Steve Reads

Being a Philip Roth novel, Indignation features what the scientists would primly call “an episode of receptive oral sex.” Roth is rather more straightforward with his nomenclature than either the scientists or I can be (this is a family publication, after all): the novel that brought him infamy, Portnoy's Complaint, featured a chapter that we’ll have to call “C-Word Crazy.”

The “receptive episode,” as we’ll call it here, sets off a chain of disasters for Indignation‘s narrator — the episode’s recipient, as it were. He’s already left home in New Jersey (most Roth novels take place in New Jersey) to get away from a father who appears to be going insane. Until then, Marcus and his father had been just about as close as two people could be: they worked side by side in the father’s Newark kosher butcher shop, and Marcus was all that a father could ask for: well-behaved, straight-A student, working nonstop, eyes always on the prize, intense. Then, for no reason that Marcus can discern — though it may be related to the thousands of Americans dying in Korea as this domestic disaster is happening — dad starts suspecting the worst: he asks Marcus constantly where he’s been (as it turns out, “the library” is just about as wild an answer as dad should ever expect), locks him out of the house if he gets back a moment past curfew, and generally makes his life a nightmare. So Marcus leaves home, abandons the familiar confines of college in Newark, and enters a polite Baptist college in the middle of Ohio.

You might wonder a couple things at this point: how a paranoid father would possibly release his son into the American heartland, and where the insanity came from. These are the first two of several “Huh?” moments in Indignation. Another is that receptive episode. It comes basically out of nowhere, and surprises Marcus just as much as it surprises us. Like a lot of people, the discovery of sex tears Marcus’s world apart. And it couldn’t come at a worse time for him: he’s already moved out of one student dormroom because his intense, studious ways conflict with the antisocial habits of his roommate. After the receptive episode, he feels compelled to defend the girl’s honor against his second roommate, who promptly coldcocks Marcus. So on he moves to his third room, the coldest, least-desirable pit on the entire campus.

Each of these shocks to Marcus’s life seems rather unsupported by the story leading up to it. This bugged me until the final few pages, which tilt the story on its head; I’m still processing what they’re about, but my sense is (I’m being careful not to give anything away here) that they change the story from a straightforward walk down memory lane to a satirized lecture on the collapse of American morals. I wish I could say more about the ending; if anyone out there reads it, email me and let me know what you think.

In any case, I think it’s safe to say that the book’s whole structure, in light of its ending, is a risk for Roth. At least until the end, I think the reader is likely to feel cheated by one unmotivated shift in the plot after another. Many readers would probably put it down before finishing it.

It helps Roth, then, that Indignation is a little thing — 200ish small pages with generous spacing. It’s easy to tear through in one sitting. I essentially started and finished it over the course of two 90-minute commutes. It’s a fine book, but Roth shouldn’t get credit for just being Roth: many authors could have written something as good as Indignation, which is not something I can say for a book of similar heft like Roth’s Dying Animal. Your time is probably better spent on the latter.

(Note: I read an early review copy of Indignation, generously supplied to me by the publisher. The book will be released tomorrow. Details of its printing may differ from what I read, but I can’t imagine that the story itself will.)

I think you have two choices when reading this book: either be utterly horrified, or take it as a succinct bit of honesty about sex. Which of these you choose will depend, in all likelihood, on whether you’re a woman or a man. Many women will see it as rank misogyny. I don’t begrudge them that belief. I happen to think, on the contrary, that it is an absolute masterpiece. It does for the sexual revolution what Roth’s American trilogy — American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain — did for the rest of mid-to-late-twentieth-century American history: condense it down and focus its agonies on one man.

Here the representative for 20th-century America is David Kapesh. Others will have met him in Roth’s earlier novels, The Professor of Desire and The Breast ; I’ve not read those, so I can’t comment. In The Dying Animal, we meet Kapesh in his early seventies, a famous cultural critic who appears on public television every week, book in hand, white mane flowing and (one presumes) turtleneck up to his chin. He is also an enthusiastic hedonist. It seems as though every semester he picks one new student to seduce after classes are over — for sex, nothing more. This is just a meeting of flesh and flesh: everyone is aware of the game that everyone else is playing.

