The Elegant Variation

SIMIC ON ROTH II

So, I've had a bit more time with Charles Simic's review of Indignation, and it's prompted this unplanned penultimate entry in my Summer of Roth ruminations.

I include a cursory look at the different responses to the novel in my final post, but two things struck me in particular about the Simic review that I wanted to take up with you.  First, on my second, closer reading, I noticed this error in Simic's review:

"Olivia has a scar across the width of her wrist that Marcus noticed the first night."

That's incorrect.  Marcus fails to notice the scar, and makes much of this later in the book.  In a letter to Olivia, he does write "I did see the scar at dinner," but immediately after the letter, the narrator admits "I didn't know what I was doing by lying to her about noticing the scar ... " (p. 76)

It seems to me there are two ways of looking at this.  The first is simply that honest mistakes happen - reviewers are human after all.  (Well, most of them are.)  And there's also the question of what constitutes a meaningful mistake.  I'm reminded of John Banville's hilarious rebuke to John Sutherland, who called him out for fouling up a detail about the squash game in Saturday:  "Summoned," Banville wrote, "one shuffles guiltily to the Department of Trivialities."

But on the other hand, this kind of mistake also suggests at least the possibility of a less than attentive reading.  In the case of Saturday, I happen to agree with Banville - none of the readers I spoke to could clearly recall the squash outcome.  But this mistake seems to strike a bit deeper at something that goes to the heart of book - Marcus's self-aggrandizing delusions.  What do you think?  Does a mistake like this rise to the level of capital offense?  Is it simply that perhaps we all expect more from the New York Review of Books?  (And I say that as a great admirer of NYRoB, Simic and Roth.)

The second thing that's grown to trouble me about Simic's review is this:  In a 4,000 word review, Simic spends nearly 2,900 of them offering nothing more than tedious plot summary.  He simply retells the entire story of Indignation - and within that summary offers only a single extended quotation from the work.  Beyond that, there's little of Roth's music to be found.  (The entirety of the review only contains one other extended quotation.)  Now, I have generally found word-count breakdowns of reviews to be less than illuminating but when you consider that another 700 words is spent in introductory throat clearing, we seem to be left with little that actually takes the book's critical measure.  And I wonder, to some extent, if the reason isn't this:

Anyone living in the 1950s could imagine such a destiny. I did, though I'm five years younger than Roth, who was seventeen when the war started. An innocent boy who dies in a war has been such a common occurrence in the history of the world that calling it a tragedy doesn't carry much conviction.

I'm left wondering whether Simic's personal identification with this story diverted him from a more critical approach?  Because once you really spend some time with this review, there doesn't seem to be much there there.  Did Simic know that on some level and fill the space with plot - (a tendency I've seen before at NYRoB)?  Or did he genuinely feel the best service to be offered to readers was a virtual scene by scene recounting of the novel? 

How do you find this review?  Do you consider it useful, illuminating?  Does it strike you as New York Review of Books caliber?  I'd love to hear what you think on this one as I try to wrap this all up.

SIMIC ON ROTH

Friends, we beg indulgence - we'll still grappling with this stubborn head cold that we picked up in NY and we're just not clear headed enough to focus on blogging duties.  We swear on a stack of Banvilles that we have interesting stuff in the hopper, and it will begin to find its way here any day now.  Please just hang in as we heal.  Equilibrium will return.

In the meantime, Charles Simic has taken a look at Indignation for the New York Review of Books, and comes to a much different conclusion than ours:

His powerful new novel, Indignation, seethes with outrage. It begins with a conflict between a father and son in a setting and circumstances long familiar from his other novels going back to Portnoy's Complaint, but then turns into something unexpected: a deft, gripping, and deeply moving narrative about the short life of a decent, hardworking, and obedient boy who pays with his life for a brief episode of disobedience that leaves him unprotected and alone to face forces beyond his control in a world in which old men play with the lives of the young as if they were toy soldiers. Roth's novels abound in comic moments, and so does Indignation. His compassion for his characters doesn't prevent him from noting their foolishness. "Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends," Roth said in an interview with Joyce Carol Oates back in 1974.^[4] Every tragic action casts a comic shadow, is how one may describe his view of life. His new novel, despite its many funny scenes, moves with the pace and inevitability of a tragedy.

