Parsimony

Hello, readers. I am happy to announce that my novel Parsimony is now available for purchase, for those of you who are interested. Here is a brief summary of it:

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 elderly 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 Russian history. Set in the course of a single day in an apartment overlooking Sanibel Island, the novel explores the generational impact of shattered ideals.

  

To Order:

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Blurbs:

"A poignant, unflinching story about the fragile bonds between fathers and sons, Parsimony’s trenchant, heartbreaking prose captured me from the first few pages and continued to resonate long after I finished. This carefully crafted novel about love ineffable, about loss and death, is threaded throughout with spirit and hope—Memento mori becoming in the book’s final, beautiful passages Memento vivere. One of the finest pieces of new fiction I’ve read in a long time.”

                                   Mark Dunn, author of Ella Minnow Pea and We Five
 
"Peter Adam Nash imbues each line of elegant prose with a pervasive sense of unease. Along with the unfolding drama of the Ansky family, Parsimony skillfully evokes the controversies of one American decade after another. I was startled again and again by the shock of recognition—and by the all too relevant warning: how easily we defend ourselves against seeing systems of cruelty when blinded by conviction and hope, or by their absence."

                  Diane Lefer, author of Confessions of a Carnivore and California Transit: Stories

“Peter Nash's evocative exploration of the complex relationship between a son and his father possesses the melancholy wisdom of Philip Roth's Patrimony, the sense that we can never really know those closest to us until we know ourselves. Nash writes like a poet; his sentences unwind through ideas, emotions, and wise reflections on the sadness of aging, the difficulties of parenting, and the trials of sustaining intimacy when so much stands in the way. I loved this book for its quiet wisdom and for its commitment to telling the most daunting truths about growing apart from those with whom we share the most."

                              George Ovitt, author of The Snowman and What Happens Next

Reviews:

"With eloquent language worthy of literary recognition, Peter Nash’s Parsimony offers wisdom fraught with interpersonal and political conflicts… While thoroughly imagined in its historical context, Parsimony is at its core the story of a family. There may be years of drama quietly hanging on the fringes of relationships and paranoid behaviors beyond comprehension, but family shapes us, through and through. Parsimony exposes this truth with effortlessly elegant prose and characters who linger in the memory.
"

Foreword Reviews (starred review)

'A dutiful son helps his increasingly demented father make his last life transition, into a nursing home, despite their uneasy relationship.

European in feel, Nash’s (The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel, 2014) novel unspools nonchronological layers of memory, spreading out from a single day, as David Ansky assists his irascible father, Jacob, who recently assaulted his maid, move from his Florida apartment to a care facility. Jacob—himself the son of Joseph Ansky, “professional Communist, imperious foreign editor for the Daily Worker”—is a retired Russian history professor who taught at Cornell and wrote a book on Trotsky. While, in the here and now, David sorts Jacob’s belongings, sooths his rants, and gentles him along the last lap of a none-too-happy life, filaments of the past unfurl and connect, offering glimpses of David’s childhood; his failed marriage; his choice of career, in part a repudiation of his father’s dry academia and barren politics. There’s a Sebald-ian flavor to this melancholy web of recollections, regrets, vignettes, infidelities, and mood moments, colored with intellectual and historical detail and some archaic vocabulary—“oppugning,” “sesquipedalian,” “impetrates.” And, occasionally, the story switches point of view from David’s resigned practicality to Jacob’s cacophony of sights, smells, and flickering thoughts. Nash’s composed tapestry of a family is delicate and poetic, although it accrues meaning more from the accumulation of episodes than penetration of character. There’s a late squall of melodramatic confrontation—“When I look at you now…all I can do is weep.” “I didn’t want to end up like you”—but the concluding mood is sweetly generous in its acknowledgement of generational love and loss.

Nash treads deftly into archetypal territory.'

Kirukus Review

Thank you very much for reading our blog.

Peter Nash