This contract alone leads into the book’s heart, which is a lecture on and a demonstration of what sex used to mean for someone of Kapesh’s generation, what it means now, what changed, and how much we’ve forgotten. In Kapesh’s youth, “heavy petting” was a stage one got to after endless courtship; anything more would have horrified his parents, had they known. Without going into detail (this is a family publication, after all), we take substantially more contact for granted. As Kapesh notes, today’s youth (I count myself in there, though maybe my youth ended on May 9) believe that absolute sexual freedom arrived along with the Declaration of Independence; we think it’s a fundamental human right, as natural as the water we drink. Kapesh reminds us that in order to move from the era of heavy petting to this sexual anarchy, sexual anarchists had to set fire to a lot of taboos: like anything else that we take for granted, today’s casual lifestyle was yesterday’s struggle.

During that struggle, Kapesh was an awestruck participant. He wasn’t young enough to take the struggle in stride and accept it as part of his being; he was a mature man, already a married college professor, who saw the revolution for what it was and decided to dive right in. He lost a wife and child during the battle, but he knew what he was getting into and knew what he’d be giving up.

When he gave it up, a lot of what passed for sexual certainty in the society was revealed to be hollow convention. Get married so that he could have unsatisfying but officially sanctioned sex with his wife, meanwhile yearning for the acres of supple flesh that attended his classes every semester; pretend that an omnivorous male could be locked away inside a socially respectable façade.

His son never forgives him. To prove that he’s so much more decent and moral than his father, he gets his girlfriend pregnant and promptly marries her. Tell her to get an abortion, Kapesh tells him. If she refuses, that’s not your problem — the sexual revolution made her a freestanding sexual being and it did the same to you. The son marries her anyway. When he goes on to have an affair a few children later, he has to endow that affair with social respectability: the girl is sweet and loving and intelligent and has wonderful parents. Kapesh can only stare with scorn: you’re trying to camouflage a transaction involving meat. Why pretend that you are anything other than you are? Why lacquer sex with the social respectability that my generation so feverishly cast off?

The son is devastated, but keeps returning to his father, whom he loathes. He needs to parade his respectability before his enemy, but at some level he probably also respects the choice that his father made. In this conflict between father and son, we have three generations of American sexual understanding: the father as a youth (sexual expectation: years of courtship followed by wedding followed by sex), father as grown man (the sexual revolution presents a world of limitless, dangerous possibility), and son as a grown man (trying to reassemble some sexual order after a generation of anarchy).

Into Kapesh’s life comes Consuela, a Cuban student born into the anarchy but standing outside of it. She is beautiful and (it’s important to the story) buxom, but she has kept aloof from the many men who desired her. She can take or leave Kapesh, and this fact drives him crazy. For once he needs control — needs to regain the order that he enthusiastically disposed of; to know that he can’t control her, and that some other man can take her away, sends him into spasms of jealousy. In one rather graphic scene, he throws away all his self-control and lets the anarchy destroy him. Consuela is the agent of his destruction, but stands hautily by while it happens.

All this in not much more than 100 large-print pages. It is the most brutally honest book about sex you will probably ever read. It is an unqualified masterpiece.

The New Yorker gave a very academic review of Exit Ghost. Everything they say about it is true  . . .  and yet I still actually found myself not really enjoying the book. It’s fine, and has some great stylistic touches (like the “He and She” play that the review mentions). But it’s just not especially great. I think Roth gets a lot of credit just for being Roth. If you want to read Roth, go pick up Operation Shylock or the American Pastoral/I Married A Communist/Human Stain trilogy. Unless you’ve been faithfully following Nathan Zuckerman since the 70’s, it’s probably okay to sit this one out.

