Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems

by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

A son receives an inheritance from his father and tries to dispose of it before it destroys him. Inherited Disorders tells this elemental story in over 100 hilarious, witty variations.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s Inherited Disorders is a rueful, absurd, and endlessly entertaining look at a most serious subject—the eternally vexed relations between fathers and sons. In a hundred and seventeen shrewd, surreal vignettes, Sachs lays bare the petty rivalries, thwarted affection, and mutual bafflement that have characterized the filial bond since the days of Davidic kings. A philosopher’s son kills his father and explains his aphorisms to death. A father bequeaths to his son his jacket, deodorant, and political beliefs. England’s most famous medium becomes possessed by the spirit of his skeptical father—who questions, in front of the nation, his son’s choice of career. A Czech pianist amputates his fingers one by one to thwart his father, who will not stop composing concertos for him. A nineteenth-century Italian nobleman wills his ill-conceived flying contraption—incapable of actual flight—to his newborn son. In West Hollywood, an aspiring screenwriter must contend with the judgmental visage of his father, a respected public intellectual whose frozen head, clearly disappointed in him, he keeps in his freezer. Keenly inventive, but painfully familiar, these surprisingly tender stories signal the arrival of a brilliant new comic voice—and fresh hope for fathers and sons the world over.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Humor, American, Literary Fiction, Family, Adult Fiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published May 3, 2016

About the author

Adam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of three books: Gretel and the Great War, The Organs of Sense, and Inherited Disorders. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, and Harper’s Magazine, and he was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, and he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inherited Disorders had me at the title and the cover. The description promised the rest, a humorous look at how sons dealt with the legacy they inherited from their father, whether in physicial, monetary, or any other form. At first the short, shorter and shortest short stories made me wanting more, the stories were quirky, surreal, with a hint of absurdist humor and hilarity.

This is all about the often problematic relationships between fathers and sons and these fathers'expectations of their sons, what will they do with their 'inheritance'. Will they trump their fathers and be better or more well-known? Or turn away and go the complete opposite direction? Or worse, utterly fail?

DIVING RECORD
A Florida man died Monday while trying to surpass his father’s record for deep diving without the aid of oxygen or fins. Thirty years ago, in the Gulf of Mexico, the father famously dove 225 feet without using oxygen or fins. On Monday the son made three dives in the same location, all without using oxygen or fins. His first dive was 167 feet. His second dive was 191 feet. On his third attempt the son managed to dive down 216 feet without oxygen or fins, but his lungs burst on the way up and he died aboard his diving vessel. At the funeral, his father tearfully admitted that in his record-setting dive he had actually used both oxygen and fins.

But then, it became repetitive. There are just too many of these highly intellectual, metaphysical and philosophical vignettes. So, eventhough dnf-ed at 39% of the book, I'll still give this book a solid 3*. The writing is excellent. AES knows the craft of playing with words. It is just...not for me.


Review copy supplied by publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a rating and/or review.

[Bogdan]

Brilliant but short breathed

This book contains some of the most hysterically funny, insanely inventive – also because truculently erudite –, exquisitely absurd and, last but not least, surprisingly wise short prose pieces I read in this language in a long while, or ever.

I must say, though, that a good number of these stories, parables or problems, seemed to have been too premeditated. They were like half ideas, half quirks of the imagination developed almost only logically. This gave them a rather dry, conceptual air, lacking that deeper, irrational breath of creativity.

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. This collection of short-shorts about fathers and sons is absurd and truthful about how we humans are caught in a loop of actions and reactions that, even as we imagine we are changing anything, inevitably repeat our habitual addictions, reinforcing our beliefs. The pieces are funny and edgy and frequently required me to make sounds like hoots, gasps, and insane cackling.

I’m grateful to Goodreader Lauren for her review of this out-of-print gem. I easily got a hardcover edition (pub. 2016, Regan Arts.) from the library, and after I recommended it to a friend who said he’d buy it, I checked and found that used-book prices are exorbitant. This would be such an easy book for author Adam Ehrlich Sachs to republish on his own that I almost tried to contact him, but he seems busy with new work, plus I realized he’s so brilliant he doesn’t need nudging from me. So I kept my mouth shut.

Is my choice to remain silent the very solipsism Sacks writes about? I believe he is brilliant and doesn’t need my input, therefore my decision to remain silent somehow validates this belief?

Hell, I don’t know. Read the book.

