When I first started reading Roth, there was one of his early titles that sounded, well . . . interesting: The Breast (1972). I also knew the basic premise; it’s one people like to tell you for the reaction. One day a middle-aged man finds that he has turned into a 150-pound female breast. In Roth’s hands it is intriguing — it is, in fact, Rothian — but is it okay for me to consider this a serious reading project?
I have good news. The book takes only a little over an hour to read, so you’ll know the answer to that question soon enough. More good news now that I’ve read it: it is obviously a very strange book — but it is strange in a good way.
Probably the only reason I read this book now rather than later is because it is the first of Roth’s David Kepesh books (the others being The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal). Since I finished Roth’s Zuckerman books last year, I thought it would be nice to get to know another of his famous serial characters. And before we meet David Kepesh in the latter two books (where I don’ t believe he is still a breast) we must first see him transformed into a breast, this is where I found myself.
It began oddly. But could it have begun otherwise, however it began? It has been said, of course, that everything under the sun begins oddly and ends oddly, and is odd. A perfect rose is “odd,” so is an imperfect rose, so is the rose of ordinary rosy good looks growing in your neighbor’s garden. I know about the perspective from which all that exists appears awesome and mysterious. Reflect upon eternity, consider, if you are up to it, oblivion, and everything becomes a wonder. Still, I would submit to you, in all humility, that some things are more wondrous than others, and that I am one such thing.
I would agree that Kepesh’s transformation into a breast began oddly, but “it” is what is truly odd. The result of this transformation would seem to render any discussion of the initial redness around the penis as neither here nor there. Alas, that is where Kepesh begins his book, and it’s not the most intriguing aspect of the book. I much prefer Kafka’s approach when he simply begins the story with the fabulous metamorphosis already having taken place. In this case, though, the fact that the transformation begins in Kepesh’s genitals seems to be relevant, particularly as an indication of why Kepesh might have transformed.
The Breastis about the banal. Kepesh is a man with a sexual appetite that doesn’t stope when he becomes a breast. He’s still flesh — only now he can never fully reach climax, but that doesn’t stop him from trying. Such scenes are not interesting, not to me, anyway. The novella becomes exceedingly interesting, however, when Kepesh tries to intellectualize himself around his problem:
When I came around, I at last realized that I had gone mad. I was not dreaming. I was crazy. There was to be no magical awakening, no getting up out of bed, brushing my teeth, and going off to teach as though nothing more than a nightmare had interrupted my ordinary and predictable life; if there was ever to be anything at all for me, it was the long road back — becoming sane.
Here, post-transformation, Kepesh decides he won’t accept what has happened. He calls it a crisis of faith, as he narrates this section after having accepted his lot in life. I was amused to no end as Kepesh tried to no avail to get his doctor (Doctor Klinger) to accept that he was mad and had not, in fact, transformed into a female breast.
He laughed.
“I am mad, though — aren’t I?” I asked.
“No.”
I was set back only momentarily. I realized that I had inverted his meaning as easily, and as unconsciously, as we turn right side up the images that flash upon the retina upside down.
“I want to tell you,” I calmly explained, “that though you just answered yes when I asked whether I was mad, I heard you say no.”
He does finally overcome his crisis of faith, but that doesn’t make it any easier for him. Next he wants to know why; and furthermore why a breast?
Now, with Dr. Klinger’s assistance, I was trying to figure out just why, of all things, I had chosen a breast. Why a big brainless bag of dumb, desirable tissue, acted upon instead of acting, unguarded, immobile, hanging, there, as a breast simply hangs and is there? Why this primitive identification with the object of infantile veneration? What unfulfilled appetites, what cradle confusions, what fragments out of my remotest past could have collided to spark a delusion of such classical simplicity?
He persists in intellectualizing about his condition, posing questions, looking into his mind, looking into his past. He used to be a professor of literature, and for years he taught Kafka, Gogol and Swift. Perhaps there’s an answer there.
Didfiction do this to me? “How could it have?” asks Dr. Klinger. “No, hormones are hormones and art is art. You are not suffering from an overdose of the great imaginations.” “Aren’t I? I wonder. This might well be my way of being Kafka, being a Gogol, being a Swift. They could envision the incredible, they had the words and those relentless fictionizing brains. But I had neither, I had nothing — literary longings and that was it. I loved the extreme in literature, idolized those who wrote it, was virtually hypnotized by the imagery and the power — ” “And? Yes? the world is full of art lovers — so?” “So I took the leap. Made the word flesh. Don’t you see, I have out-Kafkaed Kafka.”
The intellectualizing doesn’t help, though. How could it have? He is a breast and that is that. He has his urges, and that is that. The world is banal. He is banal. It is time to accept it. These high-minded complexes Kepesh tries to create for himself simply won’t work for anything other than denial and diversion.
Of course, for a reader like me, a reader who was fed from the politicalized and psychologized interpretive schools for literature and life, a reader who much preferred the passages of intellectualizing to the scenes portraying the banal, it’s a difficult sentiment to buy. The book, then, remains not entirely successful. That’s not to say it isn’t worthwhile. It is very well written, of course. And though I found what it was saying much less satisfying than what it was decrying, that doesn’t make it less interesting, particularly in the hands of Philip Roth. How can I not prefer that fiction did this to Kepesh? And I’m happy to keep reading the fiction of Kepesh.
After feeling, slightly, like I was reading Philip Roth’s memoir when I was reading the Zuckerman books (I know it is not really autobiographical), I have been very interested in reading his real memoir, Patrimony (1991; National Book Critics Circle Award). Roth’s books have such a real feel to them, such a sense of history, that I never doubted for a second that Patrimony would be less substantial than his books.
When the book begins, Roth tells us that his father, at age 86, was incorrectly diagnosed with Bell’s palsy. He woke up one morning to find that he couldn’t move half of his face. Apparently, if the paralysis was caused by Bell’s palsy, it would go away eventually. Unfortunately, Roth soon learns from the doctors that this diagnosis was incorrect. For the last decade a tumor had been growing in his father’s head. Here is how, in a scene where Roth tells his father the bad news, Roth weaves together so many of the themes he will focus on a decade and a half later:
I sat in the chair across from him, my heart pounding as though I were the one about to be told something terrible. “You have a serious problem,” I began, “but it can be dealt with. You have a tumor in your head. Dr. Meyerson says that given the location, the chances are ninety-five percent that it’s benign.” I had intended, like Meyerson, to be candid and describe it as large, but I couldn’t. That there was a tumor seemed enough for him to take in. Not that he had registered any shock as yet — he sat there emotionless, waiting for me to go on. “It’s pressing on the facial nerve, and that’s what’s caused the paralysis.” Meyerson had told me that it was wrapped around the facial nerve, but I couldn’t say that either. My evasiveness reminded me of his on the night my mother had died. At midnight London time, he had told me that my mother had had a serious heart attack and that I’d better make arrangements to fly home because they didn’t know if she was going to survive. “It doesn’t look good, Phil,” he said; but an hour later, when I phoned back to tell him my flight plans for the next morning, he began to cry and revealed that she had actually died in the restaurant where they had had dinner a few hours earlier.
The main narrative in the rest of the memoir focuses on the events leading up to the death of Herman Roth. Herman Roth has not always been an easy father: expecting perfection, he constantly berated his quiet wife and, even during his illness, does the same to his girlfriend; he frequently gives advice where none is wanted, saying it is because he truly loves and is truly caring for those around him. Nevertheless, Roth also develops the vulnerable side of Herman Roth, a first-generation American Jew who, unlike the father in the Zuckerman novels, fully supported his son’s literary endeavors.
