The Poison Tree

Description

Growing up in his father’s looming shadow, Henry I. Schvey wondered if he was doomed to repeat the past, doomed to make the same mistakes his father made. Would he succumb to the drive for domination and transform his own world into one colored by fear, domestic violence, infidelity, and spousal abuse? Schvey grew up in New York as his father rose to the pinnacle of success in the Reagan era of dog-eat-dog global finance, eventually becoming Vice-President and Chairman of the Bond Funds Division at Merrill Lynch. But his father’s success was paid for with the currency of intimidation and he wore it with the braggadocio of a man with an outsized ego who didn’t care who he stepped on to get to the top—including his son.

The Poison Tree is a study of Schvey’s relationship to his father, an illumination of the secret life of a man who was powerful, highly respected, and greatly feared, and a journey—both sad and tragicomic—that ultimately leads to forgiveness.

“Keenly felt and elegantly written, this is a moving and sad account of a family that despite—or perhaps because of—all its power and wealth was profoundly troubled. Although Schvey shows contempt for his closest relatives, he paints balanced portraits of each of them. Their very humanness makes the book all the more tragic, touching, and affecting. Schvey’s sharp-edged humor—particularly when capturing the dialogue and mannerisms of his Jewish grandparents who tried to help —saves the author from wallowing in self-pity and gives a nice counterpoint to the “particularly virulent form” of illness called adolescence that he lived through and overcame. A kind of nonfiction Portnoy’s Complaint but with a lot less sex; intricately renders a dysfunctional family’s life in the mid-20th century.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The Poison Tree is a tantalizing coming of age memoir that painstakingly recalls the joys and pains of a boy’s passage into celebrated manhood.”
—A.E.Hotchner