****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This book just misses being brilliant. It's eminently readable, more memorable for the oddness of the material than for lyrical style. In thinking about why I would downgrade it to four stars instead of five, I came to the realization that I lost a certain amount of sympathy for the author when Philip Smith displayed what was clearly jealousy of his father's romantic parners. As the center of his father's attention and the arguable inheritor of his psychic gift, he is not disposed to share. He makes his mother a sympathetic, if eccentric woman and he clearly loved her. The father, a popular 1960s-era Miami designer, discovers he has psychic healing abilities and more and more abandons his high-life contacts for the satisfactions of the spiritual world. This led to his whole-hearted devotion to his new passion and a lessening of the attention and luxuries he had previously showered on his wife. After Philip's mother was out of the picture because of divorce, she moved next door in lessened circumstances while Philip stayed with his father. Perhaps it is natural that he would resent another woman trying to replace his mother in his father's affections, but he displays an intolerant, even vicious side in his depictions of the companions who must have given his father some comfort. He turns them into harpies inhabited by evil spirits. Maybe they were, but showing less personal dislike and a more objective way of describing their dangerous spirits would have made him appear more tolerant and thus more personally attractive to most readers.There is a definite break in the two parts of this memoir (pre- and post-psychic awareness. The first part is amusing, lively, intriguing. If you don't believe in the power of the supernatural world, you're possibly not going to enjoy the second part. You might even think Smith's father was delusional. If you have an open mind to the power of suggestion or to the actual validity of psychic phenomena, it will hold interest for you and you will sympathize with the elder Smith's attempts to heal hopeless cases with the aid of entities from the beyond-- usually successful attempts, be it noted. The author, a normally self-conscious high-school student, becomes a believer despite his fear of being different. The posthumous discovery of an archive of psychic writings and personal records of his father's cemented this conversion. Despite his father's attempt to get him to use his own considerable psychic powers, Philip Smith never became a practitioner of the mystic healing arts. He chose instead to use his obvious artistic gift for painting, and now, writing. There is a bit of a non-sequitur while he veers off his father's story to write about his own life in New York's art milieu, which is almost like a subject for another book.One is left to wonder, if he truly believes in his father's unique powers and if he himself has the same gift, why not. Perhaps so he could bring us entertaining books like this one.