Also, while Roth describes the vulnerabilities of his father, he also shows us his own weaknesses, some of which came unexpectedly and were most unwelcome given the circumstances. Here, for example, is where Roth learns that he has been mostly cut out of the will. Roth himself told his father to do this, that he didn’t need the money. Nevertheless, with death imminent, he is shocked by a bit of bitterness:
Didn’t I think I’d deserved it? Did I consider my brother and his children more deserving inheritors that I, perhaps because my brother, by having given him grandchildren, was more legitimately a father’s heir than was the son who had been childless? Was I a younger brother who suddenly had become unable to assert his claim against the seniority of someone who had been there first? Or, to the contrary, was I a younger brother who felt that he had encroached too much upon an older brother’s prerogatives already? Just where had this impulse to cast off my right of inheritance come from, and how could it have so easily overwhelmed expectations that I now belatedly discovered a son was entitled to have?
I think this small passage also shows how many angles Roth can add to his themes. This matter with the will is just a small side-road in the narrative. It shows Roth dealing with what he considers to be selfishness that he is now entitled to. It shows how sentiment can get attached to otherwise unimportant things like money. And through all of this are constant questions as Roth tries to pin down the cause. It is a very philosophical novel, and it hearkens, at times, to another great rumination on death: “Had it been the MRI of Yorick’s brain that Hamlet had been looking at, even he might have been speechless.”
The entire book is a well controlled look at many of the intimations that come when death is imminent. One of my favorite aspects was the look at Newark, New Jersey. Herman raised his family in Newark. He and his Jewish neighbors spent years toiling in poverty, as first-generation immigrants, hoping to give their children the opportunities they could never have. And that generation, and their city, is passing away seemingly with Herman Roth:
He only quieted down about it when I turned up from Elizabeth Avenue toward Bergen Street and began to drive through the most desolate streets of black Newark. What in my childhood had been the busy shopping thoroughfares of a lower-middle-class, mostly Jewish neighborhood were now almost entirely burned out or boarded up or torn down. The only ones about seemed to be unemployed black men — at any rate, black men standing together on the street corners, seemingly with nothing to do. It was not a scene conducive to alleviating the gloom of three people on their way to consult with a brain surgeon, and yet the rest of the way to the hospital, my father forgot the encounter awaiting him there and, instead, reminisced in his random fashion about who had lived and worked where when he was a boy before the First World War and on these streets immigrant Jews and their families were doing what they could to survive and flourish.
Newark is haunted by memories. Memory is also one of the central themes in the novel. Here is a passage where Roth and another man are discussing suicide. Both men had been tempted at times in their life, but Roth says that is not the case with his father:
“Not him. He doesn’t even have a fantasy solution. I was over there today to get him to the doctor. I had to drive him across poor, poor, poor old Newark. He knows every street corner. Where buildings are destroyed, he remembers the buildings that were there. You mustn’t forget anything — that’s the inscription on his coat of arms. To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory — to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing. . . .”
But these memories are all contained in perishable human beings. These archives do not last. Once Herman Roth is gone, so are his memories of his first-generation life — that whole generation will have passed away. And therein lies some of Roth’s main themes, themes that must keep him up at night given how pervasive they are in his fiction and the quality of his ruminations and his rants on mortality:
“Understand,” my father said, “I’m talking about just another three or four years . . .”
The doctor nodded; he understood very well. The original request for a couple more years had, in a matter of minutes, been extended to three or four, I noticed. My father was obviously coming to trust and even to imbue with a certain divine might this doctor who was at once so much more patrician and potent-looking that haimisher, heavyset Dr. Meyerson, who had proposed to do rather more than stick a needle up through the roof of his mouth. It occurred to me that if we were all to sit and talk together in Benjamin’s office for another day or two, my father would eventually overcome his fear of calling down even worse misery upon himself by appearing sinfully greedy and proclaim to his doctor what had to be in his heart, which was that he wanted not just three or four years more, but to tackle the whole damn thing all over again: “I raised myself up out of the immigrant streets without even a high school education, I never knuckled under, never broke the law, never lost my courage or said ‘I quit.’ I was a faithful husband, a loyal American, a proud Jew, I gave two wonderful boys every opportunity I myself never had, and what I am demanding is only what I deserve — another eighty-six years! Why,” he would ask him, “should a man die at all?” And of course, he would have been right to ask. It’s a good question.
It’s a terribly touching memoir through and through. I was reading the last few pages on the trainride home and I got choked up. From page one we know what will happen to Herman Roth, but that knowledge doesn’t stop the emotional response — Roth is a master. Amidst all of the distractions on the train — the noise, the people getting up, my approaching stop, the fact that I didn’t want to get emotional in front of a bunch of strangers — I was still completely emotionally engaged with the story. I put this up with The Ghostwriter and American Pastoral as my favorite Roth.
I wasn’t planning on taking a break from my reading the Giller Prize shortlist, but then Roth’s latest, The Humbling (2009), came out. And it’s so incredibly short — only 140 pages of large typeset — that I knew this minor diversion wouldn’t disturb me too much. Plus, Philip Roth is one of my favorite writers – he might even be my favorite. So in the middle, I stopped reading the Giller Shortlist and put this one under my belt quickly. But in the interest of getting the reviews of the shortlist out, I put off posting this review until now. That has worked two ways: first, it helped me really consider the book, especially in conjunction with Roth’s other late works (is it appropriate to use this term with a living, working author — I hope Roth’s late works go well into this century); second, some of it is no longer perfectly fresh in my memory. Please forgive me. And please enjoy one of the talented Milton Glaser’s exceptional covers.
Roth’s The Humbling is the only of his books — that I know of — to deal with the performing arts. And of his late short works, it is the most supremely strange. Everyman had a noble melancholy in its approach to old age and death (and is the best of the planned quartet, in my opinion). Indignation had, well, indignation and rage for a young life cut short the governing authority. Returning to a subject in his elder years (sixty-five), The Humblingis almost a farce in its treatment of old age and death – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also serious and devastating.
Here we meet Simon Axler, a famous stage actor getting on in years. He has been a performer — a very successful performer — all of his life. But now, that’s all gone. One day he got up and tried to do Macbeth, and it just didn’t work. Here are Roth’s first lines in this book, lines that in most any other Roth book would have been introducing a different form of lost power:
He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent. He’d never failed in theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing happened: he couldn’t act.
This causes Axler to lose other things. In his despair, his exhausted wife moves out. His will to live flees, and Roth doesn’t hesitate to introduce us to that famous theatrical shotgun. But like Hamlet, Axler can’t quite build up the courage — or perhaps its the right stage direction — to do the job and instead ends up in a clinic.
In great Rothian style, the book is conspicuously organized like a three-act play. The first act, the one dealing with all Axler has lost, is “Into Thin Air.”
