Chance plays as big a role in my reading decisions as anything else. I recently went to the library with the explicit intention to check out The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth. And, while sifting through the "FIC-ROT" section, I of course came across a trove of Philip Roth books. I like Roth, and had read good things about Nemesis, so I snaffled that book as well in my most recent visit.
I can hardly claim to be a Roth expert, having only read perhaps a half-dozen entries from his voluminous output, but I have read enough to be really impressed at the variety of his writing. Which I suppose shouldn't be surprising... it would probably be more shocking if a non-genre writer managed to keep doing the same thing for more than fifty years without changing his or her style. Still, I'm regularly impressed at just how assuredly and confidently he can write any of these stories, making it feel as though he's been practicing that particular style for decades.
Nemesis is one of his latest books, but if I didn't know that, I might think it was one of his first. The story structure is more straightforward than in books like The Counterlife, and the writing is fairly direct, with less of the intricacy I remember from entries like American Pastoral. Of course, simpler doesn't mean worse, and while there are only a few themes in this book they are very powerfully explored. I'm left with a few very strong, gripping images, rather than the sometimes-bewildering array of memories after reading Roth's more complex stories.
In some ways, this book reminds me a little of The Plot Against America: the circa-WWII setting, with a focus on New Jersey, along with a highly readable and gripping prose style. Nemesis is much less fantastic, though, and deals with an actual historical moment rather than the counter-factual history of TPAA. Nemesis also feels like a more human story: it's very focused on a small collection of characters, particularly the protagonist, while TPAA had more fun spinning out the plot, and tended to use characters as a means towards that end.
MINI SPOILERS
Nemesis focuses on Bucky Cantor, who I think is one of the most likeable characters who I've recently encountered. Like many of Roth's characters, Bucky is Jewish, living in the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic in Newark. It's the summer of 1944, at the height of American involvement in WWII. All of Bucky's friends have gone to war; he tried to enlist, but was rejected as a 4F due to his poor eyesight and short stature. Despite that, though, Bucky is a powerful and vigorous young man, who has been physically training and excelling at sports for practically his entire life. He's a hero to the young Jewish kids of the neighborhood, where he supervises the playground in the summer. He's about the most perfect role model you could imagine: he's patient with the unskilled kids, encourages their progress, sets good examples of sportsmanship, and protects them against threats both on and off the field.
It's a huge testament to Roth's writing prowess that this might be the first time in my life that I've been able to think about organized sports as a positive thing. My attitude towards gym class while growing up varied between hatred and resentment; it seemed frustrating, pointless, and demoralizing. (It wasn't until I became an adult that I realized that I actually enjoy physical activity, just not the competitive nature of organized sports.) Bucky, though, is a very eloquent champion of the virtues of sports and physical fitness, and ties it to these young boys' self-esteem and role as citizens. Many people in this neighborhood were just one generation removed from the ghettos of Europe, and excelling in sports isn't just a means to assimilation, but also a way to give oneself the confidence to protect oneself against anti-semitism.
Bucky isn't the most bookish guy, but he's also hardly a dumb jock: he was the first member of his family to graduate from college, thanks in part to the amazing emotional support of his grandmother and grandfather, and he takes his mission as a caregiver to children very seriously. He still feels a lot of guilt over "missing" the war in Europe, but that just increases his already-substantial sense of purpose and responsibility to his community.
Bucky was already admired, but becomes a minor hero when a polio epidemic strikes. I have to admit that, from my sheltered perspective in 21st-century America, I had only a vague notion of exactly what polio is. All I knew was that FDR got it, and it made his legs weak, and it was somehow connected to the iron lung. I succeeded in the difficult task of preventing myself from jumping on Wikipedia to research it, partly because I liked the idea of keeping myself in a mindset similar to that of the characters in this book. Polio is a mysterious disease, and while nobody in the novel is exactly sure what causes it or how it is spread, its effects are horrifying. It seems to particularly target young children and infants, much like a predator, killing many of them outright and leaving the survivors mangled, with twisted limbs.
Early on, Bucky's virile protection of the playground seems to provide some sort of protection over Weequahic as a whole. While most of Newark has been infected, this community remains safe. That begins to change, though, and Bucky feels partly responsible when children from his playground are the first to be infested and die.
Of course, people are worried by this, and the increasingly fraught nerves as the toll climbs higher threaten to transform into a panic. I was a little reminded of the antisemitic pogrom in The Plot Against America, but rather than false accusations being levied against a particular target, here there's a very particular harm but no certainty about the culprit. The reasonable pillars of the community seek to comfort people and keep them calm, but even they have to admit that they aren't sure what specifically can be done to halt the disease's spread. They offer their best possible advice: wash your hands, keep your home clean, avoid contact with the sick, try to get fresh air, and so on. But, of course, many of those who die seemed to have followed all of this advice, while others who flout it remain unscathed.
In light of all this, it's natural that people in general (and Bucky in particular) begin to think dark thoughts about the fairness of life and the universe. This is rather cliche territory, but Roth explores it with fresh urgency: how can one believe in a loving and all-powerful God who allows innocent children to be killed? Why should we give God credit for prayers that are answered, and not ascribe blame for those that are ignored?
It might be worth pointing out here that, as usual, Roth makes good use of the separation between author, narrator, and protagonist. I was reminded a little of American Pastoral's structure: in that book, it was easy to think that we were reading a third-person attached narrator of a story about The Swede. However, what we were actually reading was Nathan Zuckerman's embellishment of a story he'd heard about The Swede; Zuckerman only appears briefly on page near the start of that novel, but every word we read was written by him (as written by Roth). Similarly, Nemesis seems to be entirely about Bucky, but the actual narrator is one of the kids from the playground. It's a little surprising to hear him chime up at one point in the book - basically just saying, "Oh, yeah, that kid who got polio was me" - and then he appears for a bit longer near the end, describing how he was reunited with Bucky decades later and learned his story.
All that to say, while the novel tackles some heavy stuff, it doesn't really feel like a polemic. We get Bucky's perspective of a cruel and malicious God, which is viewed with skepticism by the atheistic narrator, all of which is being presented to us by Roth. The mediation isn't nearly as important here as it is in some of Roth's other books, but it's still interesting and effective.
MEGA SPOILERS
Nemesis feels unusually propulsive, and late in the book, one bombshell drops after another. Bucky surprises us and himself when he agrees to abandon his playground duties and retreat to the safer environments of a remote summer camp. That was very narratively surprising, since it seemed to violate the heroic structure of the story so far. The book reaches a dark climax when polio cases begin to appear in the camp as well, and reaches its apex/nadir when Bucky himself is diagnosed with polio, confirming his horrible suspicions that, rather than being the guardian of the children, he was in fact their destroyer.
The actual truth of this belief is left open to questioning, as the narrator does at some length. For whatever it might be worth, I'm inclined to agree with him. I could believe that Bucky could be an asymptomatic carrier, who ignorantly infected his charges. However, given that he actually starts showing symptoms several days after the counselor does, I don't think it's possible that he could have first started carrying it way back before all the kids were infected. The timelines just don't seem to add up. (And, now that I've finished the book and finally rushed to read all about polio on Wikipedia, I feel vindicated in that decision).
That said, though, even if I don't believe that Bucky was responsible, I certainly can believe that he felt responsible. For so much of the book he felt like he was abandoning his moral obligations - to serve in the war effort, to stand by his post at the playground - even though reasonable people would certainly say that he was hopeless to prevent the first case and making a perfectly defensible choice in the second case. That sense of guilt easily transmutes into a sense of failure, and a mind like Bucky's will seize on something tangible to anchor that failure to.
This book ended up being far more depressing than I had initially thought. Rather than the tale of a solid, reliable young man who stood up for what he believed in and helped people survive the emotional trauma of a horrific plague, it became a tragedy, the tale of a man deserting his post and losing all happiness from his life. For all the sadness, though, it's still a beautifully written story, if not one I see myself running back to any time soon.
END SPOILERS
Nemesis might be the most accessible Roth I've read yet, alongside The Plot Against America. It's simple but powerful, not unlike its protagonist. As with many Roth tales, it's rooted in a very specific time, place, and community, but that same specificity allows it to address some universal ideas in a very engaging way. While I can't say this is the most enjoyable Roth story I've read, it's very well-crafted and another fine example of his vast range.
Showing posts with label philip roth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philip roth. Show all posts
Friday, November 22, 2013
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Counterattack
"The Counterlife" is an awesome name for a great book. It continues my erratic wandering through Philip Roth's canon. It hasn't exactly been reverse-chronological, though my overall direction has, of necessity, been backwards. I started with "American Pastoral" in college, which remains not only my favorite Roth book but probably one of my favorite books, period. Since then I've gone through "I Married a Communist", "The Plot Against America," and now, The Counterlife.
Oh, yeah, before I get into Counterlife, I should report briefly on the Roth book that I DIDN'T read. At one point I decided to start reading Roth in chronological order. Not exhaustively, but I wanted to pick, say, his Zuckerman books, and actually read them in the order they were published. I decided to start with his first famous book, "Portnoy's Complaint." Well. I lasted for all of, um, maybe twenty pages, before I gave up and returned the book to the library. I tend not to think of myself as much of a prude, but that book really managed to get under my skin. I think it has much more to do with Roth's brilliant/terrifyingly-gripping use of language, and the insistent voice that the first-person narrator uses, which makes it seem much filthier than it actually is. I mean, I read all of Murakami's books, which have WAY more disturbing sex scenes, but those are conveyed in such a detached, dreamlike fashion that it's easy for me to ignore them. It was impossible for me to ignore Portnoy, and I couldn't imagine putting up with that throughout the whole book, so I gave up. I dunno… I may try again at some point, when I'm more worldly-wise and cynical.