It must be awfully hard to interview Philip Roth, as I’ve mentioned before. First of all, Roth pours great scorn on the idea of interpreting the author into his books or his characters; that scorn leaks out of practically every page in Exit Ghost. So if you go into the interview with that in mind, you’re going to have to keep to the text of the book. Which is fine: that’s a discipline that more reviewers should have, John Updike among them. Updike’s review of Ann Patchett’s new novel in this week’s New Yorker manages to suck all the life out of Patchett’s earlier novel, Bel Canto, by psychologizing about Patchett when he ought to keep his head in the story. What makes Bel Canto magical is that during the time spent reading it, the rest of the world disappears; there is no world outside that novel. Patchett planned it that way. The characters are tucked off in a house that’s mostly disconnected from the world, in a nameless South American country, and they themselves forget that there is another world outside their doors. The great beauty of Bel Canto is that you and the characters are equally enveloped. (The fact that Updike can’t grasp this may explain why I’ve never been able to read more than a few pages of his writing.)

I mention all of this because Hermione Lee interviews Roth this week. He is bellicose as always about the role of the novelist. He’s adamant that the author’s role is to dig for the particulars of characters, not to deliver sermons; he’s been making that point at least since I Married A Communist.

Roth’s latest is filled with bile for the juvenile way in which critics interpret novels as one-to-one renderings of the authors’ real lives; one of his characters pens a long letter to the New York Times in which she claims that the world would be a better place if all the literature classes of the world disbanded, and all the book reviewers went home. Leave readers alone with their books, she says. She’s particularly incensed that the Times ventured off into the hinterlands of Michigan to interview those who may have inspired Ernest Hemingway’s early short stories. (She may, in fact, be referring to this article.)

So if I were interviewing Roth, I’d try my best not to draw any connections between the world of the books and the world of the world, and try to dive as intensely into his characters as he himself has: to really seek to understand the books, rather than understand Roth. I realize this may be overly limiting, but it would be a refreshing change of pace: I invite anyone to find me an interview with Roth that manages to stick entirely to the details of the books. He obviously encourages us to conflate the man and the character, so I have to blame him. At the same time, this should direct interviewers to ask him about particular moments in Zuckerman’s life as an author — rather than particular moments in Roth’s life that would have led him to mold Zuckerman in a particular way.

Philip Roth’s latest book arrived at the library for me yesterday. It’s the final (so I’m told) book in the Nathan Zuckerman series. Zuckerman, like the protagonist in many of Roth’s works, is possibly a stand-in for Roth himself. At other times (Operation Shylock among them), the protagonist’s name has in fact been “Philip Roth.” Roth — the real-life person — delights in confusing us about where the author ends and the character begins. By this point, it’s hard not to believe that Roth himself is a bitter, incontinent, impotent old man who hides in the Berkshires away from civilization, coming down from the mountain just long enough to buy groceries. Perhaps the real Roth rejects even a friend’s gift of kittens, as Zuckerman does at the beginning of Exit Ghost. Maybe too much companionship distracts the real Roth from the full-time business of being a writer, as it does Zuckerman.

Or maybe not. When the protagonist (“Philip Roth”) in Operation Shylock goes on a quest to find and destroy a man who’s claiming in major newspapers to be the famous author Philip Roth, and using the real author’s good name to spread his own (i.e., the impersonator’s own) noxious ideas, the real Roth may well be telling us to stop looking for the author in the book. Just read the book, appreciate it as literature, and let the book be enough. Maybe. I’ve not made up my mind.

If this were all that one got from Roth’s books, it would be little better than navel-gazing. Instead, his works are embarrassingly rich troves of ideas and intoxicating stories. They’re embarrassing to a non-writer because they’re like a well-executed magic trick: the writing is so simple — almost slapdash — that I’m never sure what it is that gets me hooked. By the fifteenth page of Exit Ghost, I couldn’t put it down. Roth had already set up and torn down two threads that could have been the foundation for the book, and had already introduced what might be a love interest but then again might not. As usual for Roth novels, Exit Ghost feels to me like a sequence of confidently executed quick brush strokes that quickly form a painting of entrancing beauty.