Sitting there amid his books, he tried to remember plays in which there is a character who commits suicide. Hedda in Hedda Gabler, Julie in Miss Julie, Phaedra in Hippolytus, Jocasta in Oedipus the King, almost everyone in Antigone, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Joe Keller in All My Sons, Don Parritt in The Iceman Cometh, Simon Stimson in Our Town, Ophelia in Hamlet, Othello in Othello, Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar, Goneril in King Lear, Antony, Cleopatra, Enobarbus, and Charmian in Atony and Cleopatra, the grandfather in Awake and Sing!, Ivanov in Ivanov, Konstantin in The Seagull. And this astonishing list was only of the plays in which he had at one time performed. There were more, many more. What was remarkable was the frequency with which suicide enters into drama, as though it were a formula fundamental to the drama, not necessarily supported by the action as dictated by the workings of the genre itself. Deirdre in Deirdre of the Sorrows, Hedvig in The Wild Duck, Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, Christine and Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra, both Romeo and Juliet, Sophocles’ Ajax. Suicide is a subject dramatists have been contemplating with awe since the fifth century B.C., beguiled by the human beings who are capable of generating emotions that can inspire this most extraordinary act. He should set himself the task of reading these plays. Yes, everything gruesome must be squarely faced. Nobody should be able to say that he did not think it through.
Act II, “The Transformation,” takes us a very different direction. Here Axler meets the daughter of some of his old friends from a performance forty years ago of Playboy of the Western World. The forty-year-old Pegeen was named after the heroine of that play. Though twenty-five years his junior — and a lesbian — Axler establishes a lusty relationship with Pegeen, much to the dismay of her parents. “The Transformation,” from one perspective, refers to Axler’s attempts to domesticate Pegeen, help her “to be a woman he would want instead of a woman another woman would want. Together they were absorbed in making this happen.” However, “The Transformation” also represents Axler’s own transformation from suicidal despair to hope. Over sixty, he feels his life is just beginning. At least, his life is re-beginning. He’s got a new role to perform, and his costar is playing the part.
Roth begin Roth, and this book being the third of a quartet of brief novels (Nemesis is due out next year), it follows thematic elements raised in Everyman (2006) and Indignation (2008), so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the last act is called ”The Last Act.”
With things unravelling, Roth plays with Axler’s perspectives on life and living, particularly the fact that Axler has always seen his life as a series of performances, making this look at the futile fight against aging and dying very unique: “If he were given this role to act in a play, how would he do it? How would he do the phone call? In a voice that was trembling or a voice that was firm? With wit or with savagery, renunciation or rage?”
If Everyman was a look at the inevitable decline to death and Indignation was a look at how events tramples over us, regardless of our will, The Humbling is a great look at the futility of trying to fight against other things aging takes from us. It is even better for begin skewed by Axler’s warped play-acting perspective. One can look at one’s life as a big performance and can react to the successes and flops accordingly, but our characters are shaped by more than our will. Axler come to this realization:
Shouldn’t he have played that line for a laugh instead of delivering it in a fit of anger? Shouldn’t he have been quietly sardonic, as though it were a deliberately needling overstatement rather than his sounding out of his mind? Oh, play it however you like, Axler told himself. Probably you’re playing it for laughs anyway without your even knowing it.
A year ago today I posted a giddy review of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer. Since then I’ve slowly — but still giddily — made my way through the eight other Zuckerman books (you can find my thoughts on them all here). It was a fantastic project that I’d recommend to anyone. The Nathan Zuckerman alter-ego is one of the most ingenious vehicles ever used to study the elusive nature of identity and the influences that shape it, be they familial, ethnic, national, extra-marital, etc. It was completely unintended but fitting that on this anniversary of sorts I’d post the review of Roth’s last Zuckerman book, Exit Ghost
I was a little wary starting this book. On the one hand, the only book in the series that I didn’t like was I Married a Communist, so 7 out of 8 are pretty good odds suggesting I’d like this final one. But some reviews were less than glowing, and I hated the thought of tainting my Zuckerman experience with a final bitter swallow. Then again, how could I not read this? That was never a question.
The first few pages, while not bad, didn’t do much to encourage me. Where I found the prose in The Ghost Writer to be so vivacious and robust, here the prose felt a bit more stifled. The ideas were interesting, and I liked encountering Nathan Zuckerman, now 71 years old. He’s been living in the Berkshires, eschewing society, for eleven years. He’s incontinent following a surgery for prostate cancer, and he’s impotent. Little by little the prose sunk in. No, it’s not robust anymore. Neither is Zuckerman. If one of his sentences doesn’t feel as tight as it used to, neither does he have the quick brain he used to. But he does still know how to pinpoint a malady:
I hadn’t been in New York in eleven years. Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I’d hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those eleven years and, what’s more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11, three years back; with no sense of loss — merely, at the outset, a kind of drought within me — I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment. The impulse to be in it and of it I had long since killed.
After eleven impotent years on his own, Zuckerman hears of a simple treatment offered in New York that might help his incontinence (he knows his impotence, unfortunately, is incurable). Not sure it’s worth the trouble, Zuckerman nevertheless decides to undertake the treatment. Reentering “the present moment,” Zuckerman finds life teaming in New York, and he’s anxious to leave it.
All the city would add was everything I’d determined I no longer had use for: Here and Now.
Here and Now.
Then and Now.
The Beginning of the End of Now.
These were the lines that I jotted onto the scrap of paper where I’d previously written Amy’s name and the phone number of my new New York apartment. Titles for something. Perhaps this. Or should I just come right out with it — call it A Man in Diapers. A book about knowing where to go for your agony and then going there for it.
Completely by chance, Zuckerman runs into Amy Bellette, whom he hasn’t seen since the last few pages of The Ghost Writer, nearly fifty years earlier. She’s wearing a worn out, reworked hospital gown and her head is somewhat misshapen. He doesn’t go to her at that point, but just seeing her brings back his past. On a whim he frequently regrets afterwards, he decides to answer an ad in the New York Review of Books: a young writing couple wants to swap homes for a year. He goes to the apartment to meet the young couple and falls immediately in lust with the young wife, Jamie Logan. He finds it unbearably delightful and terrible. He at once wants to run away from and with her. Jamie has an ex-lover writing a biography on E.I. Lonoff, Zuckerman’s father/mentor for the night we experienced in The Ghost Writer. Already thoroughly enjoying myself, it is at this point that the book took off for me, becoming one of my favorites in the series.
Biography/identity is always an interesting underlying thread in the Zuckerman books. In The Ghost Writer we get Zuckerman’s fantastic self-serving yet profound alternate biography for Amy Bellette. In The Counterlife we get Zuckerman’s alternate biography/obituary for himself. In American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain we get biographies that are alternate, but we don’t know to what extent, and at this point Zuckerman doesn’t hide his view that the fiction is more true than the fact. In Exit Ghost we get Zuckerman’s alternate version of his conversations with Jamie Logan. And underlying all of this is the Nathan Zuckerman character as an autobiographical character for Philip Roth himself. Again, the line between fact and fiction is blurred, and we’ll never know just how much Roth sees himself in Zuckerman, though we do know Roth is having fun with just that blurred line. Biography is an ingenious strain that runs through already complex and tightly woven themes.
It is ironic, but Zuckerman, the master of biographies, all fictional, is livid that this importunate would-be biographer would dare tread on Lonoff under the pretext of bringing a forgotten literary master back to the light. While it is made worse that the young man plans to focus his biography on a secret Lonoff apparently hid all of his life, we get the sense that what Zuckerman is really trying to protect is his own biography. Biography as fiction, fiction as biography — has it ever been done better?
All of this leads to the elegiac resolution, typical yet sought after in all of these books. Zuckerman knows his death is just around the corner. Then his biography is no longer his own. He will have lost control of his story. And there’s that nagging possibility of losing control before death.
If one morning I should pick up the page I’d written the day before and find myself unable to remember having written it, what would I do? If I lost touch with my pages, if I could neither write a book nor read one, what would become of me? Without my work, what would be left of me?