Anyways, the reason I think of this now is that The Counterlife is one of the Zuckerman novels, and it feels much more like a "real" Zuckerman novel to me than the others I've read have. Nathaniel Zuckerman is Roth's alter-ego, a Jewish-American novelist from New Jersey who narrates and appears in many of his books. American Pastoral was technically a Zuckerman novel, but Nathan was hardly in it; he appears in the early pages, describing his childhood with the Swede, and then simply narrates the remainder of the story, disappearing from the action entirely. The Counterlife, in comparison, is almost entirely about Zuckerman. Usually he's on the page, and when he isn't the characters are usually thinking about him. Roth has a great sense of humor about this situation, and he plays around a lot with the author-as-character idea, and much of the book is about writing fiction and fiction's relationship to real life. The in-book equivalent of Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" is Zuckerman's fictional novel "Carnovsky", which does a great job of evoking the same feel as the real book's title. As far as I can tell, Carnovsky's role in Zuckerman's universe is very similar to Portnoy's in ours: it's a shocking, filthy, widely respected book that catapulted its author into literary stardom, and secured him a position as a professional writer. Given this equivalent, it's also tempting and easy to imagine that the other effects of Carnovsky also occurred for Portnoy's Complaint. Zuckerman wrote Carnovsky roughly based on his own childhood; the family in that book is recognizable as his own real-life family, and many (but not all) incidents in that book "really happened." This causes a large rift between Nathan and the other Zuckermans: his parents feel betrayed, and die afterwards of illness without ever having been reconciled. Zuckerman's brother, Henry, also becomes estranged, and they go for many years without speaking to one another. Henry is upset at the way Nathan has betrayed their family's privacy, but he's almost equally as upset that Nathan didn't even faithfully betray it. Nathan uses his family as characters, twisting their actions, putting words in their mouths, in order to serve his literary purposes. This makes people assume that the fictional Carnovsky family's traits are shared by the "real" Zuckerman family, making them seem grotesque.
Anyways… that's almost just background for this book. The plot itself is pretty intriguing, but I should address that under the heading of
MINI SPOILERS
The plot of the story: Two grown brothers, who have spent years without speaking to one another, re-enter a fraught relationship. One of the brothers has developed a heart ailment; this is easily treatable by drugs, but a side-effect of the drug leaves him impotent and unable to please his lover. He becomes obsessed with the idea of undergoing a slightly risky surgical procedure to fix his heart; everyone, including his lover, opposes this idea, but he decides to go through with it, and something drastic happens after the surgery.
That's the plot. What's cool, though, is that the details are changed and repeated throughout the story. At first, Henry is the brother with the heart problem, and he dies after the operation. Then, he survives the operation, but becomes extremely depressed, and leaves his wife and lover behind when he travels to Israel to join a militant Jewish settlement. In some of these stories, Nathan lives nearby in New York; in others, he lives in England with an English wife. Then, in the later stories, Nathan is the one suffering from impotence and contemplating surgery. Nathan dies, but leaves behind stories in which he survives, and which imagine his future life with his new wife.
It took a while for me to get what was happening. There are only… I think five named chapters in the whole book, and they often go for a long time between section breaks. Sometimes a section break continues the story, sometimes it switches to a parallel track, and sometimes it takes you into another universe. Anyways, I was a bit confused after the part that ended with Henry's funeral and Nathan's conversation with Carol, when the next part began with Henry having fled to Israel. I had initially thought that Roth was opening up the chronology of the story: where we, as readers, had assumed that the funeral took place very shortly after the surgery, we were now reading about a long coda within Henry's life, between his choice and his death. That would have been a cool approach, and I think it sort of works - it's harder to buy Nathan's changes in situation, but you can imagine the people at the funeral being upset about Henry's operation, not because (as we assume) he dies on the table, but because it snaps something in his mind that makes him go on a years-long jag that ends in his death.
Anyways… that's not what happens, which I eventually figured out. We keep getting multiple perspectives and multiple realities; in one really nice bit, there's a long and surprisingly intense account of Nathan's flight from Tel Aviv airport back to London, where a would-be hijacker tries to enlist him in his plot and they both are roughly interrogated; later, we learn that the flight back to London was uneventful, and Nathan had kept busy by writing the story we just read.
I love the title "The Counterlife," and I love how Roth uses that as his operating framework for the novel. A counterlife is still your life, but a fundamentally differently imagined one: a life where you married someone else, where you made a different crucial decision, where you switched roles with someone else. Each individual life is very richly explored and detailed, and whenever we switch to a new counterlife, we come into the new life with an accumulated understanding of the person and their situation which makes the story even richer.
The book gets extremely "meta" towards the end. After Nathan dies, Henry goes through his papers, where he discovers drafts of the book Nathan has been working on. That book is the one we've been reading: it starts with Basel, which is about Henry's affairs with Wendy (his dental assistant) and other women, and his relationship with Carol and his drive to have the surgery. Within "The Counterlife," Henry is incensed; Nathan has taken HIS problem of impotence and projected it onto Henry, reversing their positions. Henry's greatest complaint, though, is fundamental to Nathan's provision: he's an author. Henry's interior monologue seethes and rages at the way Nathan always had to be on top, and wasn't just content with being the best, but felt the need to control others, putting words into their mouths and thoughts in their head inside his books. It's a view of author-as-tyrannical-God that's pretty fascinating.
Once this perspective gets opened up, Roth continues running with this theme through the remainder of the book. In the next section, which picks up the previous storyline by having Nathan return from Israel and reunite with his (fourth) wife, Maria, we learn that Nathan has died, and Maria describes her own experience of going through Nathan's papers; it's yet another counterlife, Maria and Henry, who never "met" in any of these worlds but whose roles reflect one another. Maria also comments on the various stories that we've already read; intriguingly, she also reacts to a story that we haven't yet read, entitled "Christendom," describing which parts of this story were accurate, which were embellished, and how reading that story makes her feel about her relationship with Nathan. "Christendom" ends up being the final chapter in "The Counterlife," and it's a cool shift to now be reading a story after hearing an outsider's gloss, rather than matching a gloss against a story we've already read. "Christendom" ends up being the trickiest and most meta of the stories. In "The Counterlife," none of the stories are finally "real", but form a sort of Ouroboros, each springing from some other story, each writing another story. Characters throughout this book have worried about BEING characters within Nathan's stories, and it seems as though Maria may have suffered this fate. She ultimately rebels against it (and Roth has a nice hat-tip to the literary tradition of characters turning against authors - I thought of Muriel Spark here, though I'm sure there are other examples), leaving Nathan the final task of arguing with a woman who may be his creation, may be his salvation, may be more real than him.
A few other thoughts:
Wow, Roth (and I suppose Nathan) is a master of honoring individuals' perspectives. There aren't straw men anywhere in his book, which is filled with passionate debate between opinionated individuals. He lets a character go on for pages and pages, building a highly persuasive argument, to the point where you're convinced that this is what Roth intends us to believe; then he lets Nathan or someone else respond, just as eloquently and as long. The authorial weight ends up supporting Nathan's perspectives, but by the end of the book I felt like this was Nathan's authorial weight, not Roth's. The book seems to support the idea that Nathan is kind of a bully, who gets to give himself the final word, even if along the way he tries to craft his opponents as carefully and widely as possible.
To give one specific example: during Nathan's trip to Israel, Mordecai Lippman comes across as a villain, and one of the biggest examples of this is his sneering disdain for Western niceties such as treaties and human rights. To Lippman, all that matters is strength, force, the ability of one group to exert their desires over another group. To Nathan, this is anathema, and one of the most morally dangerous aspects of Henry's association with the group. Much later on, the last few pages of the book deal with the future of Nathan's and Maria's potential, presumed son. Nathan has an interior, and then an exterior, diatribe against the christening of his son; he's horrified at the thought of doing it, and calls out and then browbeats Maria into acknowledging that this superstitious, religious ritual has no place on their son. Then, in the next stage, Maria responds with her own nascent fear: that Nathan will insist on circumcision for their son. Now, from a purely humanistic, secular, disinterested standpoint, there is almost no difference between christening and circumcision. If anything, as Maria gently notes, circumcision is the worse of the two: it's a traumatic pain inflicted on a young child. Nathan isn't religious, so will he be satisfied to spare his child this ritual? The book's last page has Nathan's response: no, absolutely not; as much as he wants Maria back, he will insist on their child being circumcised. He can't even muster a very persuasive argument, arguing that the pain is itself important, a crucial waking-up of the child to the cruelties of the world and the necessity of retreating into your own people-group. Nathan the author is explicitly giving himself the last word in the novel; however, I think that Roth the author expects us to draw the parallel between Nathan and Lippman. Nathan, for all his sophistication, intelligence, and charm, is as much of a bully as Lippman is, and has no more moral justification for what he does. He wants his family's traditions to continue, and not those of his wife's family, because… well, because he's more powerful (richer, older, smarter), and can get away with it.
As with… well, pretty much all Roth books that I've read, Jewishness in general and the American-Jewish identity in particular are important themes to the book. I think it's more central here than anything else I've read; not necessarily throughout the whole book, but certainly the middle chapters in Israel are almost entirely preoccupied with these questions of race, culture, identity, and politics; and even the sections that aren't explicitly about Jewish identity are still mostly about Nathan, and as we learn throughout the book, Nathan has been certainly shaped by his experiences. Most of the book paints a positive picture of American assimilation and the opportunities for Jewish people in this country, which has largely escaped the deeply ingrained anti-semitism of Europe. As Nathan points out towards the end, though, he tends to be in a contrary position no matter where he goes: in Israel, surrounded by Jews, he defends the goyim and downplays the importance of Jewish identity; in England, surrounded by bigots, he passionately argues for a visible and strong Jewish identity. I'm not sure exactly what Roth's main point is, if he has one, but it's a very powerful one. Not for the first time, I find myself kind of wishing that I knew what it felt like to grow up Jewish in a majority-Christian culture; I'm guessing that someone with that background would have a more deeply emotional connection with the themes that Roth likes to use in his books.
END SPOILERS
I have absolutely no regrets about reading American Pastoral, and think it's still my favorite, but I do think that The Counterlife is at LEAST as tempting of a book to use in a college-level English Lit class. There are just so many directions you can go with it, it's such a great (and un-annoying) example of post-modernist literature, so many various themes (political, cultural, personal, relational, familial) that could be plumbed for paper topics… not to mention that it's a fairly easy read (not too light, but not needlessly ornate either), sectioned well to fit into a syllabus. It isn't something like Ulsysses, which I don't think I could have read outside of a class, but I think this good book could get even better with the guidance and discussion of a focused class.
Hmmm, that's a fun experiment… in the unbelievably tiny chance that I ever do teach a college English lit class, what would I want to teach in it? That might be a good topic for a future blog post!