[Lee Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much of a good thing after a while — some of these short pieces about fathers and sons are genius and others seem to reveal the seams of seeming like genius. The best of these I wanted to send copies of to friends who teach; most seem formulaic (ironic reversal of patrilineally inherited traits); some close up before they have a chance to bloom with humor. Recommended to fans of Temple of the Iconoclasts and The Afflictions — I also have a story called Carry Me Father No More that predates this by a decade but seems influenced by it.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent excellent book. Each vignette takes 1-3 minutes to read. Writing is concise and perfect. Not a wasted word. Very very funny. Recurring themes re: family, particularly fathers & sons.

I read his piece in the New Yorker a while ago (was~5 of these vignettes) and pre-ordered this book on the strength of that piece. I have not been disappointed. I can hardly put it down each night.

Highly recommended

Oh, and I loved David Foster Wallace, and AES very much reminds me of DFW. Just as funny and smart and careful with words as well.

[Jessica Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Note: I received an advanced digital copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.)

In this series of 117 vignettes, Sachs explores the complex dynamic between fathers and sons. His stories are absurd, philosophical, funny, surreal, clever, quirky and often morbid in nature.

Members of the Surrogate Son Program at an assisted living facility are encouraged to visit less frequently, less willingly, for shorter stretches of time and with more unspoken resentment and physical unease — you know, to increase the authenticity of it. An aspiring screenwriter has his father’s head cryogenically frozen so that he can wake him up once he’s accomplished something. A son seeks out charities that will accept not only the physical possessions, but the mental attributes of his recently deceased father.

Like most story collections, some are much more amusing than others, and with such a large number of vignettes, the themes inevitably became repetitive. It took me some time to really get going and immerse myself in Sachs’ absurd world, but once I did, it really grew on me. There were many occasions when I laughed out loud — and I think you will, too, if you share my twisted sense of humor.

This was a one-sitting read for me, but it’s also the kind of book you can pick up and read intermittently when you’re in the mood for a couple quick, amusing, thought-provoking little stories.

[readbyjulia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5.
Zbiór 117 miniaturek literackich (opowiadań na 1-2-3 strony) o różnorakich relacjach ojców z synami, czy też synów z ojcami. Momentami dużo humoru, ale też jakiejś takiej delikatnej zgryzoty.

[Sarah Furger · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was ok. I was hoping for a more varied experience, an exploration of fathers and sons and all of their manifestations and complexities, but it felt like the same two or three relationships possibilities dressed up in different particulars in each chapter. It's by turns warm and funny and bitter and sad, and I certainly didn't hate it. However, I didn't love it as much as I had expected to either.

[Sandra · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this for book club (or tried to). No one got through it, so I don't feel bad about giving up on it at 41%. Short short stories about minor variations on dysfunctional father-son relationships to the exclusion of anything else (like if Lydia Davis set out to fail the Bechdel test). I did like story #32 (In a Vat). But it bugged me that the author doesn't care that Saarinen designed the Arch (story #46) or that there isn't just one "sweeper" on a curling team (story #15), or that the author thought it was funny to make up some convoluted grammatical tics and assign them to a Canadian indigenous people *and* move them to another province (story #40). Because I got the ebook I unfortunately could not hurl it across the room.

[Elizabeth Madsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC copy through a goodreads giveaway.

I immediately fell in love with this book. The basic idea of it is that it's the elemental story of a father's inheritance repeated in many variations. It's humorous. It's thought-provoking. And it's extremely well written. One of my favorite stories was about a couple sons, each burdened with their father's legacies, who decided to swap with each other. So good.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a good collection of stories, or want a good laugh.

[Shelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I started this book, I was all in. Quirky, cerebral, novel short stories that read like an updated Aesop's Fables for adults. However, the further I read, the more repetitive the stories became. Instead of a painter, the next chapter's character of interest is a sculptor.... I wish the author had published a smaller selection of stories and left the reader wanting more.

[Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, hilarious, and combinatorially exhaustive variations on the theme of father-son relationships. All one or two pagers for bite size consumption I found myself laughing out loud almost every page.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really entertaining set of short stories. Some of them almost seemed like they could be adapted as jokes. A book worth reading, even if its just for a few minutes here and there.

[Jule · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a collection of short stories and snippets about fathers and sons (and society). It is mainly about dealing with a fathers inheritance, whether of physical, financial, or ideological kind, or a business or even a record set by the father that the son is trying to repeat / outdo. Society comes in to play as the other driving force: next the the (dead / dying) fathers' wishes, it is society that drives the sons to do crazy things by expecting the same or more from the son as from the father and by comparing them to each other. Also hinted at is the issue of nurture vs nature in terms of following fathers business or intellectual footsteps. The focus of this book is on sons, not children, and fathers (at most father figures), not mothers. Sachs even goes as far as to include a story pointing out that "father" cannot simply be switched for "mother", as the issues are different. In most - if not all - of the stories, the son(s) fail. The book is filled with failure and suffering, at the very best a neutral outcome, but never positivism.