This book came at a particularly poignant time in literary history, called by the importunate young biographer “The Twilight of the Gods.” We talk about Art Buchwald and George Plimpton, and, though he was still alive for a few months more when the book was published, Norman Mailer. And I read it just a few months after John Updike passed. All of these immortals now dead.
Humorously and unusually — that’s how George and his friends imagined themselves dying back before they believed they would, back when dying was just another idea to have fun with. “Oh, there’s death too!” But the death of George Plimpton was neither humorous nor unusual. It was no fantasy either. He died not in pinstripes at Yankee Stadium but in pajamas in his sleep. He died as we all do: as a rank amateur.
This past week Philip Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959; National Book Award), celebrated fifty years. Those of you who’ve been followed my blog last year know that he is one of my favorite authors, though I’ve really only read novels written since The Ghost Writer. I was very curious how his work would feel at its inception. Also, this being Roth’s only collection of short stories, how good would this master novelist be in that form?
The book is really one novella, Goodbye, Columbus, and five short stories: “The Conversion of the Jews,” ‘Defender of the Faith,” “Epstein,” “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings,” and “Eli, the Fanatic.” I particularly enjoyed reading them after reading about their stand-ins in Roth’s later Zuckerman books. Well, it’s easy to see why a young man, after writing this kind of work, would find himself welcomed by literary recluses. All of the stories are incredibly well written, the kind of writing one would expect from a much older writer, one who’d learned control through maturity. But, truth be told, probably the most conspicuous difference between Roth at twenty-five and Roth at seventy-five is the absence of death as a theme in the former. The skill and many Rothian signatures are already there. Saul Bellow expressed it best: “Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently.”
My favorite of the five short stories was “Defender of the Faith” first published in The New Yorker in 1959. It must be one of the more iconoclastic pieces, one that was surely uncomfortable for the Jewish community. It takes place at the end of World War II, in the brief period after fighting in Europe had ceased but before fighting in the Pacific came to its shocking end. Sergeant Nathan Marx, after fighting for a year in Europe, is back on U.S. soil in Missouri, supervising training.
In one of his groups are three young Jewish boys, all of whom breathe a sigh of relief when they think their new Sergeant is also a Jew. Though he tries not to let on, through a few slips of the tongue, the trainees find out he is a Jew, and they hope that he will find a way to allow them to go to shul on Friday nights when they usually have to clean the barracks. Somewhat resentful, though understanding, he finds a way to grant them leave to go to the synagogue. Feeling a bit like a part of his past is missing, he decides to attend with them and swears he hears one of them say something like “Let the goyim clean the floors.” The favors build, as does the guilt he feels when he reprimands the supplicant who calls him anti-Semitic.
It’s a very interesting piece, especially considering the timing. Were Jews willing to allow someone to depict the gradual recognition of Jewish rites (and rights) as the more pejorative “sense of entitlement”? Of course, Roth doesn’t suggest that all Jews feel a sense of entitlement and feel that anyone who denies this is anti-Semitic. But at that time, to even bring it up. Risky and, now, Rothian.
Goodbye, Columbus was published first in The Paris Reviewin 1959. On its surface, it’s a simple love story doomed from the start because of an unlikely pairing. Neil Klugman is a college grad who lives with his Aunt and Uncle in Newark while he works at the Newark Public Library. An invitee at a club swimming pool, he meets Brenda Patimkin, a resident of suburban Short Hills, still a posh spot to live. In a burst of courage, Neil introduces himself. Brenda is just unconventional enough to like his advances. Roth depicts Neil’s drive to Short Hills nicely:
Once I’d driven out of Newark, past Irvington and the packed-in tangle of railroad crossings, switchmen shacks, lumberyards, Dairy Queens, and used-car lots, the night grew cooler. It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs roase in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on where themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin.
The Patimkins welcome Neil to the home. Even Brenda’s younger sister Julie and her older brother Ron are kind to the stranger: “Before I’d even reached them, Ron stepped forward and since the Diaspora.” Still, it’s uncomfortable, and Roth’s scenes are filled with ways to depict the discomfort. Neil himself is the cause of much of the discomfort because he wants to read into everything, even critiquing the family portraits.
On the wall hung three colored photo-paintings; they were the kind which, regardless of the subjects, be they vital or infirm, old or youthful, are characterized by bud-cheeks, wet lips, pearly teeth, and shiny, metallized hair. The subjects in this case were Ron, Brenda, and Julie at about ages fourteen, thirteen, and two. Brenda had long auburn hair, her diamond-studded nose, and no glasses; all combined to make her look a regal thirteen-year-old who’d just gotten smoke in her eyes. Ron was rounder and his hairline was lower, but that of spherical objects and lined courts twinkled in his boyish eyes. Poor little Julie was lost in the photo-painter’s Platonic idea of childhood; her tiny humanity was smothered somewhere back of gobs of pink and white.
Again, the story is more nuanced than what perhaps sounds like a less dramatic West Side Story. It’s not all about class, though that plays a large role. Thankfully, I didn’t have to look too hard for another Roth signature: the comic rant. This one comes from Mr. Patimkin’s brother (who runs a light-bulb plant; Mr. Patimkin’s sink manufacturing plant is much more successful—yes, another Roth signature: the tell-tale / ironic managerial jobs of the rising Jewish population). At a wedding, the uncle gets tipsy and confessional to Neil:
“I’ll tell you something, one good thing happened to me in my whole life. Two maybe. Before I came back from overseas I got a letter from my wife—she wasn’t my wife then. My mother-in-law found an apartment for us in Queens. Sixty-two fifty a month it cost. That’s the last good thing that happened.”
“What was the first?”
“What first?”
“You said two things,” I said.
“I don’t remember. I say two because my wife tells me I’m sarcastic and a cynic. That way maybe she won’t think I’m such a wise guy.”
The rant continues sporadically through the next several pages, nicely punctuating the themes while providing rhythm and flow to the prose. It also pleased me to no end that Roth knew even then how to make his readers smile at discomfort while taking deep breaths at the soft revelations.
After finishing I Married a Communist—which I didn’t like—I didn’t know how long it’d be before I gained the courage to read the next book in Roth’s America trilogy, The Human Stain (2000; PEN/Faulkner). But I did know that for many The Human Stain is Roth’s best book. And unlike I Married a Communist, The Human Stain was critically acclaimed and seemed to hark back to the success of American Pastoral, which I loved. So I picked The Human Stain off the stack and didn’t ever want to put it down again.
I don’t know how to begin to take the measure of this book. Beginning with a broad stroke, the book overtly reaches back to the great themes of the Greek tragedies and arranges them in the unlikely context of America in 1998. In the first few pages we meet this book’s Jewish protagonist, Coleman Silk, fortunate enough to have his life analyzed, turned around, and reanalyzed by our narrator, Nathan Zuckerman. Coleman is a seventy-one year-old classics professor voluntarily exiled from Athena College, where he was once a king. Coleman has just informed Nathan Zuckerman that as a mistress he has a thirty-four year-old cleaning woman from the college. In a short span of sentences we learn this even as Roth zooms his lense out to introduce the setting and some of the themes of the novel: we get the American flag waving in the back ground; Nathan explains “the ecstasy of sanctimony”; and we learn that it “was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.”