Oh, yeah, before I get into Counterlife, I should report briefly on the Roth book that I DIDN'T read. At one point I decided to start reading Roth in chronological order. Not exhaustively, but I wanted to pick, say, his Zuckerman books, and actually read them in the order they were published. I decided to start with his first famous book, "Portnoy's Complaint." Well. I lasted for all of, um, maybe twenty pages, before I gave up and returned the book to the library. I tend not to think of myself as much of a prude, but that book really managed to get under my skin. I think it has much more to do with Roth's brilliant/terrifyingly-gripping use of language, and the insistent voice that the first-person narrator uses, which makes it seem much filthier than it actually is. I mean, I read all of Murakami's books, which have WAY more disturbing sex scenes, but those are conveyed in such a detached, dreamlike fashion that it's easy for me to ignore them. It was impossible for me to ignore Portnoy, and I couldn't imagine putting up with that throughout the whole book, so I gave up. I dunno… I may try again at some point, when I'm more worldly-wise and cynical.
Anyways, the reason I think of this now is that The Counterlife is one of the Zuckerman novels, and it feels much more like a "real" Zuckerman novel to me than the others I've read have. Nathaniel Zuckerman is Roth's alter-ego, a Jewish-American novelist from New Jersey who narrates and appears in many of his books. American Pastoral was technically a Zuckerman novel, but Nathan was hardly in it; he appears in the early pages, describing his childhood with the Swede, and then simply narrates the remainder of the story, disappearing from the action entirely. The Counterlife, in comparison, is almost entirely about Zuckerman. Usually he's on the page, and when he isn't the characters are usually thinking about him. Roth has a great sense of humor about this situation, and he plays around a lot with the author-as-character idea, and much of the book is about writing fiction and fiction's relationship to real life. The in-book equivalent of Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" is Zuckerman's fictional novel "Carnovsky", which does a great job of evoking the same feel as the real book's title. As far as I can tell, Carnovsky's role in Zuckerman's universe is very similar to Portnoy's in ours: it's a shocking, filthy, widely respected book that catapulted its author into literary stardom, and secured him a position as a professional writer. Given this equivalent, it's also tempting and easy to imagine that the other effects of Carnovsky also occurred for Portnoy's Complaint. Zuckerman wrote Carnovsky roughly based on his own childhood; the family in that book is recognizable as his own real-life family, and many (but not all) incidents in that book "really happened." This causes a large rift between Nathan and the other Zuckermans: his parents feel betrayed, and die afterwards of illness without ever having been reconciled. Zuckerman's brother, Henry, also becomes estranged, and they go for many years without speaking to one another. Henry is upset at the way Nathan has betrayed their family's privacy, but he's almost equally as upset that Nathan didn't even faithfully betray it. Nathan uses his family as characters, twisting their actions, putting words in their mouths, in order to serve his literary purposes. This makes people assume that the fictional Carnovsky family's traits are shared by the "real" Zuckerman family, making them seem grotesque.
Anyways… that's almost just background for this book. The plot itself is pretty intriguing, but I should address that under the heading of
MINI SPOILERS
The plot of the story: Two grown brothers, who have spent years without speaking to one another, re-enter a fraught relationship. One of the brothers has developed a heart ailment; this is easily treatable by drugs, but a side-effect of the drug leaves him impotent and unable to please his lover. He becomes obsessed with the idea of undergoing a slightly risky surgical procedure to fix his heart; everyone, including his lover, opposes this idea, but he decides to go through with it, and something drastic happens after the surgery.
That's the plot. What's cool, though, is that the details are changed and repeated throughout the story. At first, Henry is the brother with the heart problem, and he dies after the operation. Then, he survives the operation, but becomes extremely depressed, and leaves his wife and lover behind when he travels to Israel to join a militant Jewish settlement. In some of these stories, Nathan lives nearby in New York; in others, he lives in England with an English wife. Then, in the later stories, Nathan is the one suffering from impotence and contemplating surgery. Nathan dies, but leaves behind stories in which he survives, and which imagine his future life with his new wife.
It took a while for me to get what was happening. There are only… I think five named chapters in the whole book, and they often go for a long time between section breaks. Sometimes a section break continues the story, sometimes it switches to a parallel track, and sometimes it takes you into another universe. Anyways, I was a bit confused after the part that ended with Henry's funeral and Nathan's conversation with Carol, when the next part began with Henry having fled to Israel. I had initially thought that Roth was opening up the chronology of the story: where we, as readers, had assumed that the funeral took place very shortly after the surgery, we were now reading about a long coda within Henry's life, between his choice and his death. That would have been a cool approach, and I think it sort of works - it's harder to buy Nathan's changes in situation, but you can imagine the people at the funeral being upset about Henry's operation, not because (as we assume) he dies on the table, but because it snaps something in his mind that makes him go on a years-long jag that ends in his death.
Anyways… that's not what happens, which I eventually figured out. We keep getting multiple perspectives and multiple realities; in one really nice bit, there's a long and surprisingly intense account of Nathan's flight from Tel Aviv airport back to London, where a would-be hijacker tries to enlist him in his plot and they both are roughly interrogated; later, we learn that the flight back to London was uneventful, and Nathan had kept busy by writing the story we just read.
I love the title "The Counterlife," and I love how Roth uses that as his operating framework for the novel. A counterlife is still your life, but a fundamentally differently imagined one: a life where you married someone else, where you made a different crucial decision, where you switched roles with someone else. Each individual life is very richly explored and detailed, and whenever we switch to a new counterlife, we come into the new life with an accumulated understanding of the person and their situation which makes the story even richer.
The book gets extremely "meta" towards the end. After Nathan dies, Henry goes through his papers, where he discovers drafts of the book Nathan has been working on. That book is the one we've been reading: it starts with Basel, which is about Henry's affairs with Wendy (his dental assistant) and other women, and his relationship with Carol and his drive to have the surgery. Within "The Counterlife," Henry is incensed; Nathan has taken HIS problem of impotence and projected it onto Henry, reversing their positions. Henry's greatest complaint, though, is fundamental to Nathan's provision: he's an author. Henry's interior monologue seethes and rages at the way Nathan always had to be on top, and wasn't just content with being the best, but felt the need to control others, putting words into their mouths and thoughts in their head inside his books. It's a view of author-as-tyrannical-God that's pretty fascinating.
Once this perspective gets opened up, Roth continues running with this theme through the remainder of the book. In the next section, which picks up the previous storyline by having Nathan return from Israel and reunite with his (fourth) wife, Maria, we learn that Nathan has died, and Maria describes her own experience of going through Nathan's papers; it's yet another counterlife, Maria and Henry, who never "met" in any of these worlds but whose roles reflect one another. Maria also comments on the various stories that we've already read; intriguingly, she also reacts to a story that we haven't yet read, entitled "Christendom," describing which parts of this story were accurate, which were embellished, and how reading that story makes her feel about her relationship with Nathan. "Christendom" ends up being the final chapter in "The Counterlife," and it's a cool shift to now be reading a story after hearing an outsider's gloss, rather than matching a gloss against a story we've already read. "Christendom" ends up being the trickiest and most meta of the stories. In "The Counterlife," none of the stories are finally "real", but form a sort of Ouroboros, each springing from some other story, each writing another story. Characters throughout this book have worried about BEING characters within Nathan's stories, and it seems as though Maria may have suffered this fate. She ultimately rebels against it (and Roth has a nice hat-tip to the literary tradition of characters turning against authors - I thought of Muriel Spark here, though I'm sure there are other examples), leaving Nathan the final task of arguing with a woman who may be his creation, may be his salvation, may be more real than him.
A few other thoughts:
Wow, Roth (and I suppose Nathan) is a master of honoring individuals' perspectives. There aren't straw men anywhere in his book, which is filled with passionate debate between opinionated individuals. He lets a character go on for pages and pages, building a highly persuasive argument, to the point where you're convinced that this is what Roth intends us to believe; then he lets Nathan or someone else respond, just as eloquently and as long. The authorial weight ends up supporting Nathan's perspectives, but by the end of the book I felt like this was Nathan's authorial weight, not Roth's. The book seems to support the idea that Nathan is kind of a bully, who gets to give himself the final word, even if along the way he tries to craft his opponents as carefully and widely as possible.
To give one specific example: during Nathan's trip to Israel, Mordecai Lippman comes across as a villain, and one of the biggest examples of this is his sneering disdain for Western niceties such as treaties and human rights. To Lippman, all that matters is strength, force, the ability of one group to exert their desires over another group. To Nathan, this is anathema, and one of the most morally dangerous aspects of Henry's association with the group. Much later on, the last few pages of the book deal with the future of Nathan's and Maria's potential, presumed son. Nathan has an interior, and then an exterior, diatribe against the christening of his son; he's horrified at the thought of doing it, and calls out and then browbeats Maria into acknowledging that this superstitious, religious ritual has no place on their son. Then, in the next stage, Maria responds with her own nascent fear: that Nathan will insist on circumcision for their son. Now, from a purely humanistic, secular, disinterested standpoint, there is almost no difference between christening and circumcision. If anything, as Maria gently notes, circumcision is the worse of the two: it's a traumatic pain inflicted on a young child. Nathan isn't religious, so will he be satisfied to spare his child this ritual? The book's last page has Nathan's response: no, absolutely not; as much as he wants Maria back, he will insist on their child being circumcised. He can't even muster a very persuasive argument, arguing that the pain is itself important, a crucial waking-up of the child to the cruelties of the world and the necessity of retreating into your own people-group. Nathan the author is explicitly giving himself the last word in the novel; however, I think that Roth the author expects us to draw the parallel between Nathan and Lippman. Nathan, for all his sophistication, intelligence, and charm, is as much of a bully as Lippman is, and has no more moral justification for what he does. He wants his family's traditions to continue, and not those of his wife's family, because… well, because he's more powerful (richer, older, smarter), and can get away with it.
As with… well, pretty much all Roth books that I've read, Jewishness in general and the American-Jewish identity in particular are important themes to the book. I think it's more central here than anything else I've read; not necessarily throughout the whole book, but certainly the middle chapters in Israel are almost entirely preoccupied with these questions of race, culture, identity, and politics; and even the sections that aren't explicitly about Jewish identity are still mostly about Nathan, and as we learn throughout the book, Nathan has been certainly shaped by his experiences. Most of the book paints a positive picture of American assimilation and the opportunities for Jewish people in this country, which has largely escaped the deeply ingrained anti-semitism of Europe. As Nathan points out towards the end, though, he tends to be in a contrary position no matter where he goes: in Israel, surrounded by Jews, he defends the goyim and downplays the importance of Jewish identity; in England, surrounded by bigots, he passionately argues for a visible and strong Jewish identity. I'm not sure exactly what Roth's main point is, if he has one, but it's a very powerful one. Not for the first time, I find myself kind of wishing that I knew what it felt like to grow up Jewish in a majority-Christian culture; I'm guessing that someone with that background would have a more deeply emotional connection with the themes that Roth likes to use in his books.
