NONFICTION - April 2, 1995

SISTERMONY by Richard Stern. (Donald I. Fine: $17.50; 128 pp.) “I respect impassivity: one has feelings, one keeps them to oneself. (In this way, they’re enriched.),” writes Stern in the very prologue of this book about his sister’s death from uterine cancer in 1991. “We’d certainly,” he writes, “never said that we loved each other. No one in our family would say anything like that.”

There’ll be a revelation you think, hearing the gears of evolution engaging in this professor of English at Chicago University. And they do not. “When does Ruth’s story end?” he asks himself in the last chapter of a book that spans the year of her death and the two years following it. It ends, paradoxically enough, with Stern sitting in the dark on his 64th birthday thinking, “I’m not the one in the dark.”

The fallacy is that this is not Ruth’s story at all. A reader learns a little about Ruth but it is so transparently interpreted by someone who could only get close to her in his own restrained way that one is left as frustrated as Stern’s son Christopher, who has all but cut off contact with his father. This straining is punctuated by virulent name-dropping Chicago-style: Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth. “Part of me wanted to mourn her,” he writes of his sister before she’s even dead. Was it his heart?