In excellent Roth form, the narrative takes us back and forth through time and location until we get a sense of who Coleman Silk is and why he is being cast as the protagonist in a Greek tragedy. He has caused an uproar in his community because one day in class he asked about two students who had as yet never attended class: “Do they exist? Or are they spooks?” It turns out the two students are black, and they soon file a complaint to the dean of faculty, and, surprisingly, many faculty members side with the students, claiming that Professor Silk was racist. Here is the chorus, clamoring for purification. It is clear, however, that Coleman was not being racist; nevertheless, things get so ugly he resigns out of principle and vows to fight the college. In the midst of the struggle, his wife dies, he claims because of the stress the college placed on them. Now in exile, Coleman has settled with Faunia Farley, the new mistress who pretends she is illiterate.
The story soon takes an unexpected twist, however. Nathan Zuckerman takes us back into Coleman Silk’s hidden past, where we find that he was raised in East Orange, New Jersey, in a black family. Yes, Coleman himself is a black man wearing the mask of a white Jew. Indeed, one could say that his profession, his college, and all, that he is more white than most white men. This might appear unbelievable, but this has happened, particularly in the time before the Civil Rights movement when it was just so much easier to get around (let alone get a job) as a white man in America. If you were pale enough, it could work. Roth delves into the mind of a man who would cast off his birth and family to assume a new role. Even before his momentous decision to live life as a white man, Coleman resents being classified with a group. Here is a passage taken from when he has left home to attend Howard, one of the nation’s most prestigious black colleges.
Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the of the we’s overbearing solidity, and he didn’t want anything to do with it or with the next oppressive we that came along either. You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we? Another place that’s just like that, the substitute for that?
We spend many pages on Coleman’s childhood and adolescence (all excellent pages), and we sense the oppressive atmosphere bearing down on this incredibly successful black man even in Roth’s subersive prose:
Yet on the Silks’ own modest tree-lined side street ordinary people needed not to be quite so responsible to God and the state as those whose vocation it was to maintain a human community, swimming pool and all, untainted by the impurities, and so the neighbors were on the whole friendly with the ultra-respectable, light-skinned Silks—Negroes, to be sure, but, in the words of one tolerant mother of a kindergarten playmate of Coleman’s, “people of a very pleasing shade, rather like eggnog”—even to the point of borrowing a tool or a ladder or helping to figure out what was wrong with the car when it wouldn’t start. The big apartment house at the corner remained all white until after the war. Then, in late 1945, when colored people began coming in at the Orange end of the street—the families of professional men mainly, of teachers, doctors, and dentists—there was a moving van outside the apartment building every day, and half the white tenants disappeared within months. But things soon settled down, and, though the landlord of fthe apartment building began renting to colored just in order to keep the place going, the whites who remained in the immediate neighborhood stayed around until they had a reason other than Negrophobia to leave.
Coleman’s white family does not know about his past. It is like a sin waiting to be uncovered, one that could be uncovered in the most tragic way, say when one of his children marries a white man but has a black child. Hopefully, if nothing else has, this gives a sense for how this book has the feel of Oedipus or The Bacchae. Roth weaves this strange secret into Coleman’s current life in 1998, and the irony is rich:
As a force, propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltratin, if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women’s rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It’s not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never happened—it’s as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It’s, he though, as though Babbit had never been written. It’s as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race—scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day . . . all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. Here in America either it’s Faunia Farley or it’s Monica Lewisnsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk! This, in 1998, is the wickedness they have to put up with. This, in 1998, is their torture, their torment, and their spiritual death.
One might think the weight of these large themes, would crush the individual characters in the novel, that the characters would be mere props for Roth’s ambitious trek through humanity. However, Roth achieves here what he himself calls the “juxtaposition of grandeur and intimacy” (yes, there’s metafiction at work here too; isn’t Roth always a bit solipsistic? a bit metafictional?). Despite these large themes working in the background, the characters remain fixed in the foreground, completely in focus. The characters are always given priority over theme. Indeed, in this book Roth succeeds in introducing us intimately to more characters than in any other Roth novel that I’ve read. Roth takes the time to explore these lives, from Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley, to Coleman’s nemesis at the college, Delphine Roux, and Faunia’s ex-husband Lester Farley. Roth even takes the time to put a personal face on a herd of milk cows and a black crow. Somehow, in all of the tangle that would normally be confusion in such an ambitious story, Roth is able to shine the light on the perfect detail to bring his characters achingly to life without distracting the reader from the whole, and that whole never distracts us from its pieces. This is master craftsmanship at work.
After binging on Philip Roth, reading seven of his books over a period of a few months, I haven’t read anything by him since October. Partly that’s because I’m reading his Zuckerman books in order and the next book on my list was I Married a Communist (1998); I’ve been much more excited to read The Human Stain. It’s also a bit discouraging after reading so many Roth books where the cover proclaims the awards it garnered that this one simply says, “Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral.” I guess I had low expectations of this book and viewed it as something I needed to get through (a self-imposed barrier, I know) in order to move on to better Roth pastures.
But why should I have approached this book with trepidation. After all, I Married a Communist capped off a great decade for Roth. In the 1990s, Roth won the National Book Critics Circle Award (nonfiction) for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral (1997). And I Married a Communist is the middle part of Roth’s highly acclaimed America Trilogy and the greater Zuckerman series. Yet still I had low expectations of this book and put my Roth project on hold until I had the gumption to just get it done.
Then the other night my son was awake and sick. I picked up this book and began reading while I rocked him. So much for that night of sleep. Roth’s prose begins as seductively as usual.
The book opens differently than American Pastoral; where American Pastoral opened with an excellent framing device for the overtly solipsistic narrative to come, I Married a Communist has the rather mundane framing device of memory. The narrative structure here is, in a way, a sort of late-night-on-the-back-porch interview Nathan Zuckerman has with his former high school teacher Murry Ringold. The discussion takes place in the late 1990s but looks back nearly fifty years before to America during the era of McCarthyism. The topic of their six-evening-long discussion is Murray’s now-dead brother Ira, a devout Communist in a time when America’s zealous hatred of Communism was so great that even acquaintances of alleged communists were tainted. Rather than delve into Ira’s story right away, the book begins with Murray’s own run-in with the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HUAC), a committee setup to investigate potential threats to American security – in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the perceived threat was Communism. Paranoid, HUAC, with the help of a sinister family foe, investigates and interrogates Murry Ringold, mainly because he is Ira’s brother. As a result of his ultimate noncompliance, Murray loses his teaching job. Turns out that Nathan’s own life was affected by Ira’s political beliefs, though he remained ignorant of this until this back-porch discussion nearly fifty years later. Murray says that when Nathan applied for the Fulbright Scholarship he was denied only because of his connections to Ira Ringold, connections that we readers do not know much about yet. (I’d actually like to thank HUAC for whatever they did to deny Nathan the scholarship because instead of doing whatever he would have done with his Fulbright, Nathan goes to the University of Chicago - The Ghost Writer is only a few steps away.)
One of the compelling aspects of this early part of the novel is how well Roth evokes the nuances of an age that we now think of only in the vague yet absolute term McCarthyism. Today we look back on this time period as excessive government feeding on mass paranoia. I’m not saying we’re wrong to call it this, but Roth manages to make the time period become a bit more difficult to map in black and white. And again, Roth is not saying McCarthyism was good – far from it – but he allows his characters to be more than mere symbols of an age. Well, all of his characters except for the main one – Ira. Though I’m sure this was not Roth’s intent, things went down hill for me when I finally met Ira through Murray and Nathan’s memories and long-winded talk. The book became heavy-handed – so much so that Ira was flattened quickly.
