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August 26, 2005

COMING ATTRACTIONS ...

If you'd like a sense of the reviewing style of newly annointed LATBR editor David Ulin, you can check out today's Newsday, where he reviews the new Henry Roth biography.

The question all this raises is why a writer so overtly self-reflective should need a biography. What can a biographer tell us that Roth cannot? To his credit, Kellman addresses that dilemma from the outset: "What is left," he asks, "for biography to say about a man who wrote hundreds of articulate pages about himself?"

The answer, of course, is plenty - "Mercy of a Rude Stream" ends in 1927 - yet "Redemption" can't help but exist in the shadow of Roth's work. Although Kellman does a nice job of tracing the author's lost years, he never quite gets at the inner life, the psychological tumult of his subject's world. This is especially true when it comes to Roth's relationships with his wife, Muriel, whom he credited with saving him, and his sons Jeremy and Hugh, who grew increasingly distant as they got older. In many ways, this suggests the limitations of biography, which must imagine a life from the outside, rather than the other way around. At the same time, it also highlights Roth's ultimate achievement: to use literature as a means to reconstruct himself. That's a tricky process; for all the power of "Call It Sleep," "Mercy of a Rude Stream" is a more uneven effort, by turns brilliant and overwrought. Yet if "Redemption" has anything to tell us, it's that even this is something of a miracle, given what Roth had to overcome.

Posted at 02:46 PM in LATBR Thumbnails |

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Comments

Patry

Whenever the goal of a writer's life's work is to give us a vision of "the reconstructed self," his fans become curious about the unreconstructed version.

Redemption sounds like a fascinating book, but we need to keep in mind that it is also a reconstruction.

Posted by: Patry | August 28, 2005 at 03:14 AM

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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

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