The Scientists: A Family Romance

by Marco Roth

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue , Los Angeles Times , and The New Republic
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A FRANK, INTELLIGENT, AND DEEPLY MOVING DEBUT MEMOIR The precocious only child of a doctor and a classical musician, Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York. Theirs was a world that revolved around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and discussions of the latest advances in medicine―and one that ended when Marco's father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s. What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, with surprising and often devastating effects. Written in the tradition of Edmund Gosse, Henry Adams, and J. R. Ackerley, The Scientists is a book that grapples with a troubled intellectual and emotional inheritance―the ways in which we learn from our parents, and then learn to see them separately from ourselves.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Science, Biography Memoir, Audiobook, New York

208 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 2012

About the author

Marco Roth is a founding editor of n+1 magazine. He teaches literature and writing at The New School University's Eugene Lang College, in New York.

Reviews

[Dupont25 · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is utterly devoid of humor, the writing on each page feels very stilted and precious, and the author comes across on more than one occasion as insufferable. I understand that some people happen to process events in a very intellectual way, but Roth has an annoying tendency to overthink things (and overanalyze the most trivial details) that gets in the way of his writing fluid prose (or maybe he just doesn't have that capacity). Metaphors, which are supposed to elucidate the similarities between two otherwise disparate things, have something like the opposite effect in Roth's book: they seem twisted and the product of way too much conscious effort. Roth also frequently displays inconsistency as an artist: on one page, he writes, about metaphors used to describe enzymes, "I am not the kid in my class who is going to ask how such keys are made, or whether we can pick the lock." But a few sentences after he has left us with the impression of him as an indifferent student (at least in science class), he launches into an over-elaborate imagining of the HIV "gang" at work--"a gang of supersubtle saboteurs so lithe and practiced they will never set off an alarm." So, contra his earlier self portrait, Roth is now this kid with the overactive imagination and flair for words all of a sudden?
This work definitely will not appeal to everyone: if the following sentence elicits not even a flicker of a smile, then chances are you will not find this book in the least rewarding: "the old deconstructionists greeted the last of the even older philologists, and together they ignored the new historicists." Even if the sentence resonates with you, I'd urge you to steer clear of this writer who favors baroque sentence constructions and unwieldy metaphors. In the second half of the book, Roth makes an attempt to show how his father's life and his own life are imbricated with certain fictional stories and characters. He devotes so much space to plot summaries of Fathers and Sons and Oblomov (to name just two novels) that readers will soon grow weary and want to put the book aside for some less self-absorbed work (in which case, see any of the titles on Roth Sr's reading list). Some parts of the book made me think that Roth spliced paragraphs from his graduate school essays into the book solely in order to impress readers with his insight.
This book's effort and ambition to be regarded as a literary antimemoir is so transparent and drains any pleasure away from reading it. It's very hard for me to believe that Roth derived any true, unadulterated pleasure in writing it--I'm almost tempted to think that he wrote this book for the approbation of someone like David Bromwich, a former instructor of his. There's a moment at the end that encapsulates my frustration with Roth's approach to writing about his life: in it, he recounts how his daughter one day asks him what he had for lunch in kindergarten and he is suddenly transported back to a time thirty years ago when he opened his lunch box to a salami sandwich. Is there a term in literature for the opposite phenomenon of the Proustian surge of recollection? No matter--Roth's book supplies the term (indeed, it's impossible to escape direct mention of, or allusion to, reverse transcriptase in the book), or rather, he surreptitiously plots for the reader to apply the heavy-heanded reverse transcriptase metaphor to his reverse Proustian moment. But the ease with which the connection is made, the phrase alighted on, instantly colors the event with his daughter and makes it seem less credible, if not entirely contrived. Proust's novel, of course, begins with the madeline and in this book, we have Roth ending with a phantom salami sandwich. Even as Roth inverts the Proustian process of unfurling memory, he affirms some parts of it (a topic for an entirely different essay) and seems almost to want to establish a kind of architectural symmetry with it. It's this spectacle of naked striving for literary greatness that is most irritating to read. My recommendation is to skip this book and read Bechdel's "Fun Home" instead, which is better than this overwrought memoir in a hundred ways.