If we decide to view Nathan Zuckerman as a mirror on Philip Roth, then the real author is a husk of a man who’s seen his death approaching for ten or fifteen years. Let’s hope, then, that the character has nothing to do with the man. As a selfish reader, I hope I spend many more years in the company of this awe-inspiring author.

I finished up The Plot Against America last night, having bought it Sunday; it’s quite a quick read. Unfortunately, I don’t know that I can really recommend it, particularly when readers could choose from some of Roth’s masterpieces, among them American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, The Human Stain, or Operation Shylock. Something about TPAA seems stilted, in a way that Roth’s other books aren’t. The characters suddenly develop traits and exercise them for no good reason, other than that the story required it. And then there’s a deus ex machina toward the end that’s just not very plausible. Then there’s a 30-page postscript discussion of the historical research on which the book was based, which seems weird and out of place. Such a postscript seems like the sort of thing that Roth would hate; I imagine him arguing with his publishers, “This book stands on its own; why do I need to insult my readers with a postscript designed for eighth graders?”

There’s another interpretation of the book, which is that it’s not about the characters and is more about reminding Americans that “it can happen here.” I can appreciate that, but it feels like Roth wouldn’t allow himself to go all the way with it.

I guess I’m just puzzled about what he was shooting for here.

P.S.: Speaking with my friend Sharon just now, I was happy to note that she shares a lot of my impressions of the book. I always feel a little on edge if I say something bad about an author I revere as much as Roth, so it’s good to get a little support on such things.

Last night my buddy Stevie read me a passage from Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal — Roth, whose every word nowadays is poetry. Fortunately the passage is available through Amazon’s Search-Inside-The-Book feature. It’s one of the best passages I’ve ever heard on the psychology of jealousy.

How do I know a young man will take her away? Because I was once the young man who would have done it.

When I was younger I wasn’t susceptible. Others got jealous earlier, but I was able to protect myself from that. I let them have their way, confident that I could prevail through sexual dominance. But jealousy, of course, is the trap door to the contract. Men respond to jealousy by saying, “Nobody else is going to have her. I’m going to have her — I’ll marry her. I’ll capture her that way. By convention.” Marriage cures the jealousy. That’s why many men seek it out. Because they’re not sure of that other person, they get her to sign the contract: I will not, et cetera.

How do I capture Consuela? The thought is morally humiliating, yet there it is. I’m certainly not going to hold her by promising marriage, but how else can you hold a young woman at my age? What am I able to offer instead in this milk-and-honey society of free-market sex? And so that’s when the pornography begins. The pornography of jealousy. The pornography of one’s own destruction. I am rapt, I am enthralled, and yet I am enthralled outside the frame. What is it that puts me outside? It is age. The wound of age. Pornography in its classic form has a kick of about five or ten minutes before it becomes kind of comical. But in this pornography the images are extremely painful. Ordinary pornography is the aestheticizing of jealousy. It takes the torment out. What — why “aestheticizing”? Why not “anesthetizing”? Well, perhaps both. It’s a representation, ordinary pornography. It’s a fallen art form. It’s not just make-believe, it’s patently insincere. You want the girl in the porno film, but you’re not jealous of whoever’s fucking her because he becomes your surrogate. Quite amazing, but that’s the power of even fallen art. He becomes a stand-in, there in your service; that removes the sting and turns it into something pleasant. Because you’re an invisible accomplice in the act, ordinary pornography takes the torment out while mine keeps the torment in. In my pornography, you identify yourself not with the satiate, with the person who is getting it, but with the person not getting it, with the person losing it, with the person who has lost.