For me, after reading about a third of Roth’s books, Ira Ringold is Roth’s weakest character yet. Unlike the Swede in American Pastoral, Ira never feels like he has his own voice. We learn of him from two sources fifty years in the future. In Ira’s long-winded (thirty, forty, and fifty page segments) recounts of the past, his fraternal interests are to set up Ira as a martyr. Sure he says Ira is to blame for some things, but he always passes off Ira’s actions as just part of this innocent man’s nature. Had things been different, Ira could have succeeded in life. In these segments, Ira feels like someone capable only of reaction.
I’d never known anyone so immersed in his moment or so defined by it. Or tyrannized by it, so much its avenger and its victim and its tool. To imagine Ira outside of his moment was impossible.
While this idea is compelling, and this is not the only book where Roth looks at how history can steamroll over individuals, it didn’t work here. Ira never fully comes alive in Murray’s narration.
Nathan as narrator is only a fraction more successful. While the young Nathan is still doting on Ira’s ideological stamina, we get a few more glimpses of Ira in action – getting kicked out of a house at gunpoint while accompanied by the young Nathan, ranting about America to people interested only in taxidermy (again while accompanied by the young Nathan) – but even these are a bit over the top when they occur. It seems that Ira is not a character so much as a symbol, someone whom Roth can use to represent disillusionment, wrath, and injustice. Indeed, to a limited degree Ira even becomes one of Roth’s alter egos while at the same time appearing to be one of Roth’s own attempts at revenge: after Ira’s marriage falls apart with the actress Eve Frame, Eve writes an unflattering, best-selling book (I Married a Communist); after Roth’s marriage to actress Claire Bloom ended in 1994, Claire published an unflattering depiction of Roth (Leaving a Doll’s House) in 1996 – in this book, Eve is not depicted in a particularly flattering light.
Though at the beginning of the book I was fascinated by the evocation of the 1950s and McCarthyism, ultimately I cared less for Ira and Communism than for the tangentially developed idea of Nathan’s own pursuit of a father figure. Of the 325 pages, the best ones, and the ones I will remember, are the ones where Nathan’s character develops. I was particularly pleased every time Nathan’s father entered in the narrative.
The moment when you first recognize that your father is vulnerable to others is bad enough, but when you understand that he’s vulnerable to you, still needs your more than you any longer think you need him, when you realize that you might actually be able to frighten him, even to quash him if you wanted to – well, the idea is at such cross-purposes with routine filial inclinations that it does not even begin to make sense.
We come to find out in this book one of the first events that begins to strain Nathan’s relationship with his father; it’s not just because Nathan writes an offensive story while at Chicago.
I was also enthralled when Nathan’s character developed from the idealistic, politically active youth (who saw that in “Zuckerman Bound”?) to the more familiar, apathetic Nathan I’ve come to love. Another surrogate father who enters Nathan’s live during the 1950s is Leo Glucksman, one of Nathan’s humanities teachers at Chicago. Some of Roth’s quintessential aesthetic ideas is expressed during these pages, and we see why Nathan ends up a recluse in his later life.
“Art as a weapon?” he said to me, the word “weapon” rich with contempt and itself a weapon. “Art as taking the right to stand on everything? Art as the advocate of good things? Who taught you all this? Who taught you art is slogans? Who taught you art is in the service of ‘the people‘? Art is in the service of art – otherwise there is no art worthy of anyone’s attention. What is the motive for writing serious literature, Mr. Zuckerman? To disarm the enemies of price control? The motive for writing serious literature is to write serious literature. You want to rebel against society? I’ll tell you how to do it – write well. You want to embrace a lost cause? Then don’t fight in behalf of the laboring class. They’re going to make out fine. They’re going to fill up on Plymouths to their heart’s content. The workingman will conquer us all – out of his mindlessness will flow the slop that is this philistine country’s cultural destiny. We’ll soon have something in this country far worse than the government of the peasants and the workers – we will have the culture of the peasant and the workers. You want a lost cause to fight for? Then fight for the word. . . .”
So there are some great parts that didn’t serve to strengthen the overall story. I am glad I read it because I am deeply interested in Roth’s depictions of Nathan Zuckerman. However, I’m not sure it’s for anyone interested in seeing Roth at his best. The last few pages of the book, however, are beautiful, and maybe just for them the book is worth it.
Before you read the book:
After I read American Pastoral I realized that if I planned on reading all of Roth’s “Zuckerman” books in order, I’d already failed, having skipped The Counterlife (1986). Oh well. It actually doesn’t throw anything off at all. There’s little continuity between The Counterlife and the previous Zuckerman book, The Prague Orgy, and there also was no great hole between The Counterlife and American Pastoral. However, I still like the idea of watching Zuckerman age, so before moving on to I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, and Exit Ghost, I figured I’d better step back to the first Zuckerman book to win one of the U.S.’s major literary awards, taking the National Book Critics Circle for Fiction in 1987.
So all of the Zuckerman books are experiments in the metaphysical. Nathan Zuckerman is known to take liberty when narrating the lives of his friends and family, leading to some incredible, extended passages where he imagines their life for them: in The Ghost Writer we have his amazing extended alternate life for Amy Bellette; in American Pastoral he fills in the large gaps of the Swede’s life with his own version of what happened, to devestating effect.
The Counterlife is along the same idea and yet it is very different. Where the two works I mentioned above still have the feel of a realistic novel, The Counterlife plays with all sorts of metaphysical and metafictional conceits with more post-modernist flare that . . . well, let me try to give a brief look at the novel without giving it away.
The book is broken into five sections: “Basel,” “Judea,” “Aloft,” “Gloucestershire,” and “Christendom.” In the first, we find out that Nathan’s brother Henry has died during surgery he hoped would enable him to stop taking medication that was making him impotent. But with Roth a lot of the fun is not just in the story – it’s in the writing. Here is a great example of a sentence that flows smoothly despite the complexities, a sentence that pushes us one direction, subverts our expectation, and then takes us to a final word that casts the beginning words in a different light:
They experimented for six months, first with the dosage and, when that didn’t work, with other brands of the drug, but nothing helped: he no longer awakened with his morning erection or had sufficient potency for intercourse with his wife, Carol, or with his assistant, Wendy, who was sure that it was she, and not the medication, that was responsible for this startling change.
Zuckerman attends Henry’s funeral, and in a passage between him and Henry’s wife, Carol, we get a flavor for how this book is going to shift our perspective many times, making the true life not just ellusive but down right impossible to determine.
But in Zuckerman’s arms, pressing herself up against his chest, all she said, in a breaking voice, was “It helped me enormously, your being here.”
Consequently he had no reason to reply, “So that’s why you made up that story,” but said nothing more than what was called for. “It helped me, being with you all.”
Carol did not then respond, “Of course that’s why I said what I did. Those bitches all weeping their hearts out – sitting there weeping for their man. The hell with that!” Instead she said to him, “It meant a lot to the children to see you. They needed you today. You were lovely to Ruth.”
Nathan did not ask, “And you let him go ahead with the surgery, knowing who it was for?” He said, “Ruth’s a terrific girl.”
