ABSTRACT
In March 1993, reading a selection at the poetry center of the 92nd StreetY from his memoir of his father's last year, Patrimony, Roth relates, of an evening's concert at his father's condominium community in Miami Beach: "The performance was as alarming as it was heroic" (57). Roth's performance, too, spanned that vast spectrum, alarming for it spoke of death's relentlessness, of the body's fragility with unusual candor, and heroic because it was his own father, not a fictional construction, being revealed that night, a father only recently departed and most clearly still achingly present to the narrator.
