brief morning of prowess when he was a high school basketball player, his injuries, his fatherhood...all progressing steadily to the endpoint identified in the book's title. 

But in defiance of all statistics, all likelihood, all normal expectations, Milton Shields (originally Schildcrout) is still at cruising speed in his nineties, still running, still dating, still writing, still competitive, still likely to take his son down a peg when he deems it necessary, still driving his son crazy.  Milt Shields tracks through the book in rogue counterpoint to its story of quickly passing corporeal efflorescence and long, difficult corporeal withering -- he is ageless, indomitable, annoying.  One could say the portrait is ultimately loving and affectionate, but, erm, Tuesdays with Morrie it ain't; it isn't even Roth's Patrimony.  

Yet ultimately, what is it in the book that has fastened itself to your memory?  Milt Shields.  The reviewer in the New York Review of Books seemed under the impression that Milt's vitality was such that he somehow transcended his grumpy son's vain attempt to bring everybody down, but I wonder if the apotheosis of Milt wasn't exactly what Shields was going for, that apotheosis being achieved every bit as much by the sharp delineation of his flaws as it is by his vitality and refusal to age.  Oh, to have been there had the father of Kafka's "Letter to my Father," Vladek Spiegelman, Herman Roth (or his shadow, Jack Portnoy), and Milt Shields ever sat down for a game of gin rummy.