END SPOILERS
I have absolutely no regrets about reading American Pastoral, and think it's still my favorite, but I do think that The Counterlife is at LEAST as tempting of a book to use in a college-level English Lit class. There are just so many directions you can go with it, it's such a great (and un-annoying) example of post-modernist literature, so many various themes (political, cultural, personal, relational, familial) that could be plumbed for paper topics… not to mention that it's a fairly easy read (not too light, but not needlessly ornate either), sectioned well to fit into a syllabus. It isn't something like Ulsysses, which I don't think I could have read outside of a class, but I think this good book could get even better with the guidance and discussion of a focused class.
Hmmm, that's a fun experiment… in the unbelievably tiny chance that I ever do teach a college English lit class, what would I want to teach in it? That might be a good topic for a future blog post!
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War
I'm in awe of Philip Roth. I can't truthfully say that he's my favorite American author, but he may be the most talented living American author who I've read. He has such a quiet yet thorough command of the language, the ability to create vividly realistic scenarios with a few murmured words.
I read his "American Pastoral" in college, and in my mind, that's one of the few books in the running for the Great American Novel. I tend to think of the GAN as being the book that captures the transitory essence of living in America. The most famous example is probably The Great Gatsby, which, in a surprisingly brief length, managed to convey the most crucial features of the American character: our drive for self-improvement, our eagerness to impress, our resilience and capacity for re-invention, the way we tell stories about ourselves and start to believe them. American Pastoral is a longer book, and you could say that it covers an even greater range: it focuses on family, the core building block of American society, and all that flows from it: generation gaps, the way children reject the teachings of their parents, the mixture of comfort and anxiety that comes from being closely bound with others' lives. It also gives a frank (and never boring) look into the role of business in America: how we shape our businesses and derive pride from them, and also how we fight against them. It shows the poisonous impact of politics on personal relationships, and the powerful effect religion (particularly religious conversion) can exert on relationships. I'm not saying that AP is BETTER than GG... but it's darn good, and it paints a very broad canvas.
My latest Roth book, "The Plot Against America," doesn't shoot for another home-run like AP, but it manages to keep exploring some of Roth's same concerns while operating in a very different mode. AP was nominally one of the "Zuckerman" novels, a loosely connected fictional world created by Roth that include Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish character and often narrator. TPAA isn't a Zuckerman novel; instead, it's set in an alternate history (!) and features a young narrator named "Philip Roth".
MINI SPOILERS
Alternate history novels seem like genre fiction, but this is anything but. TPAA does get a lot of great mileage out of its historical conceit, but as is always the case with the Roth novels I've read, the core of the novel doesn't come from the plot; instead, it comes from the relationships between its characters and the thoughts of its protagonists. (Think of a highly readable version of "Ulysses" and you have a great idea of what to expect: humanism, compassion, sorrow.)
That said, I'm a sucker for genre fiction, and the alternate history aspect was one of my favorite parts of the book. The timeline diverges at the 1940 Republican convention: instead of Wendell Wilkie being nominated in the fifth ballot, the convention stays deadlocked until after midnight, when Charles Lindbergh (in the novel as in real life, an isolationist anti-Semite) makes a dramatic entrance and wins the nomination by acclimation. He carries out a maverick campaign, flying to states throughout the country and driving home a single-issue campaign theme: "Vote for Lindbergh or vote for the war." He defeats FDR, then withdraws American support for the British, signs a treaty with the Germans and Japanese recognizing their respective rights to Europe and the Pacific (in the latter case protecting existing US island possessions), and starts rolling back New Deal programs and replacing them with proto-fascist anti-Jewish policies.
It's all rather nightmarish, and quite gripping. I think we all like to tell ourselves "It couldn't happen here" when we hear about genocides, pogroms, and martial law. Still, in any society there will be at least a small number of people who support hateful actions like those. We're fortunate in the US to have a government that (for all its faults) loudly preaches the religion of tolerance, and surely that helps keep our worst tendencies in check. But what if we suddenly woke up under a government that just as loudly proclaimed the necessity of separating undesirable elements? For our own protection, you understand?
That led to the other creepy aspect of the story. All the action takes place from about 1939-1942, narrated from some point past that (likely the late 1960s or early 1970s). Yet, I couldn't help continually thinking back to our own time. So much of that book's actions seemed to echo my own concerns from the time when it was published in 2004: a showy President who wore plainspun unsophistication as armor and spurned the advice of "intellectuals" and "experts"; a widespread cultural trend towards demonizing a subset of American citizens; the abrogation of civil liberties in the name of national emergency.
I think that's more me than Roth, though. The biggest difference is that Lindbergh was trying to keep America out of a war, while Bush was trying to push us into one. (Although, in the most chilling climax of the story, Acting President Wheeler comes within days of declaring war on Canada, in effect aligning America with the Axis powers.) Bush, for all his faults, never supported the xenophobia directed against Arab citizens, even though parts of the country were certainly ripe for such support. And the first term Bush presidency tackled civil liberties incrementally, not overreaching in one swoop like Wheeler does in the novel.
So, I think it would be a mistake to read this book as a kind of retro-historical-allegory of the first G W Bush term. Instead, it's a book that taps into a persistent concern that we should always have as a country: never getting too self-assured in our righteousness, and remaining aware that the price of liberty is constant vigilance. When we slip (as happens fictionally in the book, and as happened in the real world a decade ago), all of our traditions do virtually nothing to protect us. It's our actions now that will determine our future, not the two hundred plus years of democratic history.
As fascinating as all this is, again, it really isn't the main thrust of the book. Roth creates this rich background, then sets about his main concern, looking at how this stressful situation affects a single family, the Roth family, third-generation Jews living in a Newark suburb. The father and mother have created a safe mental space for their children, free from the persecution that they encountered in their own childhoods. That safety begins unraveling, even in small ways. The election of an anti-Semite emboldens ordinary citizens to disparage them during a trip to Washington, D.C., when otherwise they might have remained quiet (still racist, but only internally so). The Lindbergh administration starts a new program to disperse urban Jewish youth into the countryside, and the eldest son leaves; when he comes back, he is not only full of enthusiasm for the farm life, but full of disparagement for his own family, who he now derides as "You Jews."
That splintering of community is one of the most painful aspects of this book. Most of the Jewish people remain faithful to FDR and his liberal policies, but a voluble minority align themselves with Lindbergh. They denounce intervening in Hitler's policies, promote the breakup and dispersal of Jewish communities, and "kosher" Lindbergh to absolve middle-American Christians to vote for him with a clean conscience. This splintering tears apart families (well, the family we care about, the Roth family), and that small tragedy is the emotional centerpiece of the novel.
I'm not sure if Roth always write about Jewish people - but every one of his novels that I've read has featured them as the main characters. Earlier in this post I'd mentioned that Roth has written the Great American Novel. It might seem like it's hard to write the Great American Novel if your characters belong to a minority within America. I don't think that's true. This might sound a little cheesy, but "the outsider who lives among us" can see the majority more clearly than the majority themselves can. TPAA primarily focuses on the predominantly Jewish community around Newark, but when its gaze does expand elsewhere (to the Capital, to the heartland, to the broken country of West Virginia), it sees with a directness and clarity that I don't think you would get from someone who had grown up in that environment among those people. At the same time, the characters are so steeped in American culture that they can navigate all of its social situations and understand what's happening around them.
Back to the alternate history:
MEGA SPOILERS
One interesting aspect is how resilient Roth makes the timeline. Often, in alternate histories, you get small changes in the past that magnify into bigger and bigger changes the farther you get into the future. That could easily have happened in this book; I'm sure many other people have written other books where America's neutrality in WW2 leads to Axis domination over the world, or a world without Communism, or a world filled with Communists, or some other grand realignment. Instead, Roth gently sets the timeline back on track after just a few years' detour.
That isn't clear from the beginning. However, perhaps about two-thirds through the book, when Walter Winchell is assassinated, Roth makes the off-hand comment that this was the first time a candidate for the Presidency had been assassinated, and the next wouldn't come until Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 after winning the California primary. Immediately, the "future" starts to shift back into view. Germany can't have won (or at least not won a total war), or else there wouldn't have even been an election in 1968. Furthermore, if Bobby was running in 1968, it seems likely that Jack had won in 1960. So, just how do we get past Lindbergh?
The chaotic passage near the end of the book describes the madness that unfolds after the Winchell assassination late in 1942. Lindbergh mysteriously disappears when returning from one of his many impromptu flights out to the heartland. Vice-President Wheeler assumes power, and with astonishing swiftness sets a series of plots into motion. He blames the British and then the Canadians for Lindbergh's disappearance; fans the flames of anti-Semitic fury that Winchell had gleefully provoked, which in turn spurs pogroms throughout the Midwest; sends the National Guard in amongst the chaos to shoot and kill Jewish civilians; and then declares a state of national emergency, imposes martial law, imprisons his political opponents, and puts the country on a war footing... for war against undesirable elements within, and against Canada from without.
At this point, despite the promised glimpse of RFK, the situation seems utterly bleak. The day is saved when Anne Lindbergh, the wife and possible widow of the President, escapes from her confinement in Walter Reed's psychiatric ward, connects with sympathetic elements who give her access to a radio broadcast tower, and urges the armed forces and National Guard to reverse their actions, release the politicians they hold captive, remove Wheeler from office, and install the Secretary of State as the new acting President until elections can be held in November. They follow her lead, Wheeler is disgraced, and the day is saved. A "National Unity" ticket of FDR and Fiorello LaGuardia - and, seriously, how SWEET would that have been?! - sweeps the election.
After that, events unfurl as you would expect, just about one year later. Instead of Pearl Harbor occurring in December 1941, it happens in December 1942; the US declares war on Japan, then the Axis declares war on the US, and the war is truly joined. We don't get many details of the war - I imagine that it would be even harder than the real one, if Britain hadn't had access to our armaments and we hadn't ramped up war production - but it seems to follow more or less on track. Germany surrenders in 1945, a few weeks after FDR dies in office.
It is fun to imagine just what happened next. I kind of think that by then everything was back on track. In the real world, Roosevelt replaced the liberal and divisive Henry Wallace as the VP with the centrist and pragmatic Harry Truman; it seems likely that in the alternate world, he would have replaced the liberal and controversial (though totally awesome) LaGuardia with Truman. So the bomb would still have fallen on Japan, and the war would end as it did.