INDIGNATION REVIEW

You've probably found it on your own by now, but my review of Philip Roth's Indignation is up at the Barnes & Noble review.  Here's the opening:

Philip Roth must have emerged indignant from the womb, so fiery has been the burning thread of fury glowing through the heart of his oeuvre: Class resentment appears early in his debut, Goodbye Columbus. By the time Portnoy's Complaint rolls raucously into town, this has transformed into something considerably deeper and rawer: "What I'm saying, Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds..." Nathan Zuckerman expressed resentment at the demands of celebrity. Revulsion against puritan politics informs the celebrated American Trilogy, and in his final act, confronted with mortality and clash between Eros and Thanatos, Roth now rages against the dying of the light.

Having now published his 36th book at the age of 75, his capacity for righteous indignation has not dimmed but the old sharpness has dulled, leaving readers with little more than echoes of stronger works. How strong are these echoes? Indignation is filled with familiar Roth tropes: Newark, a confrontation of 1950s mores, a studious young Jewish son of well-meaning if interfering parents; a beautiful, promiscuous, damaged shiksa. An obsession with sex and with death.

You can read the rest here. 

It's a stunning Saturday in Paris, and I'm hitting the Jardin with Joseph O'Neill's second novel The Breezes.  Home Monday.

KAKU ON ROTH

I briefly interrupt my Amsterdam sojourn and Todd's guest posts to note that, although I agree with her assessment of the book itself*, Michiko Kakutani's review of Indignation makes the choice not to preserve Roth's "gotcha" - something I fretted considerably over, and handled differently, as I hope you'll see tomorrow.  Given how completely the device fails, her critical approach seems fair - it was something I did, indeed, want to engage directly with but in the end I erred on the side of preserving the reader's experience ... OK, back to Todd.

UPDATE:  Hitch weighs in, too, and is even less impressed.   There's something reassuring about the response, and we'll write more on this later, but it isn't always easy writing that early, negative review, wondering if you're the only one missing something ...

* Of course, I vehemently object to with her facile characterization of Sabbath's Theater as "sour" and "static" ...

NOTA BENE: SABBATH'S THEATER

"And he couldn't do it.  He could not fucking die.  How could he leave?  How could he go?  Everything he hated was here."

- Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater

THINKING ABOUT ROTH II

A handful of random Roth thoughts, having now finished Indignation. (No, I'm not going to tell you what I thought, at least not yet.)

1) In the novel, the Newark-born Jewish protagonist (sound familiar) heads out to the sticks, attending college in Winesburg, Ohio. Now, we can all assume that Roth makes no decisions – especially one so obvious – lightly, so it seems to me that in order to properly read Indignation, one needs to read Winesburg, Ohio. Which I haven't. But I am now. This is how I work my reviews. One book invariably leads to another. It's part of the fun, undoubtedly, but can also exponentially increase the work involved.

2) In recent interviews, Peter Carey and Andrew Sean Greer complained about reviews that betrayed a key secret of their respective novels. Well, Indignation affords a similar opportunity for betrayal – there's a key story element/twist, and it will be interesting to see how other reviewers, as well as I, deal with it. The problem is you can contort a review into coy knots to avoid revealing these things, but you end up, I think, with a review that doesn't really engage with the book. It speaks, I suppose, to what kind of review one is writing – a mere consumer report (buy or don't buy), in which case, one should preserve secrets as much as possible; or a thoughtful engagement with a piece of work, which, it seems to me, simply can't be done when you're forever holding one closed palm behind your back. I'm not entirely sure what I will do here, other than announce load and clear that a major spoiler is coming if I chose to reveal something.