[Lee Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in various locations (parks, rooms, trains) but finished the last few pages in the tiny park at First Ave and Houston about a block from where the author bounds up the subway steps toward the end. I expected to look up and see a 3D projection of Marco turn the corner and bound toward the Lower East Side, conspicuously alleviated, his self-portrayed nervous, self-defeating, self-consciously "intellectual" intelligence at long last chanelled toward specific purposes: this recently published, smart, moving "anti-memoir" about more than his father's HIV contraction and death by AIDS, and his work as co-editor of n+1. Anti-memoir, essay, or whatever it's called, it's a book very much about the interdependent duo of life and text. As such, it's also very much a book about writing a book, and therefore eligible for shelving among other books I've loved like Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer, Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, and Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas, among others I can't remember now but will add once I do. I love books about trying (and predominately failing, of course) to write books -- it's probably my favorite literary subgenre, in part because the existence of the book itself suggests a successful struggle. This is an excellent example of the genre, although it's not quite as explicit as those mentioned above. The author traces intricate patterns on a sophisticated, elaborate, endangered foundation of artistic, tempermental, and intellectual inheritance. Hand-wringing involves living up to the expectations of privilege and one's talent and education, and at most matching (if not necessarily surpassing) one's parents' success. Like all worthwhile writing, essay or otherwise, this is primarily a Truth Hunt, with the author presented as fragile literary investigator with a nose for the facts, even/especially if they're abstract realizations achieved via strict scrutiny of serious Russian/European novels his father suggested he read. The investigation takes the author to Paris to study with Derrida (as he learns more about his father's history/orientation, the son's origin/center shifts); to Yale's PhD lit program to assay his father's favorite texts (including "Fathers and Sons") for traces of truth about father and son and to hash out anti-narrative ideas of identity with brilliant/sloshed fellow grad students; and to his ever-changing place of origin, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It's an investigation that pays off for the author in that this is clearly a book that had to be written, and it's something that had to be written in proper and attentively phrased prose worthy of the author's cultural/famililal legacy and intense literary interest. But it also pays off for readers because of the clarity and intelligence of the prose, the general spirit of erudition lofted by engines of emotion (and vice versa), but also it succeeds as a simple high-lit whodunit (the conclusion of the case I won't reveal). All in all, a brave, intelligent, moving book for telling the story of discerning the truth about the father's tragic story while devising out of aesthetic and emotional necessity the book in the readers' hands. After alleviating his family burden by abstractly avenging his father's death, the son seems ready to trace new patterns across the interdependent pages of life and text. Alt title: "Portrait of the Public Intellectual as a Young Man."

[Kjersti Egerdahl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Way too much introspection going on. A boy's father is dying of AIDS through most of his growing up; as an adult, rather than ask his mother about his father's life and the real circumstances under which he got the disease, he re-reads every obscure modernist book his father lent him in a misbegotten effort to "find" him while avoiding the central question of whether or not his father was gay. Lots of spiraling downward and navel-gazing and ignoring other people in his life. Yay.

[M. Sarki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picture my finger resting on the page just before the precious very last one to read and I am dreading this book to end. As much as I did struggle to find my way into this memoir, the going, by midway in, was as easy as a stroll in Central Park, even though the topic and the consequences never were that comfortable. Marco Roth writes in a beautifully natural manner that is absent of any sentimentality or blame. Though he certainly has an agenda in writing this book it never feels pressed or vengeful. Roth's search is only for the truth and all the ramifications that come with finding it even within his own personality and how he proceeds daily in the matters of owning and living his personal life. Denial discovered in family dynamics as well as societal norms is never wasted on the unsuspecting. We all know it exists everywhere. The simple reason is because we absolutely can feel it. Denial is both diabolical and incestuous. It is very difficult to get to the bottom of it as it seems to have no end. Marco Roth has performed a modern miracle in this his first foray into the art of memoir.