A young man will find her and take her away. I see him. I know him. I know what he is capable of doing because he is me at twenty-five, as yet without the wife and child; he is me in the raw, before I did what everybody else did. I see him watch her crossing the broad plaza — striding the plaza — at Lincoln Center. He is out of sight, behind a pillar, eyeing her as I did on the evening I took her to her first Beethoven concert. She is in boots, high leather boots and a shapely short dress, a devastating young woman out in the open on a warm autumn night, unashamedly walking the streets of the world for all to covet and admire — and she’s smiling. She’s happy. This devastating woman is coming to meet me. Only it isn’t me in the pornographic film. It’s him. It’s the him who was once me but is no longer. Watching him watching her, I know in detail what is going to happen next, and knowing what is going to happen next, picturing it, it is impossible to think in what you rationally construe as your own self-interest. It is impossible to think that not everybody is feeling this way about this girl because not everybody has an obsession about this girl. Instead, you can’t imagine her going anywhere. You can’t imagine her on the street, in a store, at a party, on the beach without that guy emerging from the shadows. The pornographic torment: watching somebody else do it who was once you.

Philip Roth is now only the third writer who’s had his work published by the Library of America during his lifetime (the other two being Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty). The New York Times has an interview with him for the occasion. The interviewer writes,

Twenty-five years later, in the chaste pages of the Library of America, “Portnoy’s Complaint” still goes off like a car bomb. It’s irreverent; brash and angry at times, full of feeling and affection at others; and in those censorious times, it surely contained more masturbation scenes than any book not sold from under the counter. It’s a dirty book that happens to be extremely funny, and vice versa, and fairly or not, it may be the book for which Mr. Roth will always be best known, the one that got him labeled both a pervert and a betrayer of the Jews. Mr. Roth chuckled at the memory of a chapter whose title is still a little risqué for this newspaper  . . . 

I believe the chapter they’re looking for is called “Whacking Off.” As opposed to the one entitled “Cunt Crazy.” The latter will probably be off-limits to the Times’s august pages for the next millennium or so.

The interview reminds me that I need to find some good pretense to meet Roth. The article suggests that if he isn’t quite the recluse that American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, and The Human Stain portray, he’s pretty close. So if I’m going to meet him — a dream that took on particular urgency for me when Bellow died — I need to find something interesting to talk about. I can’t just send him a letter and say, “I think you’re really cool; wanna get a cup of coffee?” If anyone can think of a good rationale for meeting a famous person, I’d love to hear it. Is “I’d like to interview you for my weblog” good enough?

I finished reading Roth’s The Human Stain last night. It’s really a fantastic cap to the American-life trilogy that also contains American Pastoral and I Married A Communist.

This passage from American Pastoral has always struck me hard, and I’m convinced that it’s the centerpiece of the entire trilogy:

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong all over again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.

This theme keeps coming up again and again: that the author is summoning ghosts out of thin air, that they probably bear no relation to the real people he’s talking about, and that people’s inner lives are completely beyond our understanding.

That’s part of what makes The Human Stain so frustrating: I keep asking whether the narrator is reliable, and it’s quite clear that he’s not — that he is, in fact, honest about his unreliability. And it strikes me that this is why Roth chose Nathan Zuckerman as his narrator: 1) he is a human being, not the omnipotent narrator who can see what his characters are thinking at any given moment; and 2) he is an author, revealing the impotence of that job. When Zuckerman tells us what Coleman Silk or Faunia Farley must have thought at a given moment, it’s quite often clear that he’s manufacturing it out of whole cloth. He has no choice. Zuckerman himself is clear enough about this throughout: Faunia dances for Coleman one night, in a scene that Zuckerman couldn’t possibly have seen; he’d been disconnected from Silk for months. As he describes the dancing, he goes into the characters’ heads and tells us what they were thinking. The point is that Coleman thinks Faunia is thinking something completely different from what Faunia is actually thinking. And so it goes: other people’s fundamental motivations are beyond even the characters’ understanding, and they’re certainly beyond the narrator’s.

