"Winner Take Nothing" Response

Bernard Cooper's short story, "Winner Take Nothing" tells the story of his complicated relationship with his father.  All of Bernard's life has been spent trying to earn his father's approval.  The paternal figure always looked down on his son's chosen profession because he did not see any value in writing.  When Bernard published his first book, he won the PEN/ Earnest Hemingway award and did not expect anything more than apathy from his dad.  However, his father is uncharacteristically impressed and flying to New York to witness the ceremony.  The gesture is too little too late, though, for his son harbors quite a bit of resentment for the father that didn't support his other achievements.  This causes a rift between the two that isn't mended until Bernard becomes his parent's legal guardian due to dementia and foreclosure.

Cooper manages to tell a lot of a relatively short story.  He brings to life the multiple levels of his relationship with his father, and how it evolves over the years.  The author artfully balances generalized information such as his father becoming "too distracted by his legal battles to return any of [his] phone calls" (Cooper), with hyper-specific details such as the description of his dad's hearing aid malfunction, hearing only "ubiquitous coughs and whispers, crackling leather coats, the rubbery acoustics of someone chewing gum" (Cooper).  The broad descriptions in the first example allow the author the get his point across without becoming sidetracked from his primary story.  The detailed imagery of the second example gives the reader a precise sense of the scene and what was going on; leaving nothing to the imagination.

Additionally, Bernard Cooper explains the passing of time well; he explains in only a few sentences his changing feelings over each passing year.  "the first year of our estrangement, my entreaties and apologies, and furious demands for contact were recited into his answering machine... By the second year, resignation took hold... by the third year his absence settled inside me like a stone, impervious to hope or hurt," (Cooper).  These brief flashes of the years give the sense of time passing in a way that shows the changes with out dwelling on the irrelevant.

Overall, the story was very well written and interesting.  The ups and downs of the father/ son relationship kept the reader engaged while the attention to crafting the words made the story flow effectively.