I delayed my reading of this book even after very strong support given it by fellow goodreads friends whose opinions I have come to value, and above all, trust. But Roth's relationship with the litmag N+1 hazarded me a too careful look. With them, the mag, as a whole, I had a problem. And it was a matter of their own methods of disclosure and honesty, and for that I was hesitant to invest my time and money on a book written by one of its founding editors. But the magazine settled our problem to my satisfaction and I was able to let go of my resentment, at least to some degree, though I still feel the staff members involved in our communication together were not the nicest nor most accommodating people I have encountered throughout my long years engaged in all forms of commerce. An additional grudge I harbored with the publication was its bulk of content not easily accessible to a reader such as myself. Though well-read and serious, I am not so smart as I should be and the chosen intellects writing and publishing their pieces in this mag were too much the academic sort and lacked any feeling in their words so I came to abandon every article I attempted to read except for the biographical pieces concerning my friend and editor, Gordon Lish. Those articles I could get and get through with no problem at all. And those Lish pieces were the very reason I subscribed to the periodical in the first place seeing as though it was a three or four part series. The problem was they never informed the caring reader like me that they would publish these separate parts as they saw fit and not in any assumed subsequent numerical order. That made my subscription basically worthless as I never knew when the remaining Lish pieces would ever be presented again. So I asked for my subscription money back and they accommodated me. But they did so not without a fight and a few condescending remarks that I did not deserve.

The other articles in N+1 seemed to me to be purposely written in an intellectual language inaccessible to me. So I was concerned a bit that in The Scientists Marco Roth would be writing something too smart and pretentious for its own good and for that reason I resisted reading him. In addition to this problem were the few reviews I read of the book criticizing Roth for doing this very thing, for being too intellectual, too mathematical, too scientific in his pursuit of impressing us over how brilliant he was. But I found this not to be the case at all. I never stumbled once in my reading of The Scientists. Yes, it was slow to get moving and I wasn't sure where we were headed with it all, but either I was smarter now than I used to be or the book was simply written in order for all of us to benefit from his thoughtful experience and his getting to the bottom of his family's lies and trust issues, and their so-careful avoidance of full disclosure because of it.

There really isn't anything I can detail about the book without spoiling it for the next new reader. What I can say is it is a fine and dandy book, a smart book, a feeling book, and something you will benefit by from reading it. It is my sincerest hope that Marco Roth continues on with his writing whether it be fiction or not, and that his life continues to grow in at least some form of happiness as well as his desired and continued closure for the things in his life that matter.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite liked this. Some reviewers criticized him for being overly intellectual but some people do process emotional events intellectually (and lots of other people to a lesser extent). Usually you see it in fiction where authors have their "smart" character do it for dramatic juxtaposition (the scientist who buries himself in his work while his wife dies!) or journey from the world of abstract ideas into Real Life (a la Good Will Hunting). But here you have a nice example of someone using intellectual tools and cultural analysis to help them with difficult events as a matter of course.

Other reviewers criticized him for being self-important but they obviously didn't get to the anecdote where during a routine school fire drill he realizes he forgot his violin and goes in a panic to any teacher who will listen saying, "Please, don't you understand? I am an artist!" I am trying to avoid a phrase here like "not taking himself too seriously" or "being over himself" which I think are stupid, but anyone willing to share that story about themselves I think has got a decent perspective on himself.

[Jolene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marco Roth is a gifted writer.

I read this around the same time as Winter Journal. I would say it's not too far-fetched to think about Roth as a young Paul Auster.

I would also argue that Roth has discovered the molecular formula of narrative success. I'm not saying he's discovered it in the way Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. I'm saying he's discovered it the way PhD students in biology discover what their cells do in the assays they run. Roth knows how to hold a reader's interest. He knows how to tell a story in a way that engages an audience.

This book has also stoked my interest in Oblomov (Goncharov) and Bakharov (Turgenev).

A great family history--written by a very talented writer.

Highly recommended--I'm conflicted about giving it 5 stars, but in my heart, I feel that this book was amazing (and I really liked it).

[Lynn Harpham · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. I can hardly remember why now, because it was just mind-numbingly slow. I love books where nothing happens except for the internal struggle and growth, and yet I was just desperate for something, anything, of consequence, to happen in this book. I kept reading, thinking surely it was just around the corner, but I was just disappointed page after page. If I had just happened upon this book on the library shelf, I'd have given up on it very quickly I think. But it has been talked about in so many places, I thought surely the reward was in the next chapter.... Just a waste for me.....