3) Thinking about Roth's familiar touches, motifs repeated, things like that, I thought that an instructive comparison might be made to Picasso. Besides a lifelong fascination with sex (with a dose of terrified mortality thrown in near the end), the symbols of Picasso's art were always personal, almost narcissistic: His lovers, his family, his personal iconography – bulls, harlequins, matadors – put a personal stamp on his body of work that bears some resemblance to Roth's own concerns. The so-called political The Plot Against America – of which Roth has disavowed political readings – can be instructively compared to Guernica which, despite its inspiration, is a resolutely personal work. (Something, incidentally, Picasso has been criticized for.)  Just a connection noted.

THINKING ABOUT ROTH I

So, I'm a good pile of Roth into my summer reading, and so it's time for an update before moving totally takes over. A few caveats first:

Most of what follows is fairly raw, unfiltered and impressionistic. To give you a sense of what goes into writing a review like this, I'm pulling back the curtain on the "mulling things over" stage. It's the point in the process when I'm reading the author's previous works and simply noticing things. They might not be profound, they might not be important, they might not make it anywhere near the final review. But I notice them nevertheless, and it's too early to know what will count. One of the pitfalls I work hard to avoid is developing a thesis too early, and then looking for the facts to back it up. I prefer my thesis to emerge at the end of my reading. Perhaps that belabors the obvious, but the point of this exercise is to take nothing about this process for granted.

I'm about to sit down and read Indignation for the first of what will be at least two times. My deadline on this piece is September 2, but since I am leaving for Australia on August 24, I'm aiming to have a solid first draft by then, so I am only polishing language on the road.

So what I have sussed out so far? Well, years ago, I went to see The Marriage of Figaro at the LA Opera, and when it was over, I called my mother – my opera going companion in my New York days – and marveled that I'd managed to forget it was a masterpiece, and just listen; and in listening experienced precisely why it was a masterpiece. My time with Roth has been a bit like that. He's become such a literary institution, nearly embalmed in his reputation, so that it's become easy to accept his brilliance without allowing ourselves to experience it firsthand. 

Re-reading Portnoy's Complaint was a revelation, and it felt surprisingly fresh, its scathing humor still plenty sharp and effective. What has changed, of course, is the coarsening of the culture around it (some might argue it led that transformation), so one challenge was trying to imagine its impact on readers in the late 60s, trying to grasp how transformative it must have been. (Aside: When I was around 12, I asked my mother if any books in the house were off-limits. She said only one: The Odessa File, a potboiler that, of course, I made a beeline for. Why she chose this one, I don't know – she was probably trying to spare me Frederick Forsyth. But the shelves were filled with Roth – Portnoy included – all of which were apparently fair game.)

In addition to the early titles, I've now read the Zuckerman books, and the Kepesh books and something that has struck me is how unapologetically Roth declares his literary ambitions. Giants are name-dropped unselfconsciously in a way that I suspect most contemporary novelists would avoid. And his books are often as much about writing and the writer's lot – the burdens of creativity, the strange duplicity of every moment in an artist's life (is this experience or is this material?) – as they are of anything, including the Jewish American experience. 

Additional impressions: It's mildly unnerving how accomplished his debut Goodbye, Columbus is, all the more so when compared against most of today's debuts. Similarly, it's weirdly reassuring when he drops a real clunker, like this one from The Anatomy Lesson: "... Milton Appel had unleashed an attack on Zuckerman's career that made Macduff's assault on Macbeth look almost lackadaisical." And for sustained awfulness, one can't ask for much more than Our Gang, his satirical misfire which follows the travails of "Trick E. Dixon" and his cabinet. 

Of particular interest to me is the question of "indignation" itself. The word appears in Portnoy, as he recalls a Chinese marching song learned in school:

And then my favorite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: "In-dig-na-tion fills the hearts of all of our coun-try-men! A-rise!  A-rise!  A-RISE!"