And let me tell you: Freud would have a field day with each and every protagonist, as well as with the author. So much testosterone, so much failure, so much comparison... The stories range from present to historical, from realistic to fantastical, from human to animal, from famous to normal, from one end of the globe to the other. This abundance of scenarios makes the collection feel universal and therefore true.

Abundance is a good cue here. Because with 117, there were about 100 stories too many in this collection. Some were good, some were confusing and bad - mixed all-sorts as always in collections. But they all repeated the some story, the same relationship, the same failure. Over and over again. And while there was a certain hint of continuity, of the stories following up on each other and being thematically linked in their arrangement, there was no development, no spectrum from "bad outcome" to "good outcome". In the end, the writing style with it curious redundant phrases and repetition, as well as the many many many versions of just one story, caused me to rate this book with 3/5 stars.

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Note: I received a free copy of this book through Goodreads First Reads.)

This is a book of 117 short stories (it might be better to call some of them 'vignettes') in 262 pages, all of them about a common theme: sons attempting to deal with the legacies of their fathers. I love the concept.

The stories themselves are often hilarious. Also intellectual: the sons and/or fathers here are often scientists, writers, artists, philosophers... intellectuals of every stripe. Sometimes the sons are trying to carry on and finish their father's work, sometimes they're trying to repudiate it, sometimes they're trying to break away from their fathers' legacies and go off in a different direction entirely.

Here's an example of one of the shorter stories in the book (one of my favorites), to give you an idea of the overall tone:

"The University of Chicago, where his father had been first a professor and then president, wrote to ask him whether he would consider posing for a sculptor who would be erecting a statue of his father in the classics quadrangle. They sent a sketch of the proposed statue: his father striding forward with his left leg, his right hand gripping a volume of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'. The son wrote back that he would not only consider posing for the artist, he would consider standing, himself, in the classics quadrangle in just that position- left leg striding forward, right hand gripping Ovid- for the rest of his life, and would actually even consider rotating continually but imperceptibly so that he was always facing the sun. To this offer, which the son noted went 'above and beyond' what they had requested, the University of Chicago did not respond."

By the later stories in the book, I admit, it was starting to grow old. There's still amusing material there, but perhaps it's best to take this book in small chunks, a little bit at a time. I'm sure the book won't appeal to everyone. But if your tastes include silly, surreal, intellectual humor, you should love this.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book so much. It's so funny it's profound. I don't mean that the funniness masks an underlying profundity, I mean that the humor itself is on such a level that it reaches a transformative state. Plus, yes, there's an underlying profundity about the perverse and impossible nature of father/son relationships, about the love/hate, the desperation to both follow and differentiate, the embarrassment for and of, the etc etc etc, that can only be captured with desperate and repetitive harlequinades.

I read it several years ago but come back to it over and over. It was a marvelous experience as a cover-to-cover treatise and it also works wonderfully when one is just popping in for a visit. I've probably made my way through the whole thing two or three times by now, just one or two stories at a time. I especially like to read it on a long airplane flight when the absurdity of the universe is already displayed in full force and the person in front of me has leaned back all the way and I just don't think I can take it anymore. Oh, how many times has Adam Ehrlich Sachs saved me from despair? Many, many times. I'm not kidding.

That's my tagline for this book: "Never fly without it."

The only book I can really compare it to is the first quarter of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition though that one buries its humor while Inherited Disorders bangs its humor over your head with pots and pans.

Anyway, I just got off a long and unpleasant flight and the only thing that got me through it was this book so I wanted to speak up about my love. I love it. I love it as much now as I did when I first read it.

[Aengus · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Inherited Disorders" is a hilarious book of micro-fictions and short stories concerning one subject:
how fathers and sons misunderstand and disappoint one another. The son of a chimney sweep leaves the family business to become as famous professor who teaches using brooms and scrapers. Sons spend their entire lives trying to negate their father's life's work. Here's one in it's entirety:
Regret

"He had done everything possible to avoid going into his father's line of work. He studied something radically different. He moved far away from home. Yet now, years later, not a day goes by without him seeing a pregnant dog and thinking: I wish I could help you. (His father was a dog obstetrician)."
Absurd and poignant, the stories draw a portrait of perpetual familial dysfunction. The relentless fixation on this one subject can be exhausting, sort of like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes, but "Inherited Disorders" is worth the effort.

[Jimbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Sachs writing. I spoke to him and he did tell me to read the book broken up. The stories all have a similar feel, but I kept to his suggestion and I think it made the book more interesting. Although similar in tone, stopping after a few stories and then returning was like coming home. I think that I could have read the book faster, but I really think that I enjoyed it more for those spaces in between. These are stories of fathers and sons. Every single one of them deals with those relationships. Secondarily, they also deal with siblings and their relationship to a father, and their brothers. I very much enjoyed these and I am hoping that his next book is a full novel with completely different set focus.