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learned about this one through a review in the NY Times. This is Roth's first book and he is an author I will be following. The Scientist: A Family Romance is a memoir of Roth's father and how Roth went about discovering more about his father.

Roth can write. And sometimes the book feels like Roth is writing solely for the sake of writing. But Roth never loses control of his subject - or his objectives.

I enjoyed the constant reference in the text to literature, even if Turgenev and Derrida are not short listed on my to-read list.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, deeply personal book - not at all what I expected. Marco Roth grew up in an almost comically cultured and high-minded Manhattan home, the precocious son of a doctor father and artist mother. Chamber music performances and bedtime Russian novels were fixtures of his upbringing. But his father's death of AIDS - ostensibly contracted from a stray needle while treating a heroin addict, although the book centres around the son's growing scepticism of this narrative - causes him to peel back the layers of family history. The book begins as a funny, wry, memoir, and gradually gets darker. At a certain point, it becomes something of a Comparative Lit dissertation, pulling together several semi-famous 19th C. European novels as representative of the absent father. Inconsistency here is testament to authenticity: Roth is hyperintellectual and congenitally sad, listlessly pulling at the thread of his family's secrets in the search for closure. Like hanging out with a brilliant, depressed friend. This may or may not sound appealing to you: your opinion of the book will follow suit.

[Judith Baicich · Rating 1 out of 5]

This guy came off as completely insufferable.

[Candice · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is hard for me to review, such as I review that is. It is a good example of "hermenuetic anxiety" because as a student of literary criticism he applies this methodology to his psychological deconstruction of the mystery of his family dynamics, specifically his relationship with his complex and dominating father. Here is where a college degree can actually be used in day to day life outside of a career, although he has gone on to produce a literary magazine which I will be interested to read: n + 1. He struggles through this book to individuate from the powerful control and yet at the same time come to an understanding his father:

"I recognized, too my grandfather's obsessions with privacy and secrecy, obsessions natural in a man with a secret life, anger natural n one constrained to play a role and eager for the play to end. Without realizing it, may aunt had revealed that my father had been, despite every effort, a different kind of good son to his own father, repeating the same estranged life in a different key. I worried that I, too, would have no choice but to repeat my father without knowing it."

Roth wanders around aimlessly for years trying to find himself but always reacting in some form to his father's injunctions, even after his death. He gains some insight from his aunt Anne Roiphe's memoir of the family, but it only seems to deepen the mystery of the nature of his father's illness from AIDS and In true literary critical form then he re-reads all the books his father gave to him as a youth, attempting to decipher the lessons, or intentions, identifications or secret codes his father was attempting to relay to him. His mother, however, is more or less a shadowy character.

"Derrida's work emphasized the accidental, the exceptional, the perverse. It, too, was haunted by a sense of absence, of life lived in the perpetual presence of death, of death as the foundation of philosophy. In the best Socratic tradition, Derrida seemed to be saying - and I could never be quite sure in fact what he was saying - that philosophy was about "learning out to die.'"

This entire journey takes place inside Roth's brain. It was not a particularly easy read but I found it quite fascinating and not dissimilar to the way my own mind works, which is a bit alarming but hey! that's hermeneutics, folks!!

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I was as well-read as Roth. That being, parts of.the memoir became almost laborously intellectual. Certainly worth the buck I paid for this book at Dollar Tree.

[Mike Witcombe · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to recall a memoir as ruthlessly self-critical as Marco Roth's. Like many of the protagonists created by authors who have been involved with the n+1 literary magazine, Marco himself comes often across as fundamentally lost, if not openly unlikeable. He also wears his literary training on his sleeve, and large sections of the book are taken up with inventive interpretations of the books recommended to Roth by his late father.

However, the book fails to find much consolation in literature, for all the intensity of its close-reading. This is a tale of disconnection and isolation, whose satisfactions are illusory and which refuses the consolations of a coherant, novelistic life-pattern. It's a good fit with that other famous Roth, Philip, whose novel 'The Professor of Desire' occupies similar thematic ground.