END SPOILERS
Much as I enjoy Roth, his books are too weighty for me to devour with the same glee that I devote to, say, Terry Pratchett or Christopher Moore. I think that one of his books every few years should be just about right. It feels like it takes that long for me to mentally process everything in the last Roth novel I read.
Not that I can say everything is a slam-dunk. Earlier this year, I tried reading "Portnoy's Complaint," which might be the most famous book Roth has written (even more so than American Pastoral). Well... I usually don't think of myself as a prude, but that subject matter combined with that talented of a writer combined to make the most singularly uncomfortable reading experience of the past few years. I squirmed my way through about two dozen pages before setting it aside forever.
That said, I would like to go back and read some early Roth next - so far, everything I've read from him has come from the last two decades. He's been writing since the 1950's, and it would be nice to read through some of his stuff in sequence - say, the Zuckerman books. We'll see what the future brings!
I read his "American Pastoral" in college, and in my mind, that's one of the few books in the running for the Great American Novel. I tend to think of the GAN as being the book that captures the transitory essence of living in America. The most famous example is probably The Great Gatsby, which, in a surprisingly brief length, managed to convey the most crucial features of the American character: our drive for self-improvement, our eagerness to impress, our resilience and capacity for re-invention, the way we tell stories about ourselves and start to believe them. American Pastoral is a longer book, and you could say that it covers an even greater range: it focuses on family, the core building block of American society, and all that flows from it: generation gaps, the way children reject the teachings of their parents, the mixture of comfort and anxiety that comes from being closely bound with others' lives. It also gives a frank (and never boring) look into the role of business in America: how we shape our businesses and derive pride from them, and also how we fight against them. It shows the poisonous impact of politics on personal relationships, and the powerful effect religion (particularly religious conversion) can exert on relationships. I'm not saying that AP is BETTER than GG... but it's darn good, and it paints a very broad canvas.
My latest Roth book, "The Plot Against America," doesn't shoot for another home-run like AP, but it manages to keep exploring some of Roth's same concerns while operating in a very different mode. AP was nominally one of the "Zuckerman" novels, a loosely connected fictional world created by Roth that include Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish character and often narrator. TPAA isn't a Zuckerman novel; instead, it's set in an alternate history (!) and features a young narrator named "Philip Roth".
MINI SPOILERS
Alternate history novels seem like genre fiction, but this is anything but. TPAA does get a lot of great mileage out of its historical conceit, but as is always the case with the Roth novels I've read, the core of the novel doesn't come from the plot; instead, it comes from the relationships between its characters and the thoughts of its protagonists. (Think of a highly readable version of "Ulysses" and you have a great idea of what to expect: humanism, compassion, sorrow.)
That said, I'm a sucker for genre fiction, and the alternate history aspect was one of my favorite parts of the book. The timeline diverges at the 1940 Republican convention: instead of Wendell Wilkie being nominated in the fifth ballot, the convention stays deadlocked until after midnight, when Charles Lindbergh (in the novel as in real life, an isolationist anti-Semite) makes a dramatic entrance and wins the nomination by acclimation. He carries out a maverick campaign, flying to states throughout the country and driving home a single-issue campaign theme: "Vote for Lindbergh or vote for the war." He defeats FDR, then withdraws American support for the British, signs a treaty with the Germans and Japanese recognizing their respective rights to Europe and the Pacific (in the latter case protecting existing US island possessions), and starts rolling back New Deal programs and replacing them with proto-fascist anti-Jewish policies.
It's all rather nightmarish, and quite gripping. I think we all like to tell ourselves "It couldn't happen here" when we hear about genocides, pogroms, and martial law. Still, in any society there will be at least a small number of people who support hateful actions like those. We're fortunate in the US to have a government that (for all its faults) loudly preaches the religion of tolerance, and surely that helps keep our worst tendencies in check. But what if we suddenly woke up under a government that just as loudly proclaimed the necessity of separating undesirable elements? For our own protection, you understand?
That led to the other creepy aspect of the story. All the action takes place from about 1939-1942, narrated from some point past that (likely the late 1960s or early 1970s). Yet, I couldn't help continually thinking back to our own time. So much of that book's actions seemed to echo my own concerns from the time when it was published in 2004: a showy President who wore plainspun unsophistication as armor and spurned the advice of "intellectuals" and "experts"; a widespread cultural trend towards demonizing a subset of American citizens; the abrogation of civil liberties in the name of national emergency.
I think that's more me than Roth, though. The biggest difference is that Lindbergh was trying to keep America out of a war, while Bush was trying to push us into one. (Although, in the most chilling climax of the story, Acting President Wheeler comes within days of declaring war on Canada, in effect aligning America with the Axis powers.) Bush, for all his faults, never supported the xenophobia directed against Arab citizens, even though parts of the country were certainly ripe for such support. And the first term Bush presidency tackled civil liberties incrementally, not overreaching in one swoop like Wheeler does in the novel.
So, I think it would be a mistake to read this book as a kind of retro-historical-allegory of the first G W Bush term. Instead, it's a book that taps into a persistent concern that we should always have as a country: never getting too self-assured in our righteousness, and remaining aware that the price of liberty is constant vigilance. When we slip (as happens fictionally in the book, and as happened in the real world a decade ago), all of our traditions do virtually nothing to protect us. It's our actions now that will determine our future, not the two hundred plus years of democratic history.
As fascinating as all this is, again, it really isn't the main thrust of the book. Roth creates this rich background, then sets about his main concern, looking at how this stressful situation affects a single family, the Roth family, third-generation Jews living in a Newark suburb. The father and mother have created a safe mental space for their children, free from the persecution that they encountered in their own childhoods. That safety begins unraveling, even in small ways. The election of an anti-Semite emboldens ordinary citizens to disparage them during a trip to Washington, D.C., when otherwise they might have remained quiet (still racist, but only internally so). The Lindbergh administration starts a new program to disperse urban Jewish youth into the countryside, and the eldest son leaves; when he comes back, he is not only full of enthusiasm for the farm life, but full of disparagement for his own family, who he now derides as "You Jews."
That splintering of community is one of the most painful aspects of this book. Most of the Jewish people remain faithful to FDR and his liberal policies, but a voluble minority align themselves with Lindbergh. They denounce intervening in Hitler's policies, promote the breakup and dispersal of Jewish communities, and "kosher" Lindbergh to absolve middle-American Christians to vote for him with a clean conscience. This splintering tears apart families (well, the family we care about, the Roth family), and that small tragedy is the emotional centerpiece of the novel.
I'm not sure if Roth always write about Jewish people - but every one of his novels that I've read has featured them as the main characters. Earlier in this post I'd mentioned that Roth has written the Great American Novel. It might seem like it's hard to write the Great American Novel if your characters belong to a minority within America. I don't think that's true. This might sound a little cheesy, but "the outsider who lives among us" can see the majority more clearly than the majority themselves can. TPAA primarily focuses on the predominantly Jewish community around Newark, but when its gaze does expand elsewhere (to the Capital, to the heartland, to the broken country of West Virginia), it sees with a directness and clarity that I don't think you would get from someone who had grown up in that environment among those people. At the same time, the characters are so steeped in American culture that they can navigate all of its social situations and understand what's happening around them.
Back to the alternate history:
MEGA SPOILERS
One interesting aspect is how resilient Roth makes the timeline. Often, in alternate histories, you get small changes in the past that magnify into bigger and bigger changes the farther you get into the future. That could easily have happened in this book; I'm sure many other people have written other books where America's neutrality in WW2 leads to Axis domination over the world, or a world without Communism, or a world filled with Communists, or some other grand realignment. Instead, Roth gently sets the timeline back on track after just a few years' detour.
That isn't clear from the beginning. However, perhaps about two-thirds through the book, when Walter Winchell is assassinated, Roth makes the off-hand comment that this was the first time a candidate for the Presidency had been assassinated, and the next wouldn't come until Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 after winning the California primary. Immediately, the "future" starts to shift back into view. Germany can't have won (or at least not won a total war), or else there wouldn't have even been an election in 1968. Furthermore, if Bobby was running in 1968, it seems likely that Jack had won in 1960. So, just how do we get past Lindbergh?
The chaotic passage near the end of the book describes the madness that unfolds after the Winchell assassination late in 1942. Lindbergh mysteriously disappears when returning from one of his many impromptu flights out to the heartland. Vice-President Wheeler assumes power, and with astonishing swiftness sets a series of plots into motion. He blames the British and then the Canadians for Lindbergh's disappearance; fans the flames of anti-Semitic fury that Winchell had gleefully provoked, which in turn spurs pogroms throughout the Midwest; sends the National Guard in amongst the chaos to shoot and kill Jewish civilians; and then declares a state of national emergency, imposes martial law, imprisons his political opponents, and puts the country on a war footing... for war against undesirable elements within, and against Canada from without.
At this point, despite the promised glimpse of RFK, the situation seems utterly bleak. The day is saved when Anne Lindbergh, the wife and possible widow of the President, escapes from her confinement in Walter Reed's psychiatric ward, connects with sympathetic elements who give her access to a radio broadcast tower, and urges the armed forces and National Guard to reverse their actions, release the politicians they hold captive, remove Wheeler from office, and install the Secretary of State as the new acting President until elections can be held in November. They follow her lead, Wheeler is disgraced, and the day is saved. A "National Unity" ticket of FDR and Fiorello LaGuardia - and, seriously, how SWEET would that have been?! - sweeps the election.
After that, events unfurl as you would expect, just about one year later. Instead of Pearl Harbor occurring in December 1941, it happens in December 1942; the US declares war on Japan, then the Axis declares war on the US, and the war is truly joined. We don't get many details of the war - I imagine that it would be even harder than the real one, if Britain hadn't had access to our armaments and we hadn't ramped up war production - but it seems to follow more or less on track. Germany surrenders in 1945, a few weeks after FDR dies in office.
It is fun to imagine just what happened next. I kind of think that by then everything was back on track. In the real world, Roosevelt replaced the liberal and divisive Henry Wallace as the VP with the centrist and pragmatic Harry Truman; it seems likely that in the alternate world, he would have replaced the liberal and controversial (though totally awesome) LaGuardia with Truman. So the bomb would still have fallen on Japan, and the war would end as it did.
END SPOILERS
Much as I enjoy Roth, his books are too weighty for me to devour with the same glee that I devote to, say, Terry Pratchett or Christopher Moore. I think that one of his books every few years should be just about right. It feels like it takes that long for me to mentally process everything in the last Roth novel I read.