Thinking about it, there's really a strain of indignation burning through so much of Roth's work; it seems to have transformed over time from the Indignation of the Outsider (the Jew among the Goyim) to the Indignation of One's Mortality (never handled better, I think, than in the magnificent Sabbath's Theater, which I am saving for the end). But there I go, seeking grand themes too early. I'm filing that one away, and the next step is to settle down with the new novel, before returning to the backlist. More to follow. Moving this Sunday.

(UPDATE: Since posting - and correcting, thanks to Richard Beck - this post, I've read enough of Indignation to find it refers to exactly the same song noted in Portnoy, in a nearly verbatim passage.)

NOTA BENE: THE BREAST

"I am a breast.  A phenomenon that has been variously described to me as "a massive hormonal influx," "an endocrinopathic catastrophe," and/or "a hermaphroditic explosion of chromosomes" took place within my body between midnight and four A.M. on February 18, 1971, and converted me into a mammary gland disconnected from any human form, a mammary glad such as could only appear, one would have thought, in a dream or a Dali painting.  They tell me that I am now an organism with the general shape of a football, or a dirigible; I am said to be of a spongy consistency, weighing in at one hundred and fifty-five pounds (formerly I was one hundred and sixty-two), and measuring, still, six feet in length.  Though I continue to retain, in damaged and "irregular" form, much of the cardiovascular and central nervous system, an excretory system described as "reduced and primitive" - tubes now help me to void - and a respiratory system that terminates just above my midsection in something resembling a navel with a flap, the basic architecture in which these human characteristics are disarranged and buried is that of the breast of the mammalian female."

- Philip Roth, The Breast

(Amusing note: When we recently traveled to Napa, our host for the overnighter was named Zuckerman.  A good omen.  First batch of Roth thoughts to follow soon.)

DEPT OF GREAT MINDS ETC.

Over at Tommywood, it turns out that Tom Teicholz has been watching all the movies based on Philip Roth novels.  Which is probably a more efficient, if less satisfying, way to spend the summer:

Watching [Portnoy] today, it struck me as yes, failed, but better than its reputation. Lehman chose to take what was in essence a comic monologue and set it as both a story of a love affair and of one man's attempt to heal himself via analysis of that relationship and his prior ones. At the same time, Lehman attempted to show the freedom that the sexual revolution inspired and the consequences of that freedom. Karen Black gives a very strong performance as "the monkey," and Richard Benjamin delivers a more nuanced performance than he gave in "Goodbye, Columbus."

TEV GIVEAWAY: A WHOLE LOTTA ROTH

As promised Wednesday, we're going to kick off The Summer of Roth with a different kind of giveaway.  We recently bought a lot of 15 Roth novels, mostly older editions of titles we didn't have.  But there were a few duplicates in the lot, so we're offering the titles pictured below:  Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer and Operation Shylock.  All in original hardcover with tattered dust jackets.  Plus we're throwing in the latest Library of America collection of Roth called "Novels and Other Narratives: 1986-1991," which includes the remarkable The Counterlife, as well as The Facts, Deception and the NBCC Award winning Patrimony. 

Sure, they're a bit moth-eaten but there's nothing quite like the cachet of having hard covers on your shelf right?  We all know the song, so sing along: Drop us an email, subject line "ROTH MY WORLD" and please include your full mailing address.  If you've won during the last six months, you'll need to sit this one out.  We'll take your entries until 8 p.m. PST and the Random Number Generator swings into swift and merciless action.  Until then!

UPDATE: John Hood of Miami, FL - who apparently lost his whole library years ago - wins this week.  And we're throwing in a copy of The Plot Against America as a bonus.  Who says the RNG doesn't like a happy ending?  (Honorable mention in the gaming-the-RNG department goes to the reader who advised us that "I am so Roth-crazed (or so warped from years of graduate school) that I quote Roth in my dissertation about Primitive Baptists in the pre-Civil War South. Surely that deserves some kind of recognition."  It does, indeed ... Send us the quote and we'll dig up a special Roth prize.)