In the second section, Henry is ressurrected by Zuckerman’s pen. After surviving the surgery, however, Henry gets a strong urge to completely change his life to give it meaning. This secular Jew from South Orange, New Jersey, decides to move to the Holy Land, the West Bank to be exact, in order to join a group of Jewish fundamentalists seeking to overpower the Arabs. Again, we get multiple perspectives here. Here is one from a secular Jew living in Jerusalem:
“Who comes to this country now to settle and live? The intellectual Jew? The humane Jew? The beautiful Jew? No, not the Jew from Buenos Aires, or Rio, or Manhattan. The ones who come from America are either religious or crazy or both. This place has become the American-Jewish Australia. Now who we get is the Oriental jew and the Russian Jew and the social misfits like your brother, roughnecks in yarmulkes from Brooklyn.”
And here is one from one of the Jews in Henry’s (or Hanoch, for he’s also adopted a new name with his new life) settlement:
“But assimilation and intermarriage,” she said, turning quite grave, “in America they are bringing about a second Holocaust – truly, a spiritual Holocaust is taking place there, and it is as deadly as any threat posed by the Arabs to the State of Israel. . . .”
And amazingly, there’s are still several more turns of perspective. In the sections that follow we have Zuckerman imagine his own death while his mistress Maria and his still-alive brother make us question the veracity of the prior sections while providing a nice introduction to the final section – or conjuration – “Christendom.”
Unlike many contemporary works, when Roth pulls these literary tricks he does so for a deeper purpose. As in Indignation, a primary theme is escaping history, both the large scale events that overtake us regardless of our own will and the individual stories we create for ourselves to get through it all.
All of this makes The Counterlife much more complex and dense than the other Zuckerman books I’ve read. That doesn’t mean it was better, but it definitely satisfied me.
And here is a great line that describes a bit of where Roth has been with his work and a lot about where he is going:
The treacherous imagination is everybody’s maker – we are all the invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other’s authors.
Before you read the book:
I know that I recently posted a review on American Pastoral, so you might be getting tired of my posts on Roth (I’m sorry, but they won’t stop soon – he’s now got 29 books) but how could I, after converting to a full-fledged fan of Roth pass up the opportunity to review Indignation (2008) the week it came out? And could the title say anything about how Roth feels in today’s America? And here’s another text-only cover design by Milton Glaser, extending the Roth-Glaser relationship. The book itself is quite quaint and attractive, being about the same size as a trade paperback.
This books is not a novel – not by my standards anyway. It took me less time to read than it takes me for most short stories, and that’s partly because Roth’s prose is so smooth but mostly because the book is extremely short. Though it clocks in at around 230 pages, each pages is larger than usual print, larger than usual margins, and larger than usual spacing between lines. I’m not sure why it has been toted as a novel. That actually might lead to some disappointment because it is simply not deep enough to constitute a novel, especially not by Roth’s own standards.
I have to admit, I’ve been looking forward to this book, even though initial plot blurbs made it sound like many other Roth books: young Newark Jew who is trying to get out from under the tyranny of his father winds up getting into even more trouble. Indignation, though relatively slight, is much more than that.
Here we meet Marcus Messner, a nineteen-year-old Newark Jew who has always been a good kid. It’s 1951, and he’s just completing his first year at Robert Treat University in Newark. He’s loving it. The professors are invigorating. The ideas are flowing. He’s on track to become valedictorian. On the other side of the world, the Korean War is in full swing. Perhaps it’s because his son is now capable of going off to war and dying for his country that makes Marcus’s father become a bit more protective.
Whatever the cause or mix of causes fueling the abrupt change in his previously benign paternal behavior, he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts. Where were you? Why weren’t you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before you – how do I know you’re not going to places where you can get yourself killed?
After a night studying at the library, Marcus returns home to find the door locked. His father has ceased to trust his straight-A son and has locked him out of the house as a lesson to not go wandering off to whorehouses at night.
Unable to handle so much protection and distrust, Marcus flees Newark and winds up in Ohio’s Winesburg College, a place that could be even more cloistered and vigorously defensive of its standards. In an ugly twist of historic placing, Marcus is forced to accept all of these standards:
The strong desire to rush off to the bathroom was quelled by my fear that if I did so, I might get caught by a librarian or a teacher or even by an honorable student, be expelled from school, and wind up a rifleman in Korea.
But the pressure mounts. Marcus has altercations with a couple of his roommates. He finds himself suddenly involved in a tryst with an emotionally unstable girl. And underneath it is a bitter resentment of the system in place at Winesberg. He begins to skirt the line leading to expulsion, and even flaunts his unconventional beliefs to an impressed Dean who nonetheless must express his dissatisfaction with Marcus’s path:
“I admire your directness, your diction, your sentence structure – I admire your tenacity and the confidence with which you hold to everything you say. I admire your ability to memorize and retain abstruse reading matter even if I don’t necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities.”
“But what about the Nobel Prize!”
What makes all of this more interesting is the fact that we already know – and this is not a spoiler since you can find it in many of the reviews already published and in the first few pages of the book – that Marcus is dead, or perhaps on the fringe of death in a morphine-induced coma.
And even dead, as I am and have been for I don’t know how long, I try to reconstruct the mores that reigned over that campus and to recapitulate the troubled efforts to ellude those mores that fostered the series of mishaps ending in my death at the age of nineteen.
We even know how he dies, if we’re paying attention to the not-so-subtle clues. But we’re not sure how he gets there. And even that’s not fully the point. What we get is an interesting look at how history intrudes and overtakes, arbitrarily, a young, basically innocent boy. Rather than focusing on youth and social mores, then, Roth’s theme, as in the past few books, is centered on death and mortality. Unlike Everyman, however, here we see it from the perspective a boy with a bright future, not from an elderly man who has already lived a bitter life.
Unfortunately, I craved a bit of the festering bitterness. Marcus’s character might be indignant, but he’s not cynical yet. He’s a bit too immature to be fully bitter. Mostly he’s responding to emotions that flare up whenever someone attempts to give him direction, like many nineteen year olds. I’m not saying Roth failed to execute what he planned – indeed, Marcus’s voice was very convincingly innocent and unassuming and indignant - it’s just that I was not as interested in what Marcus had to say as I have been in some of Roth’s prior characters.
Still, while the title of the book come from the Chinese national anthem and the book takes place nearly 60 years ago, it was easy to associate both the title and the themes to America’s situation today. That’s a point that is never explicit, but anyone who walks into a book store and sees the title should make the association naturally, even if that person is not aghast when thinking about America’s plight. The book works very well on this level of analysis too.
Basically, I came away pleased but not to the same degree I have come to expect from Roth. He usually succeeds in delving much deeper and being much more nuanced. This book felt more like a quick project, a great exercise in masterful writing but that doesn’t quite live up to its thematic potential (like McEwan’s On Chesil Beach). Still, it’s tightly woven and compelling. I just wouldn’t recommend it to people for their first go with Roth.
Before you read the book:
I’m hooked. The more Roth I read the more I’m convinced he is the greatest American writer alive today (and there are several great ones). But Roth – Roth’s books are in another league. Freshly finished with The Prague Orgy (the last book in what Vintage calls “Zuckerman Bound containing The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy) I decided to not move on to his latest “Zuckerman” novel, Exit Ghost, published last year. Instead I chose to finally read Roth’s Pulitzer Prize winner: American Pastoral (1997). American Pastoral also – and I was so happy – includes one of my newest favorite literary characters of all time, Nathan Zuckerman, albeit in a different role.
While “Zuckerman Bound” and Exit Ghost are written about Nathan Zuckerman, American Pastoral is written by Nathan Zuckerman, creating what has to be one of the most sophisticated and effective framing devices in all of literature. The first section “Paradise Remembered” is Zuckerman’s reflection on how this book came about. It’s a beautiful introduction to the themes of the novel that are displayed and flayed and displayed again in a different light and then stripped down with stunning compassion which leads to chilling effects in the last two parts, “The Fall” and “Paradise Lost.”