[John Vanderslice · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's impossible not to love this book, although I am biased as a male with a history of a complicated relationship with his father. (But what male doesn't have that?) To say that these flash fictions--117 in all in a mere 262 pages--all about the fraught relationships between fathers and sons--are tragically ironic doesn't begin to get at their mysterious quirky charm. They are also sweet, bittersweet, whimsical, sad, and infused with a powerful longing for forgiveness (both to give it and receive it), which I appreciate most of all. They are also, quite simply, very funny.

[Ang · Rating 4 out of 5]

( I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review)
I found this book to be clever and comical. It contains many little antidotes on the dynamics between father and son that range from bizarre to deranged. I found myself shaking my head and laughing to myself. This is one I know a few people will enjoy the twisted sense of humor that I think this one was written for, it's already on my husbands stand to read next.

[Brian Rothbart · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Inherited Disorders", by Adam Ehrlich Sachs is made up of over 100 short, mostly funny, somewhat absurd, at time thought provoking, "stories". There is something for everyone, even if you don't like them all, there will be something that you will find yourself laughing out loud about. And, if you don't like a story, no harm done because they are really short and you haven't wasted much time. This is a great collection and will have you shaking your head and chuckling. Fun read.

[Gin Rickey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely a necessary voice in fiction right now. Many contemporary short stories comes across as overwritten, over-workshopped from MFA programs, stale, too even as if to please everyone, too long relative to their intellectual weight, and they often portray overdrawn characters that aren't that unique as if adding more odd details makes for a better story.

Sachs' work is a reminder that fiction can be brief, both intellectually and emotionally concerned, obsessive, and very very funny.

[Kathy Heare Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

A humorous tale of over hundred scenarios for disposing of an inheritance a son receives from his father.

I won an advance uncorrected proof copy of this book during a Goodreads giveaway. I am under no obligation to leave a review or rating and do so voluntarily. So that others may also enjoy this book, I am donating it to a senior assisted living facility.

[Tyler Monsein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deep, dizzying, embarrassingly familiar insights into the strange emotional burdens of father/son relationships. Some people on here are saying it’s too repetitive, but I don’t think it’s meant to be read all at once. It’s less a book of stories and more a book of jokes or parables, something to keep picking at.

[Miles Mendez-Haines · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of stories that are largely satirical, but also very hard hitting. More humorous than I expected, given the title, but a very interesting study on the things that we are left by our ancestors, whether we want to accept those things or not.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise perfect little short story gems. Very funny.

[Sam Marquardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read but the stories became repetitive despite the new subject matter and eliciting language.

[M. Gem · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading the first stories in this book, I found them playful and interesting, making up a new sort of style of book I hadn't encountered before. However, as others have pointed out, the stories quickly become repetitive. I think this book could benefit from the addition of more longer, in depth stories, such as #71, to break up the rhythm of so many shorter stories and to change up the narration style, which becomes grating and gives off a "oh look aren't I so smart" kind of vibe after a while. The book could also use more diversity of characters; the author seems to be primarily using the characters' professions to differentiate them, but it's just like reading the same five stories over and over. Otherwise, I think this book should be edited down to maybe a quarter of its current length, which would make for a much more enjoyable read. You can get lost in so much of the same.

[Max-Philipp · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many creative, hilarious, and absurd short stories throughout. Sachs’ writing is so concise and efficient, which is an aspect that greatly benefits the comedic nature of the book and the timing of each story. Sachs describes a vast range of emotions and types of relationships between a father and son that the book should be familiar in at least one aspect to you. Even if most of the stories describe a painful, remorseful, or resentful relationship, and the stories frequently involve the suicide or death of the father and or son, when I finished I couldn’t help but think fondly over the book and my relationship with my dad. I did also reflect on the vexed or strenuous aspects of my relationship with my dad. Overall though, I think Sachs argues that the father son relationship is significant and one that both groups of men should cherish and work to improve.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kinda like finding a band that's heavily influenced by, and almost derivative of, one of your favorite bands, but you don't care because you're so happy more of that sound exists, this book had me giddy with its (Thomas) Bernhardian tics, from the idiosyncratic italicizations to the vignette structure that imitated, or homaged, The Voice Imitator. But this book was less caustic and misanthropic than Bernhard, goofier in a good way, and flat-out laugh-out loud funny-- that rarest of qualities in a literary work. Highly recommended and can't wait to read more by this young fella.