Parsimony

Book excerpt: Parsimony is a novel about fathers and sons, about the twisted manifestations of politics and history in the lives of a particular Jewish American family. When the novel opens, David Ansky, a divorced and disaffected New York architect, has gone to Florida to move his father into a local nursing home. He has never been close to the man and dreads the responsibility, intending to dispatch with the matter as swiftly as possible. Yet things do not go as planned, so that quickly he finds himself entangled in the past, trapped in a cat and mouse game with his father in which he is never quite sure how to gauge the man's remarks, which range from the paranoid and sentimental to the cruelly, severely astute. At the heart of this experience is David's reckoning, just after 9/11, with his own life and career, and with his family's radically left-wing past-with his Stalinist grandfather and with his bitter, politically disillusioned father, a Trotsky scholar and retired professor of history. Set in the course of a single day in an apartment overlooking Sanibel Island, the novel explores the generational impact of shattered ideals.