Not that I can say everything is a slam-dunk. Earlier this year, I tried reading "Portnoy's Complaint," which might be the most famous book Roth has written (even more so than American Pastoral). Well... I usually don't think of myself as a prude, but that subject matter combined with that talented of a writer combined to make the most singularly uncomfortable reading experience of the past few years. I squirmed my way through about two dozen pages before setting it aside forever.
That said, I would like to go back and read some early Roth next - so far, everything I've read from him has come from the last two decades. He's been writing since the 1950's, and it would be nice to read through some of his stuff in sequence - say, the Zuckerman books. We'll see what the future brings!
Friday, March 03, 2006
What can change the nature of a man?
Monday night, around 10:30PM, I finished what feels like my first "serious book" in ages: "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth. The remainder of this post describes why I was reading this book and my thoughts about it.
Throughout my life, I've been blessed with incredibly good English teachers. Junior High gave me Mrs. Wherry and my ninth-grade teacher; I've forgotten his name but not his powerful examination of Steinbeck. High school gave me some of the best teachers of my life, a near-holy trinity of Mr. Harris, Mr. Piro and Dr. Langlas; any one of those would have been sufficient incentive to pursue my English degree in college, and the combined effect of the three was incredible. Mr. Harris took me in under his wing after I arrived in Wheaton and made a scary move a lot less frightening through his humor and humanity; as a teacher he showed incredible talent at turning on his students, creating awakening an intellectual thirst that even he could not slake. I only had a single semester with Mr. Piro, but that semester probably did more to prepare me for college writing than anything else I did in high school; even more impressively, he effortlessly communicated why the rules were important. Any teacher can say "Don't use passive voice," but he had a gift for helping us FEEL the difference, with the result that most of us continue to follow his instructions to this day: we no longer need to, but he gave us the great gift of caring about how our words sound. (I'm afraid this blog sets a horrible example, but when I'm serious about writing something good, I can just turn on the Mr. Piro in my mind.) Finally, Dr. Langlas was a great elfin wizard who tied the literate to the metaphysical, showing that good writing could underly any worthy human endeavor. His canon often springs first to mind when I'm looking for good analogies.
The streak continued in college. I enjoyed a lovely range of talented, well-differentiated professors. There was Professor Hadas, the delightful Jewish atheist who taught Bible As Literature and found more beauty in the Scripture's words than many Christians can see. There was Professor Davies, my fiction writing teacher, who taught me the evils of deconstructionism and gave me the confidence to enjoy works for their quality. In my senior year Professor Munson introduced me to Old English; reading Beowulf felt like I had finally come full circle, from being turned on to literature by The Hobbit to exploring the words that had inspired The Hobbit's creation. Professor Meyer led the single most unique class I've ever taken: Electronic Poetry, a fascinating exploration of the very nature of art and the possibilities of automation. Professor Mackay brilliantly showed us that there is no such thing as postmodernist literature, and in the process helped me see the beauty in early 20th century English literature that has long escaped me. At the capstone of my academic career was Professor Johnston's semester on Joyce; reading Ulysses allowed me to cross one item off my list of "things to do before I die," and his kindness and force went beyond the classroom, allowing me to graduate as a more confident person than I would have been without him.
If Johnston was the capstone, though, Professor Robert Milder was the cornerstone. First as my teacher in two American Literature courses and later as my faculty advisor, he daily intimidated me with his brilliant mind. At Wash U, my cockiness in computer science classes was matched by my hesitation in English classes; I loved the material as much as anyone, but struggled to uncover the meanings and references that seemed to come easily to my fellow students. In Milder's classes, everyone was in the same boat; every day he led us out into dangerously deep waters, then under the waves, bringing us to an understanding few others have seen. I never felt happier to be an English Lit major or more despairing of my abilities than when I was in his class. By the end, the foundation he provided gave me a way of understanding literature that makes reading even more pleasurable than it was before.
Outside of class, he was a gentle and soft-spoken person. (I'm using the past tense here because I haven't spoken with him in years; unlike Mr. Harris and Professor Hadas, Professor Milder is still among the living.) He showed great interest in my path through the university and offered wise counsel which I gladly accepted. One of my most vivid memories of college is sitting in his office in Duncker Hall: the massive bookcase that reaches from floor to ceiling, the trees just outside the window, the incredibly comfortable chair he provided for his visitors. There was a softness and quitness in that room, it felt more like a sanctuary than any place else at the school, and simultaneously a serious place of learning where Professor Milder went to think his great thoughts.
I could write a nice long post on every single book Milder taught. They were uniformly great, well-chosen pieces. One of them (Moby Dick*) even won a coveted place on my Top Five list. This post, though, is about the sequel to a book I encountered in that class, Philip Roth's "American Pastoral."
Philip Roth is considered one of the three greatest living American writers. He has been writing since the late 50s and still puts out incredible work; he wrote American Pastoral 1997 and won a Pulitzer. American Pastoral is an American tragedy; it chronicles the public rise and private fall of The Swede, an incredibly likeable, kind, accomplished all-American guy. Like many of Roth's characters The Swede is Jewish; unlike the other characters, he seems to almost effortlessly assimilate into the mainstream of society. I don't want to go into the plot too much... well, I guess it isn't necessary for this post anyways. Read it if you get the chance.
Anyways. Just recently I was poking around online, and saw that American Pastoral was actually part of a series of "Zuckerman Novels." Zuckerman is Philip Roth's alter-ego, a Jewish author who narrates these books. The book immediately after American Pastoral was I Married A Communist. I immediately requested a copy, and a few weeks back began to read it.
Unlike what I'd imagined, it's a sequel to Zuckerman's story, not the Swede's. The overall framing device is very similar to the former book: once again Zuckerman talks with someone, hears a lot more about someone else's life, and proceeds to tell that person's story, interspersed with occasional memories from his own life. This time the subject is Ira Ringold aka Iron Rinn, and the intermediate narrator is Murray Ringold, Zuckerman's high-school English teacher.
The book was excellent, the best I've read this year (granted, that's only two months). I didn't enjoy it quite as much as American Pastoral. I've thought a little bit about why that is. Partly it's the subject matter; American Pastoral felt like a more political book, and its politics were centered around the radicalism of the 1960s, an era I find fascinating. I Married a Communist (henceforth IMAC) is also fairly political, but is more focused on the McCarthy era, which while still interesting doesn't carry the same force for me. Another reason, of course, was the way I was reading it. I think I'm a more capable reader now than I was going into school, but I certainly can't extract as much understanding from a book on my own than I can with the help of a capable teacher and fifteen avid readers. Still, the book was very good, and I'm sure I'll be returning to Roth in the future. Next on the list may be The Plot Against America.
Mega Spoilers
Like AP, IMAC is a tragedy. Once again a Jewish man rises towards the top of society, including a marriage to a famous and beautiful wife, and then is ruined and betrayed by his wife. That said, I was surprised by how different the novels felt. In large part this is because of how different the main characters are. AP's Swede was almost pure, an incredibly likeable guy who did nothing wrong but was still tormented by his own conscience for what happened to him. IMAC's Iron Rinn feels more like a traditional tragic figure from mythology: he is quite talented and has great ambition, but is felled a fatal flaw. Finding that flaw is left to the reader, and I'll talk about it some more below. Maybe. Anyways, Ira is strong where the Swede was weak, feeling confident in his own virtue no matter what happens, but he lacks the composure and control of the Swede, creating and compounding his own troubles.
At a surface level, Ira's problem is communism. He has embraced an ideology that has come under fire in the US, and must eventually suffer for it. Yet Roth is careful to show that Ira's fall was the result of his personal relationships. He had built up shields around himself, and only with the betrayal of his wife and others is he swept up in the national hysteria. So, what causes those shields to fail? Once again, the answer seems to be communism. While not open about his affiliation Ira is not at all shy about his convictions, and his tireless polemics against American society may have finally worn through.
However, Ira's radio world is filled with fellow sympathizers, who are content to express their worldview subtly in their work and among friends without browbeating their enemies. Ira is uncomfortably suspended between two worlds, the zealousness of O'Day and the comforts of stable family life. Now that I'm writing this, I think the problem is that Ira doesn't know his own mind. It isn't until everything comes crashing down that he even becomes conscious of the contradictions in what he is trying to do, being a perfectly good revolutionary Communist while simultaneously trying to achieve the perfect bourgeoise dream of a contented family life. Even towards the end he thinks that his Communism is only opposed to his job, and there he's content - he can go back to other work if he is shoved out of his radio job. But he doesn't recognize the struggle between his stated ideology and his heart's longing until too late. Even then, he puts the blame squarely on his desires instead of his intractable nature.
Throughout the novel we catch hints of some violence in Ira's past. In the novel's final chapters the violence explodes to the surface, strongly altering the reader's perception of Ira; he now appears dangerous, unhinged, murderous. Looking back, we realize that this was the true self that he had hidden all this time.
That is one of the most striking things in this novel: the difference between perception and reality. Obviously, this is hardly a new topic and drives most of modern literature, but I thought it was particularly well-done here. We are introduced to Ira through Nathan, and Nathan's own early memories of Ira as this dynamic, idealistic, wonderful man serve as the baseline for our perception of him. Things get added to it - "Oh, this great man had a rotten marriage." "This great man was a Communist." It isn't until the end, when the earlier image collapses under the combined weight of Murray's story and Nathan's own recollections, that we seriously start to question that underlying perception. Was Ira really all that good? Or were we praising his luck and success, which had given him a sheen that glossed over his deficiencies?
I have way too strong a capacity to identify with characters in novels. Here I really identified with Nathan. In a narrow way I share his quietness, the way he seeks to observe everything and soak it up instead of participating in what's happening. More broadly, his ideological evolution closely mirrors my own, in arc if not in content. First of all, both of us are strongly drawn to ideologies. I like finding or inventing core principles, and then judging everything in relation to this principles. In the same way, Nathan felt incredibly confident when he could argue with his father for Wallace because that support was part of a fully-constructed worldview. Secondly, while both of us stick with our ideology while we have it, we can shift from one to another with surprising ease. Nathan seemed to absorb the teachings of the strongest personality he was near, whether Murray, Ira, his U of C prof, or O'Day. I tend to be periodically jolted by major events and, unmoored, seek for more fitting principles on which to rebuild my worldview. The 1996 CDA law made it impossible for me to support Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter), and brought me into the Libertarian fold. The Enron and Worldcom scandals dashed my faith in the invisible hand and brought me back into the statist fold; the Iraq war and our fiscal nightmare drove me to become a Dean Democrat, where I remain today. Finally, we share a certain awareness and wry humor about our situation. Nathan marvels at how he could ever have found Ira interesting, and I wonder who I will be voting for in a decade.