Zuckerman has aged a little more than a decade since I last visited him (only a month ago) in The Prague Orgy. It’s his forty-fifth-year high school reunion. Events and encounters lead him to reflect on his youth and in particular on his boyhood hero: Seymour “the Swede” Levov. The Swede is among the generation of Jews who were finally able to take full advantage of what America offered; he is descended from immigrants who had nothing, from a second-generation Jewish family that started building up a foundation, and from a father who has built a successful glove making factory. His grandfather and then his father had to work hard, and now the Swede is set up for an easy life; he even takes on the physical features of an all-American boy. Zuckerman idolized the Swede. He was the perfect athlete who was raised to an even higher status since he was enacting these great athletic feats while the country engaged in World War II. As is usual with Roth (but he still surprises me with his ability), the narrative looks at the Swede’s status from many angles: as a blessing, as an insignificant fact, as a piece of nostalgia, and as a curse.
And it all began – this heroically idealistic maneuver, this strategic, strange spiritual desire to be a bulwark of duty and ethical obligation – because of the war, because of all the terrible uncertainties bred by the war, because of how strongly an emotional community whose beloved sons were dying far away facing death had been drawn to a lean and muscular, austere boy whose talent it was to be able to catch anything anybody threw anywhere near him. It all began for the Swede – as what doesn’t? – in a circumstantial absurdity.
Zuckerman has seen the Swede a few times since childhood, and he’s still struck with awe, still a little giddy. One day not long before the high school reunion Zuckerman receives a letter from the Swede asking him to meet him in a New York City restaurant. The Swede’s father has died, and the Swede actually wants Zuckerman to consider helping him write a piece about his father. While Zuckerman would never do such a thing for another person, he is too intrigued by the Swede to say no. Zuckerman hopes to get under the surface of this apparently perfect man who has lived an apparently ideal life.
Only . . . what did he do for subjectivity? What was the Swede’s subjectivity? There had to be a substratum, but its composition was unimaginable.
That was the second reason I answered his letter – the substratum. What sort of mental existence had been his? What, if anything, had ever threatened to destabalize the Swede’s trajectory?
Zuckerman, trying to see beneath the at once humble and complacent veneer, is disappointed. Turns out that at the dinner the Swede doesn’t even go into the piece he wants written about his father. They pass a dull evening together, and Zuckerman, in a sense, gets over the Swede. There is nothing going on under the surface. Unless . . .
Unless he was not a character with no character to reveal but a character with none that he wished to reveal – just a sensible man who understands that if you regard highly your privacy and the well-being of your loved ones, the last person to take into your confidence is a working novelist. Give the novelist, instead of your life story, the brazen refusal of the gorgeous smile, blast him with the stun gun of your prince-of-blandness smile, then polish off the zabaglione and get the hell back to Old Rimrock, New Jersey, where your life is your business and not his.
He knows nothing more about the Swede, however, until the high school reunion comes around. There he runs into the Swede’s younger brother, Jerry. Only a bit of information is passed from Jerry to Zuckerman, but it’s enough. A tidbit about the Swede’s daugher shows Zuckerman how wrong he was to pass off the Swede as just another superficial human being, too ideal to be interesting. As happens at large reunions, Jerry and Zuckerman are separated before Zuckerman can satisfy his curiosity any further.
Though Zuckerman has little to go on, he delves into writing a book about the Swede’s life, focusing on the period of the 1960s and Vietnam and the early 1970s with Watergate, when his daughter has most destabalized not only his life but the life of his wife, the neighbors, the community, and the United States. It is a fantastic, virtuosic plummet into the heart of America.
I can’t remember a book that caused a more visceral reaction to me. Roth does not pull punches and he is not shy about making the reader feel complicit. Because of this, I can’t say I’d recommend American Pastoral to everyone despite the fact that I consider it one of the greatest novels of the last century. It deserves to be looked at with an open mind and with an understanding that Roth is not putting anything in here for gratuitous effect, and the effect is often devestating. I swear, when the Swede encounters Rita Cohen to pass information to Merry I felt like I was there. My mouth went dry. Like the Swede, I too wanted to run out of the room I was in. I felt like the Swede, and I admired Roth even more for his ability to do that. Indeed, Roth, more than any other writer I know of, has the ability to pull me into the emotions the characters are feeling. I feel transported, like the Swede:
The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral – into the indigenous American berserk.
Another striking aspect of the novel is its treatment of Newark, a city I’m drawn to since I spent a summer working as a judicial intern in the Federal Court, which sits right in the area described in the novel, and I still frequent Newark’s streets. Roth, like Zuckerman and the Swede, grew up in Newark in a time when it had a better reputation. Here we get a gritty, up close shot of the city following the ugly and destructive riots of 1967; forty years later, these riots still affect the city and its abismal reputation. Over the past few years, Newark has been attempting to revitalize itself. It has a classy performing arts center and a brand new state-of-the-art stadium. The homicide rate is dropping, finally. But this scene is still familiar:
Along this forsaken street, as ominous now as any street in any ruined city in America, was a reptilian length of unguarded wall bareen even of graffiti. But for the wilted weeds that managed to jut forth in wiry clumps where the mortar was cracked and washed away, the viaduct wall was barren of everything except the affirmation of a weary industrial city’s prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its ugliness.
The book doesn’t dwell in the urban areas, though. The Swede has moved from Newark to the rural community of Old Rimrock. It’s a stark contrast: Newark is primarily inhabited by Democrats and immigrants, Jewish or Catholic; Old Rimrock is primarily Republican and inhabited by wealthy WASPs. The Swede’s generation was one of the first to change these stereotypes. With his Irish Catholic wife, the Swede moves thirty miles west of Newark, and allows Roth to explore yet another side of America.
I’ll admit that my proximity to the landscape has made me like this book more than I perhaps would have otherwise, as I suspect is the case with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Still, American Pastoral is more layered than the clichéd onion. In many ways, that layering is the major motif in the novel: there are glove factories, face-lifts, paintings that look like they are trying to “rub out” the paint rather than apply it. We see it in the narrative structure which has a fictional author writing a fictional account about a real person. We see it in the way Roth plays with the layers of time. We see it in the layers of meaning in each and every scene. This is an intimate look at a family that spreads out into an astounding discussion of America and her history.
After you read the book:
The last sentence in my review states that this is a great discussion of America and her history. I’m very curious about how people not from America responded to this book. Was it accessible despite the multitude of historical references? My suspicion is that it is, that the book goes beyond America and touches on topics that are familiar to everyone. I’m not just talking about the interfamily relationships here; I’m talking about the backwards look at a century that promised a lot and looked quite pretty from the surface. But underneath . . .
I have heard from several people that they get bored with the last section. I can understand how that could happen. Instead of following Merry and Rita further into the berserk, Roth moves on to a small neighborly cookout on a holiday weekend. I found it fantastic, the perfect ending. After stripping the Swede’s emotions down to the raw core, Roth then proceeds to show everyone covering their pain up. Dawn is moving on by getting a facelife, a new house, and a new man. This is as much to cover the past as it is to build a better life. It’s a pleasant looking scene with friendly conversation going on between people who despise each other fundamentally. Brought to remembrance that great last scene in Woody Allen’s film against Ronald Reagan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, though American Pastoral was much less comical.
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