You might recall this clip from Douglas Light's short story
"Separate" published on Identity Theory last May:
To blame my parents' divorce on my father's missing hand is to blame a fire on the wood and not the spark that blazed it. True, my folks stopped sleeping together soon after the accident, but that was because my father took to rubbing his stump against my mother's thighs as she slept.
Light's debut novel, East Fifth Bliss (Behler, 220 pages), carries many of the same qualities as that piece (but with more refinement, as you'd expect), and like "Separate," it describes a naive man's abnormal relationship with his father. Here's more info from the book's website:
There are seven defining moments in a person's life. For Morris Bliss, the difficulty is in knowing which moments are defining. At age thirty-five, Morris Bliss is clamped in the jaws of New York City inertia: he wants to travel but has no money; he needs a job but has no prospects; he still shares a walk-up apartment with his father.
Enter Stefani, an eighteen-year-old girl in a catholic school uniform, and Morris's once static life quickly unravels...
Purchase East Fifth Bliss online.
posted by Matt Borondy on 4/24/2007 