While Ira's story is the main one, Nathan's is also intriguing. It feels like a condensed version of the inevitable process of coming of age. There's an old saw that goes, "Anyone who is young and conservative has no heart; anyone who is old and liberal has no head." In my own experience, this is not true. Some of the smartest and more liberal people I've ever known were elderly college professors, and the youngest member of my own family is without a doubt the strongest Republican. No; I think the difference is that the young are most idealistic. I remember first studying political science in junior high and thinking everything was so pure, so abstract. It felt like a physical science: you just need to find the principles, and everything flows logically. It goes beyond politics; in morals, religion, literature (did you ever know anyone who would read nothing but sci-fi?), and more, younger people seem to have a greater capacity for wanting the best and purest of whatever they're looking for. Inevitably, they are disappointed, and the urge is strong to remake the world so that the principles can fulfill their promise.
After you have been disappointed enough times, you come to realize that it is probably a doomed cause. You can either struggle on in pursuit of the unattainable goal, doomed to failure; or you can give up the fight and live in the imperfect world. A third option presents itself: set your goals just a bit lower, try to change this one piece instead of the whole, and continue the struggle. It will be hard to explain yourself to your ten-year-old son, who can't understand why you aren't voting for the candidate who agrees the most with you, but you carry on, knowing that the possible good is greater than the impossible perfect.
Or, it might end in another way. The longer you live, the more people you meet, at least some of whom have different ideologies from yourself. The longer you live, the more experiences you have, some of which may call into question the rightness of your beliefs. You see others changing their convictions as they grow older and, encouraged, you begin a process of introspection, examining the ideologies you have accumulated and judging which to keep and which to discard as you re-examine your worldview. You now begin to see ideologies as lenses through which you can choose to examine an issue, rather than empirical declarations about what the world really is.
Whichever path you take, and I think a lot of people take both at some point, the result is the same: experiences show that the world is a muddled, messy place, and you can no longer have absolute loyalty to a particular ideology. I think there are two places you can go from here. The first is what I think of as realism, best exemplified in the book by Nathan's father. The realist has unbounded desires but realizes that he can never fulfill them all, so he chooses to pursue those which are most important or most achievable. He retains the idealist's drive but not his all-or-nothing goals. The other result is cynicism. The cynic sees the impossibility of perfection and despairs. He may still act, but does so only for the act itself and not because he thinks it will accomplish a goal.
Returning to the story, one of Ira's flaws was, in a way, his inability to grow up and surrender his armor-clad idealism. As readers we're drawn to idealists, they're very interesting and powerful; in the real world, however, idealists have and create all sorts of problems, and the nature of Ira's downfall feels organic and inevitable.
This story is filled with contrasts. One of the most useful may be between Ira and Nathan. Ira holds firm to his convictions. I'm strongly reminded of the theory of imprinting advanced by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, which Murray more or less echoes when he says that, if Ira hadn't been exposed to O'Day, he would have become just as committed to whatever else he happened to be around at that time. When he was young Ira was changeable, but once he gets set in place, that ideology stays with him forever. Nathan, though, has spent his entire life shuttling between convictions, and at this late stage in his life doesn't seem to believe anything strongly. It seems as though this is a prerequisite for Nathan becoming a writer, and his conversations with the college professor explicitly state this: artists are concerned with the individual minutia of reality, and must be on guard against the pull of ideologies which will color and distort that minutia, obscuring some and elevating others, making art subservient to meaning.
Personally, I think that's a way to describe art, but not all art. Most of my favorite authors fall within this camp of creation in the service of art itself. However, just off the top of my head I can think of plenty of works that are made better for their service to an ideology, or that wouldn't exist without it. Think of George Orwell's 1984, or the beautiful propaganda posters of the Spanish Civil War, or La Marseillaise. Each owes its existence and power to the creator's devotion to an ideal. It's certainly not fashionable these days to create art in this way, but I don't believe that means it's any less good. (I cheerfully grant, though, that ideology-driven art is probably much more likely to be awful than that created for its own sake.)
As a final note, these two Roth novels have made me more pessimistic about having kids than anything else in my life. In a way, I can't make up my mind which daughter is worse. Sylphid is objectively the worse person; her spite, vindictiveness, sadism, and repulsive physical appearence don't have any redeeming counter. The Swede's daughter seems almost tame in contrast; she has turned her heart to stone and runs with a bad crowd, but she comes across as more of a victim while Sylphid is the victimizer. On the other hand, though, Ira has an out with Sylphid: she's not really his kid, he puts up with her for as long as he can stand and then walks away. The Swede, though, saw his daughter born, raised her, loved her, gave her every attention and care, only to have her destroy him and break his heart. To me, that's the more horrifying scenario, and I'm sure it's something every parent dreads: the fear that, no matter how good a parent you may be, your child will somehow not turn out right. I admire and hate the way the Swede blames himself for his daughter's inexplicable drifting away. It feels like such a heavy burden, and there's only so much you can do.
So, that's that. I'm glad I took this break from comic books, fantasy novels and video games to dive into "serious" literature once again.
* Whenever I say "Moby Dick," I mean "Moby Dick: The Robert Milder Cut." It's basically Moby Dick with a short list of chapters we were allowed to skip. They added up to around 50-75 pages and all dealt with the minutiae of whaling, from how whales communicate to many chapters on the items one collects from a stripped whale carcass. The book might still be on my Top Five list even with these chapters included; I'll re-read the entire book some day and let you know.
Throughout my life, I've been blessed with incredibly good English teachers. Junior High gave me Mrs. Wherry and my ninth-grade teacher; I've forgotten his name but not his powerful examination of Steinbeck. High school gave me some of the best teachers of my life, a near-holy trinity of Mr. Harris, Mr. Piro and Dr. Langlas; any one of those would have been sufficient incentive to pursue my English degree in college, and the combined effect of the three was incredible. Mr. Harris took me in under his wing after I arrived in Wheaton and made a scary move a lot less frightening through his humor and humanity; as a teacher he showed incredible talent at turning on his students, creating awakening an intellectual thirst that even he could not slake. I only had a single semester with Mr. Piro, but that semester probably did more to prepare me for college writing than anything else I did in high school; even more impressively, he effortlessly communicated why the rules were important. Any teacher can say "Don't use passive voice," but he had a gift for helping us FEEL the difference, with the result that most of us continue to follow his instructions to this day: we no longer need to, but he gave us the great gift of caring about how our words sound. (I'm afraid this blog sets a horrible example, but when I'm serious about writing something good, I can just turn on the Mr. Piro in my mind.) Finally, Dr. Langlas was a great elfin wizard who tied the literate to the metaphysical, showing that good writing could underly any worthy human endeavor. His canon often springs first to mind when I'm looking for good analogies.
The streak continued in college. I enjoyed a lovely range of talented, well-differentiated professors. There was Professor Hadas, the delightful Jewish atheist who taught Bible As Literature and found more beauty in the Scripture's words than many Christians can see. There was Professor Davies, my fiction writing teacher, who taught me the evils of deconstructionism and gave me the confidence to enjoy works for their quality. In my senior year Professor Munson introduced me to Old English; reading Beowulf felt like I had finally come full circle, from being turned on to literature by The Hobbit to exploring the words that had inspired The Hobbit's creation. Professor Meyer led the single most unique class I've ever taken: Electronic Poetry, a fascinating exploration of the very nature of art and the possibilities of automation. Professor Mackay brilliantly showed us that there is no such thing as postmodernist literature, and in the process helped me see the beauty in early 20th century English literature that has long escaped me. At the capstone of my academic career was Professor Johnston's semester on Joyce; reading Ulysses allowed me to cross one item off my list of "things to do before I die," and his kindness and force went beyond the classroom, allowing me to graduate as a more confident person than I would have been without him.
If Johnston was the capstone, though, Professor Robert Milder was the cornerstone. First as my teacher in two American Literature courses and later as my faculty advisor, he daily intimidated me with his brilliant mind. At Wash U, my cockiness in computer science classes was matched by my hesitation in English classes; I loved the material as much as anyone, but struggled to uncover the meanings and references that seemed to come easily to my fellow students. In Milder's classes, everyone was in the same boat; every day he led us out into dangerously deep waters, then under the waves, bringing us to an understanding few others have seen. I never felt happier to be an English Lit major or more despairing of my abilities than when I was in his class. By the end, the foundation he provided gave me a way of understanding literature that makes reading even more pleasurable than it was before.
Outside of class, he was a gentle and soft-spoken person. (I'm using the past tense here because I haven't spoken with him in years; unlike Mr. Harris and Professor Hadas, Professor Milder is still among the living.) He showed great interest in my path through the university and offered wise counsel which I gladly accepted. One of my most vivid memories of college is sitting in his office in Duncker Hall: the massive bookcase that reaches from floor to ceiling, the trees just outside the window, the incredibly comfortable chair he provided for his visitors. There was a softness and quitness in that room, it felt more like a sanctuary than any place else at the school, and simultaneously a serious place of learning where Professor Milder went to think his great thoughts.
I could write a nice long post on every single book Milder taught. They were uniformly great, well-chosen pieces. One of them (Moby Dick*) even won a coveted place on my Top Five list. This post, though, is about the sequel to a book I encountered in that class, Philip Roth's "American Pastoral."
Philip Roth is considered one of the three greatest living American writers. He has been writing since the late 50s and still puts out incredible work; he wrote American Pastoral 1997 and won a Pulitzer. American Pastoral is an American tragedy; it chronicles the public rise and private fall of The Swede, an incredibly likeable, kind, accomplished all-American guy. Like many of Roth's characters The Swede is Jewish; unlike the other characters, he seems to almost effortlessly assimilate into the mainstream of society. I don't want to go into the plot too much... well, I guess it isn't necessary for this post anyways. Read it if you get the chance.
Anyways. Just recently I was poking around online, and saw that American Pastoral was actually part of a series of "Zuckerman Novels." Zuckerman is Philip Roth's alter-ego, a Jewish author who narrates these books. The book immediately after American Pastoral was I Married A Communist. I immediately requested a copy, and a few weeks back began to read it.