Like Philip Roth's David Kepesh, the narrator in this memoir is unsentimental, brazenly well-read and unapologetic for (if acutely aware of) the privilege of his background. Verbosity sometimes trumps eloquence, and it's certainly fair to say that those looking for pathos in the story of Eugene Roth's death during the AIDS crisis will find Marco's prose style devoid of the expected language of grief - as a Kaddish for his father, it's a distinctly intellectual lament.

Some minor criticisms; two of the four blubs that the novel carries on its front and rear columns are by fellow members of Roth's editorial team at n+1 - understandable, given the role of the magazine in Roth's narrative, but it still feels a bit clique-y. Secondly (for my fellow luddites that still read physical books) the paper used is far too thin - although this could just be this edition.

Still: an interesting book, and a revealing insight into a dynamic intellect.

[Kelly Audiogirl.booking.it · Rating 3 out of 5]

(2.75 stars)
Meh, this was OK the beginning and end had more substance than the middle. I was intrigued by the idea of the book. But the middle kind of seemed to me like the ramblings of a spoiled child that due to circumstance was given 600k at a very young age and never really had to work for a living. LOL, maybe that is just my jealousy speaking not that I would have wanted to trade places with him. He did seem to struggle thru his life with a lot of uncertainty and angst toward his family who was not very open with him. It makes me think that you sure can't buy happiness however you can spend a lot of years working on a book that is really only mediocre in my humble opinion.

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Audiogirl.booking.it --- Instagram

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[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviewed for ELLE Magazine's Readers' Prize Program (October 2012). "A compelling tale that keeps you guessing until the very end, The Scientists examines how we are our own scientists, discovering truths and finding cures in our own lives." Check out ELLE.com for the rest of my review.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good.

[Felisha]

Wow...very excited to read this one!

[Steve Essick · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the most part I enjoyed this book although there were sections that I found a little over indulgent.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

See http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic...

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times this felt like two different memoirs that were only tenuously connected, but I enjoyed both of them.

[Gerard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir so novelistic i didn’t realize it was one until about a quarter of the way in. Roth is one of the founders of n+1 magazine. He grew up in NYC with a medical researcher father who died of AIDS (I’m not giving anything away here) and a musician mother, who he clearly knows a good deal less about. An only child, he struggles to get out from under the weight of an accomplished but neurotic Jewish family? Sound familiar? It’s well-written enough that that well-worn path is still a new excursion. There are certainly shades of the Roths (Philip and Henry, less so Joseph) haunting the story but that adds to the self-deprecating humour in a way as he attempts to write himself out of the neurotic Jewish writer trap as much as the neurotic Jewish family trap. Not entirely sure he succeeds, but it’s worth reading the attempt. Funny, brainy and affecting. Recommended.

[Marian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense, brainy, a bit claustrophobic. The lit analysis went on a bit too long, and I can see many being thoroughly put off by it, but you lose little if you skip around in it. Some memoir readers will say it's not emo enough but it's totally worth the read if you're okay with the kind of emotion born of repression, restraint, secrets, and missed connections. The upper-class NY/moneyed privilege thing can wear on you if you let it, but if you can bear these things, highly recommended.

[Sean Egan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A charming and literate account of life lived in the NYC's cultural elite with splashes of radical politics, psychoanalytic and 19th century literature. There are times when it lacks detail or introspection and could have used some fleshing out but its a story well told.

[Hank Pharis · Rating 2 out of 5]

(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a chore. I think someone could build a whole library on books by authors who are really sharp but have nothing to say. This is where I keep the non-fiction, the fiction books are on that shelf, and here in the middle, this collection I call, Display My Education authors.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I related to the book’s theme of becoming one’s own person and the degree to which we are entangled with the lives of others.

[Anne Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting accounting of a family and how the past influences the future. I liked how the main character traveled to different locations and parts of the world but, ended up back home.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

The brokenness of this family is not bizarre, but that fact itself is somewhat said.

[RaeAnn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5