This is less literary navel-gazing than it is a study of America at the end of the twentieth century. The characters constantly misunderstand one another, and lives are destroyed as a result. Professor Delphine Roux is alone in her room — lonely, desperate for a man, unsure why she’s failing in the U.S. when she was a star in France. Coleman’s sister goes only so far describing her family’s life before shutting down in a very New England sort of way. The narrator himself is a recluse in the mountains of Western Masachusetts — not hermit-like, but more dissatisfied with the world around him. This is a nation of disconnected Americans.

The crystallization of all these ideas is the final paragraph (which doesn’t really spoil anything, but skip the rest of this review anyway if you don’t like reading final paragraphs before you read a book). The context is that Nathan Zuckerman has just noticed his nemesis — whom he suspects of murder — sitting in the middle of a pond, ice-fishing, and the nemesis has spent a while explaining the role of sharp five-inch augers in ice-fishing:

I turned from the shore, once I was safely there, to look back and see if he was going to follow me into the woods after all and to do me in before I ever got my chance to enter Coleman Silk’s boyhood house and, like Steena Palsson before me, to sit with his East Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner. Just facing him, I could feel the terror of the auger — even with him already seated back on his bucket: the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate’s signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America.

The reader — this one, anyway — has no idea whether Faunia’s ex-husband actually murdered Coleman and Faunia; Zuckerman is convinced of it, but Zuckerman has also saturated the reader with the message that he’s just as unreliable as anyone else. And here at the end of a book, the world is left thinking that Silk is authoritarian, racist, and exploitative, just like they thought when he left Athena College. Everyone is profoundly disconnected from everyone else.

So it’s an uplifting book.

Stylistically, I was less impressed with The Human Stain than with the previous two. I Married A Communist took a rather courageous leap: it’s basically one extended monologue by Murray Levin — a fantastic storyteller — with sidebars by Nathan Zuckerman. American Pastoral is more of a conventional novel, though again with the unreliable narrator throughout. (There’s one moment in American Pastoral where Nathan first says, “He must have thought  . . . ,” and it’s right there that I realized the rest of the book was pure invention, even within the fictional world of the book. I’ll dig around for the quote.) The Human Stain takes frequent leaps into the minds of its characters, so it ends up sounding like a long sequence of monologues — often diatribes by old people about the sad state of the world. Given the effect he’s going for, Roth may have had no other choice: how else do you explain that people are disconnected unless you can step into each of the people and show the world from his or her perspective?

More to the point, I don’t think it’s reasonable to view The Human Stain as a single book; it is the endpoint of a remarkable trilogy about the United States. The trilogy is, I think, three stories about the United States as personified through Nathan Zuckerman. I need to go back and reread the first two, now that I have a reasonably complete picture of all three. When I read American Pastoral, it seemed much more about how Zuckerman idolized Swede Levov, and the effect of the latter’s downfall on the former. Levov had an awful hidden life that tore him apart, personifying the U.S. during the Vietnam War, just as Ira — irascible, anti-intellectual, misdirected — mirrors the 1950’s U.S. in I Married A Communist. Perhaps Coleman Silk is Roth’s mirror in The Human Stain, but I think the mirror could just as well be Zuckerman himself: quiet, withdrawn, exhausted.

I promised to quote a long monologue from Philip Roth’s I Married A Communist a while ago. Here goes:

“Politics is the great generalizer,” Leo told me, “and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other — they are in an antagonistic relationship. To politics, literature is decadent, soft, irrelevant, boring, wrongheaded, dull, something that makes no sense and that really oughtn’t to be. Why? Because the particularizing impulse is literature. How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance? As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, à la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself — for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized. During the first five, six years of the Russian Revolution the revolutionaries cried, ‘Free love, there will be free love!’ But once they were in power, they couldn’t permit it. Because what is free love? Chaos. And they didn’t want chaos. That isn’t why they made their glorious revolution. They wanted something carefully disciplined, organized, contained, predictable scientifically, if possible. Free love disturbs the organization, their social and political and cultural machine. Art also disturbs the organization. Literature disturbs the organization. Not because it is blatantly for or against, or even subtly for or against. It disturbs the organization because it is not general. The intrinsic nature of the particular is to be particular, and the intrinsic nature of particularity is to fail to conform. Generalizing suffering: there is Communism. Particularizing suffering: there is literature. In that polarity is the antagonism. Keeping the particular alive in a simplifying, generalizing world — that’s where the battle is joined. You do not have to write to legitimize Communism, and you do not have to write to legitimize capitalism. You are out of both. If you are a writer, you are as unallied to the one as you are to the other. Yes, you see differences, and of course you see that this shit is a little better than that shit, or that that shit is a little better than this shit. Maybe much better. But you see the shit. You are not a government clerk. You are not a militant. You are not a believer. You are someone who deals in a very different way with the world and what happens in the world. The militant introduces a faith, a big belief that will change the world, and the artist introduces a product that has no place in that world. It’s useless. The artist, the serious writer, introduces into the world something that wasn’t there even at the start. When God made all this stuff in seven days, the birds, the rivers, the human beings, he didn’t have ten minutes for literature. ‘And then there will be literature. Some people will like it, some people will be obsessed by it, want to do it  . . . ’ No. No. He did not say that. If you had asked God then, ‘There will be plumbers?’ ‘Yes, there will be. Because they will have houses, they will need plumbers.’ ‘There will be doctors?’ ‘Yes. Because they will get sick, they will need doctors to give them some pills.’ ‘And literature?’ ‘Literature? What are you talking about? What use does it have? Where does it fit in? Please, I am creating a universe, not a university. No literature.’”

I just finished I Married A Communist. Fantastic book, more or less structured as a long soliloquy by Murray Ringold. A lot of the book is worth quoting, but how about a reverie on the subject of Richard Nixon’s funeral?

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I’m in the middle of Philip Roth’s I Married A Communist right now, and — as always with Roth — I’m amazed. First, he’s an amazing storyteller. Second, he tells these amazing stories with such simple language that it’s hard to figure out where the magic is coming from; there’s no trickery in his writing. Third, at least the last few of his books that I’ve read (this is the seventh) have had one or two really prominent messages around which the rest of the book coheres. In I Married A Communist, I guess you could say the theme is ‘acts’ or ‘masks’: every character in the book seems to be acting in a play, even down to the main character (Ira) who seems outwardly to be the very spirit of untrammeled nature. Even he gives up Communism when his bitterness with the world gets too great. The message seems to be that Americans can’t survive without their masks, which makes me wonder what mask the narrators (yes, there are two) are wearing.

The reason I hold out this building-around-a-theme structure as one of the book’s main selling points is that I’m amazed Roth can construct such skyscrapers atop such a small patch of ground. If the theme in I Married A Communist is “Americans and their masks,” then the theme in Operation Shylock might be “What if each of us had a doppelgänger who is a monstrous version of us? What if that doppelgänger lives inside of us?” Atop either of these themes, Roth builds astonishing novels of incredible power and depth. Combined with his simple language, I keep looking for a trick: how did he combine a simple theme and uncomplicated language (cf. Nabokov) and arrive at novels that are uniformly works of genius?

I Married A Communist is the second book in Roth’s “20th-century America” trilogy (in quotes because I don’t know whether Roth would call it that). The third one — The Human Stain — is my next project. First in the trilogy is American Pastoral, which is almost too good to imagine that a mortal wrote it. It is a book of highly controlled and directed bitterness, anger, frustration and sadness. Along with, say, Love in the Time of Cholera, Herzog, The Brothers Karamazov, and If on a winter’s night a traveler, it’s a novel that will have to go anywhere I go; if my apartment’s burning down, I’m grabbing those on the way out.

So Roth continues to amaze me. I believe he has something like twenty-four novels, of which I own eight. I’ve read from some of his earliest stuff (Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus) to some of his most recent (Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral), and it’s all amazing. I’m very careful with my use of the word “genius” — not every brilliant person is a genius, just as not every smear on a wall is art — but Roth is an unqualified genius.