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November 01, 2004

MUCH MORE ROTH

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J.M. Coetzee reviews Phillip Roth in the New York Review of Books. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know we said no more Roth links, but do you really think we could pass this up?) It figures, just as our subscription is about to end, and we'd decided not to renew, they had to go run something like this.

The modulation between youthful freshness of vision and adult insight is brought off with such skill that we lose awareness of who is speaking in our ear at any given moment, child or man. Only rarely does Roth's hand fail, as for example when the child Philip sees his aunt Evelyn for who she is: "Her pretty face, with its large features and thickly applied makeup, suddenly looked to me preposterous—the carnal face of [a] ravenous mania."

Subjecting himself to a child's worldview means that Roth has to eschew a range of stylistic resources, in particular the harsher reaches of irony and the wails and tirades of desperate eloquence that distinguish such works as Sabbath's Theater (1995) and The Dying Animal (2001), an eloquence sparked by the brute resistance of the world to the human will or by the prospect of approaching extinction. On the other hand, it does place Roth outside the range of William Faulkner, whose heady prose has sometimes overwhelmed him of late, particularly in The Human Stain (2000).

Roth has grown in stature as a writer as he has grown older. At his best he is now a novelist of authentically tragic scope; at his very best he reaches Shakespearean heights. By the standard set by Sabbath's Theater, The Plot Against America is not a major work. What it offers in place of tragedy is pathos of a heart-wrenching kind saved from sentimentality by a sharp humor, a risky, knife-edge performance that Roth brings off without a slip. The subject of the keenest pathos is not young Philip—though, clutching his stamp album, heading off into the night, determined to be just a boy again, Philip is pathetic enough—but Philip's neighbor and shadow self, Seldon Wishnow. Like Philip, Seldon is a clever, impressionable, obedient little boy. He is also fatally unlucky, a born victim, and Philip wants nothing to do with him (Seldon of course adores Philip).

As if that wasn't enough, Michael Wood (author of the previously mentioned The Magician's Doubts) reviews the book for the London Review of Books.

I called the book 'astonishing', but what astonishes is not this wild counter-history - it is presented too plausibly for that - or any fireworks in the prose, which is uncommonly sober, though always elegant. What's astonishing is the way Roth puts together the stories of the shaken Jewish family and an America that can't see what's happening to it, that isn't shaken enough. 'They live in a dream,' Philip's father says, 'and we live in a nightmare.' Mr and Mrs Roth and their two boys take a trip to Washington in the early days of Lindbergh's presidency. They are turned out of their hotel, and yelled at by anti-semitic bullies, but their American optimism survives - for a while. Philip's older brother, Sandy, takes part in the Just Folks programme and has a wonderful time in Kentucky, and Philip notes how far his sibling has 'spun out of the family orbit merely by making the ordinary American's adjustment to the new administration'. Cousin Alvin joins the Canadian army and loses a leg in France, but once he has returned he has no protest or principle left in him, only anger. Anger at what? The burly Canadian nurse who brings him back has the answer: 'At what people get angry at - at how things turn out.' Alvin joins a gang of Jewish mobsters in Philadelphia. Meanwhile Aunt Evelyn, Mrs Roth's sister, marries Rabbi Bengelsdorf, and receives a letter from Lindbergh on the occasion. She is very happy to be invited to the White House when Ribbentrop comes to visit. Mr Roth leaves his job with Metropolitan Life Insurance rather than be transferred to Kentucky. Philip tries to run away from his collapsing world, and is kicked in the head by a horse - and, worse still, saved by a boy he can't stand. Alvin and Philip's father have a murderous quarrel, broken up by a friendly, newly settled Italian American neighbour, and Philip, thinking of how the fight could have ended, draws a grim conclusion: 'The anti-semites were about to be abetted in their exhilarating solution to America's worst problem by our taking up the cudgels and hysterically destroying ourselves.' What appears to be a pogrom in Newark turns out to be a battle between the city police and an amateur Jewish police force composed of local thugs, 'the Jews' very own deviants', as young Philip puts it, sounding very much like his older self. When three Jews get killed in the skirmishing, 'it wasn't necessarily because they were Jews' ('though it didn't hurt,' Philip's Uncle Monty adds). That 'necessarily', along with Uncle Monty's joke, is a way of hanging onto even a groundless fear - just in case.

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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