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 variations.
[a] charming and witty collection of stories ... What distinguishes these stories from one another, and where Sachs makes them truly shine, is in the details ... Sachs has a finely tuned sense of humor and an economical writing style that gives each story plenty of punch. And the brevity of each story makes this a great book to simply flip open on a whim for a quick read. He’s made sure that Inherited Disorders is crammed full of smart turns of phrase, clever twists of logic, and plenty of laughs.
Filial ties, in all their tangled perversity, are the subject of Mr. Sachs’s debut. His brief comic sketches—each a darkly glittering gem of compressed neuroses—illustrate the astounding range of resentments and misunderstandings that exist between fathers and sons.
These tales are parabolic, often absurdist, each seeming to shine light on yet another way misunderstanding can flourish in a family. And they are cleverly funny, full of ironies about legacy and its pressures, about expectations misunderstood and over-emphasized ... The danger of exploring a theme over and over—say, 117 times—is that a sense of inevitability or even boredom might surface during the reading experience. This is not the case with Inherited Disorders, which is endlessly sharp and engaging from start to finish.