Unlike what I'd imagined, it's a sequel to Zuckerman's story, not the Swede's. The overall framing device is very similar to the former book: once again Zuckerman talks with someone, hears a lot more about someone else's life, and proceeds to tell that person's story, interspersed with occasional memories from his own life. This time the subject is Ira Ringold aka Iron Rinn, and the intermediate narrator is Murray Ringold, Zuckerman's high-school English teacher.
The book was excellent, the best I've read this year (granted, that's only two months). I didn't enjoy it quite as much as American Pastoral. I've thought a little bit about why that is. Partly it's the subject matter; American Pastoral felt like a more political book, and its politics were centered around the radicalism of the 1960s, an era I find fascinating. I Married a Communist (henceforth IMAC) is also fairly political, but is more focused on the McCarthy era, which while still interesting doesn't carry the same force for me. Another reason, of course, was the way I was reading it. I think I'm a more capable reader now than I was going into school, but I certainly can't extract as much understanding from a book on my own than I can with the help of a capable teacher and fifteen avid readers. Still, the book was very good, and I'm sure I'll be returning to Roth in the future. Next on the list may be The Plot Against America.
Mega Spoilers
Like AP, IMAC is a tragedy. Once again a Jewish man rises towards the top of society, including a marriage to a famous and beautiful wife, and then is ruined and betrayed by his wife. That said, I was surprised by how different the novels felt. In large part this is because of how different the main characters are. AP's Swede was almost pure, an incredibly likeable guy who did nothing wrong but was still tormented by his own conscience for what happened to him. IMAC's Iron Rinn feels more like a traditional tragic figure from mythology: he is quite talented and has great ambition, but is felled a fatal flaw. Finding that flaw is left to the reader, and I'll talk about it some more below. Maybe. Anyways, Ira is strong where the Swede was weak, feeling confident in his own virtue no matter what happens, but he lacks the composure and control of the Swede, creating and compounding his own troubles.
At a surface level, Ira's problem is communism. He has embraced an ideology that has come under fire in the US, and must eventually suffer for it. Yet Roth is careful to show that Ira's fall was the result of his personal relationships. He had built up shields around himself, and only with the betrayal of his wife and others is he swept up in the national hysteria. So, what causes those shields to fail? Once again, the answer seems to be communism. While not open about his affiliation Ira is not at all shy about his convictions, and his tireless polemics against American society may have finally worn through.
However, Ira's radio world is filled with fellow sympathizers, who are content to express their worldview subtly in their work and among friends without browbeating their enemies. Ira is uncomfortably suspended between two worlds, the zealousness of O'Day and the comforts of stable family life. Now that I'm writing this, I think the problem is that Ira doesn't know his own mind. It isn't until everything comes crashing down that he even becomes conscious of the contradictions in what he is trying to do, being a perfectly good revolutionary Communist while simultaneously trying to achieve the perfect bourgeoise dream of a contented family life. Even towards the end he thinks that his Communism is only opposed to his job, and there he's content - he can go back to other work if he is shoved out of his radio job. But he doesn't recognize the struggle between his stated ideology and his heart's longing until too late. Even then, he puts the blame squarely on his desires instead of his intractable nature.
Throughout the novel we catch hints of some violence in Ira's past. In the novel's final chapters the violence explodes to the surface, strongly altering the reader's perception of Ira; he now appears dangerous, unhinged, murderous. Looking back, we realize that this was the true self that he had hidden all this time.
That is one of the most striking things in this novel: the difference between perception and reality. Obviously, this is hardly a new topic and drives most of modern literature, but I thought it was particularly well-done here. We are introduced to Ira through Nathan, and Nathan's own early memories of Ira as this dynamic, idealistic, wonderful man serve as the baseline for our perception of him. Things get added to it - "Oh, this great man had a rotten marriage." "This great man was a Communist." It isn't until the end, when the earlier image collapses under the combined weight of Murray's story and Nathan's own recollections, that we seriously start to question that underlying perception. Was Ira really all that good? Or were we praising his luck and success, which had given him a sheen that glossed over his deficiencies?
I have way too strong a capacity to identify with characters in novels. Here I really identified with Nathan. In a narrow way I share his quietness, the way he seeks to observe everything and soak it up instead of participating in what's happening. More broadly, his ideological evolution closely mirrors my own, in arc if not in content. First of all, both of us are strongly drawn to ideologies. I like finding or inventing core principles, and then judging everything in relation to this principles. In the same way, Nathan felt incredibly confident when he could argue with his father for Wallace because that support was part of a fully-constructed worldview. Secondly, while both of us stick with our ideology while we have it, we can shift from one to another with surprising ease. Nathan seemed to absorb the teachings of the strongest personality he was near, whether Murray, Ira, his U of C prof, or O'Day. I tend to be periodically jolted by major events and, unmoored, seek for more fitting principles on which to rebuild my worldview. The 1996 CDA law made it impossible for me to support Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter), and brought me into the Libertarian fold. The Enron and Worldcom scandals dashed my faith in the invisible hand and brought me back into the statist fold; the Iraq war and our fiscal nightmare drove me to become a Dean Democrat, where I remain today. Finally, we share a certain awareness and wry humor about our situation. Nathan marvels at how he could ever have found Ira interesting, and I wonder who I will be voting for in a decade.
While Ira's story is the main one, Nathan's is also intriguing. It feels like a condensed version of the inevitable process of coming of age. There's an old saw that goes, "Anyone who is young and conservative has no heart; anyone who is old and liberal has no head." In my own experience, this is not true. Some of the smartest and more liberal people I've ever known were elderly college professors, and the youngest member of my own family is without a doubt the strongest Republican. No; I think the difference is that the young are most idealistic. I remember first studying political science in junior high and thinking everything was so pure, so abstract. It felt like a physical science: you just need to find the principles, and everything flows logically. It goes beyond politics; in morals, religion, literature (did you ever know anyone who would read nothing but sci-fi?), and more, younger people seem to have a greater capacity for wanting the best and purest of whatever they're looking for. Inevitably, they are disappointed, and the urge is strong to remake the world so that the principles can fulfill their promise.
After you have been disappointed enough times, you come to realize that it is probably a doomed cause. You can either struggle on in pursuit of the unattainable goal, doomed to failure; or you can give up the fight and live in the imperfect world. A third option presents itself: set your goals just a bit lower, try to change this one piece instead of the whole, and continue the struggle. It will be hard to explain yourself to your ten-year-old son, who can't understand why you aren't voting for the candidate who agrees the most with you, but you carry on, knowing that the possible good is greater than the impossible perfect.
Or, it might end in another way. The longer you live, the more people you meet, at least some of whom have different ideologies from yourself. The longer you live, the more experiences you have, some of which may call into question the rightness of your beliefs. You see others changing their convictions as they grow older and, encouraged, you begin a process of introspection, examining the ideologies you have accumulated and judging which to keep and which to discard as you re-examine your worldview. You now begin to see ideologies as lenses through which you can choose to examine an issue, rather than empirical declarations about what the world really is.
Whichever path you take, and I think a lot of people take both at some point, the result is the same: experiences show that the world is a muddled, messy place, and you can no longer have absolute loyalty to a particular ideology. I think there are two places you can go from here. The first is what I think of as realism, best exemplified in the book by Nathan's father. The realist has unbounded desires but realizes that he can never fulfill them all, so he chooses to pursue those which are most important or most achievable. He retains the idealist's drive but not his all-or-nothing goals. The other result is cynicism. The cynic sees the impossibility of perfection and despairs. He may still act, but does so only for the act itself and not because he thinks it will accomplish a goal.
Returning to the story, one of Ira's flaws was, in a way, his inability to grow up and surrender his armor-clad idealism. As readers we're drawn to idealists, they're very interesting and powerful; in the real world, however, idealists have and create all sorts of problems, and the nature of Ira's downfall feels organic and inevitable.
This story is filled with contrasts. One of the most useful may be between Ira and Nathan. Ira holds firm to his convictions. I'm strongly reminded of the theory of imprinting advanced by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, which Murray more or less echoes when he says that, if Ira hadn't been exposed to O'Day, he would have become just as committed to whatever else he happened to be around at that time. When he was young Ira was changeable, but once he gets set in place, that ideology stays with him forever. Nathan, though, has spent his entire life shuttling between convictions, and at this late stage in his life doesn't seem to believe anything strongly. It seems as though this is a prerequisite for Nathan becoming a writer, and his conversations with the college professor explicitly state this: artists are concerned with the individual minutia of reality, and must be on guard against the pull of ideologies which will color and distort that minutia, obscuring some and elevating others, making art subservient to meaning.
Personally, I think that's a way to describe art, but not all art. Most of my favorite authors fall within this camp of creation in the service of art itself. However, just off the top of my head I can think of plenty of works that are made better for their service to an ideology, or that wouldn't exist without it. Think of George Orwell's 1984, or the beautiful propaganda posters of the Spanish Civil War, or La Marseillaise. Each owes its existence and power to the creator's devotion to an ideal. It's certainly not fashionable these days to create art in this way, but I don't believe that means it's any less good. (I cheerfully grant, though, that ideology-driven art is probably much more likely to be awful than that created for its own sake.)
As a final note, these two Roth novels have made me more pessimistic about having kids than anything else in my life. In a way, I can't make up my mind which daughter is worse. Sylphid is objectively the worse person; her spite, vindictiveness, sadism, and repulsive physical appearence don't have any redeeming counter. The Swede's daughter seems almost tame in contrast; she has turned her heart to stone and runs with a bad crowd, but she comes across as more of a victim while Sylphid is the victimizer. On the other hand, though, Ira has an out with Sylphid: she's not really his kid, he puts up with her for as long as he can stand and then walks away. The Swede, though, saw his daughter born, raised her, loved her, gave her every attention and care, only to have her destroy him and break his heart. To me, that's the more horrifying scenario, and I'm sure it's something every parent dreads: the fear that, no matter how good a parent you may be, your child will somehow not turn out right. I admire and hate the way the Swede blames himself for his daughter's inexplicable drifting away. It feels like such a heavy burden, and there's only so much you can do.
So, that's that. I'm glad I took this break from comic books, fantasy novels and video games to dive into "serious" literature once again.
* Whenever I say "Moby Dick," I mean "Moby Dick: The Robert Milder Cut." It's basically Moby Dick with a short list of chapters we were allowed to skip. They added up to around 50-75 pages and all dealt with the minutiae of whaling, from how whales communicate to many chapters on the items one collects from a stripped whale carcass. The book might still be on my Top Five list even with these chapters included; I'll re-read the entire book some day and let you know.
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