"Frenzied tract or self-indulgent hobbyhorse"

Reading this Bookslut interview with Cynthia Ozick the other day (the interview is from December; I don't remember where I found the link, sorry), I was interested in her remarks about politics and the novel. The interviewer, Paul Morton, is trying to press her about what he perceives as her lack of engagement with the present, a premise to which she objects. He tries to clarify his question:

I may not have been as precise in what I’m criticizing. There’s a scene in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost that takes place on the 2004 election night. I haven’t seen any writer or journalist depict that night better than Roth does in those 10 pages or so.

I remember it very well. And I remember my reaction to it very well. Notwithstanding my hot admiration for Roth, both in part and as an astonishing whole, this scene struck me as the weakest point in the novel, because -- agree with Roth’s views or not -- it leaped out of the disbelief-suspending frame of the novel to become topical political rage and topical political advocacy. Nothing will kill a novel more than when it falls away from serious irony and veers into frenzied tract or self-indulgent hobbyhorse. Twenty years from now, maybe ten, maybe even five, that scene is going to be as stale and dead and ludicrous on the page as Herbert Hoover’s chicken-in-every-pot oration. It won’t survive even as comedy, though it might as self-indicting cartoon. Still, it goes without saying that Roth’s power and repute will outlast the occasional sermonic glitch.

But think of a book like Fathers and Sons which is filled with conversations that were contemporary to 1861 Russia.

But in Turgenev’s novel, one of my favorites, both sides of the political argument are lived out and imagined from the inside. Turgenev doesn’t sneer, he empathizes, he dramatizes. It’s not mere polemical advocacy thrown down out of animus. You can feel the force of history, and of torn human passions, and the troubled bewilderment of parents, and the draw of family love. For me, the greatest political novel of the twentieth century is A Passage to India, a wonderful case in point of how a novel can transcend its topical politics when the issues themselves have become obsolete. India has been an independent sovereign state for many decades. Its unhappy period as the possession of a foreign power is long over and done with, and today it has a bristling, fruitful international economy. Yet that novel lives beyond the British imperial circumstances of its moment, and why? Because of Aziz, because of Professor Godbole and Mrs. Moore, because of Adela, because of the Marabar Caves, because of a dominating uncanny mystical echo. A beautiful and amazing novel despite its dead political element and yes, the political impulse that may have partly motivated it.

It so happens that I read Exit Ghost just last week. In case you haven't read the book, our man Nathan Zuckerman has returned to New York after several years in self-imposed exile, has entered into an agreement to allow a couple to occupy, for a year, his cabin in the Berkshires in exchange for their apartment in Manhattan. In the scene referred to in the interview, Zuckerman is in the apartment with the couple, who have invited him to celebrate with them what they are sure will be a Democratic victory that night, in the 2004 presidential election, before they officially move out to the cabin. Zuckerman, intentionally, has no knowledge of or interest in what's going on, having stopped following politics years prior, though it seems clear his sympathies are not with the Republicans. His young friends are sure of a Kerry victory, sure of the evil of the Republicans, and just as sure that the latter have destroyed a great thing. They are, of course, disappointed in the event and spend much time denouncing the evil of Bush and Cheney and despairing the direction of this great nation.

A few things interest me about this and Ozick's response to it. First is her assumption that Roth, her hero, in writing this scene, necessarily has failed as a novelist, allowing "frenzied tract or self-indulgent hobbyhorse" to overtake him. Assuming, that is, that inclusion of such a scene can only be Roth taking time to either lecture the reader, or to make his own feelings known, which are otherwise irrelevant. And yet, it is a note-perfect rendition of the kinds of scenes that happened in real life, in true-blue liberal households across the land. Is it relevant to the rest of the book? I think it is, but I'm not going to go to great lengths to argue the point.

Second is her appraisal of the two older novels. She claims that in Fathers and Sons "both sides of the political argument are lived out and imagined from the inside. Turgenev doesn't sneer, he empathizes, he dramatizes. It’s not mere polemical advocacy thrown down out of animus." Note that she refers to both sides of the argument, as if there were only two, as if Turgenev had not selected his two sides to dramatize. In doing so, she fails to notice that two sides are indeed presented in Exit Ghost, that of the politically committed young couple and of the indifferent Zuckerman. And Ozick seems to accept at face value that the only sides involved in the 2004 election, or in any other presidential election, are the Democrats and the Republicans and their respective supporters. But the novel doesn't include any Nader voters, nor any others who might be capable, unlike this couple or Ozick apparently, of recognizing that, awful as they were, the Bush gang did not destroy a "great" thing but were rather implementing an extreme version of basic policies which enjoyed bipartisan support for decades, nor should it necessarily have included such characters. The book is not about the election or about politics. It is, however, largely about the risks of commitment, of life, of involvement, and the attraction of removing oneself from it all, whether for art or security or otherwise. In which case the two "sides" presented are indeed relevant to the novel.

A Passage to India, Ozick claims, is "a wonderful case in point of how a novel can transcend its topical politics when the issues themselves have become obsolete." Apparently, then, it's just fine for a novel to be about politics if those politics don't matter, as long as characters are memorable and place is well enough evoked. How convenient. Is it possible that decades from now Exit Ghost might be able to "transcend its topical politics"? Ozick doesn't say either way, but she implies that the political scenes in the novel are bad by definition. It seems to me that Ozick has allowed her a priori conviction that politics is always detrimental to fiction to determine her take on this particular scene. She claims that it is the weakest part of the book because "agree with Roth’s views or not -- it leaped out of the disbelief-suspending frame of the novel to become topical political rage and topical political advocacy". I'm curious at her assumption that the scene is anything like "political advocacy". What are Roth's views? Are they Zuckerman's or those of the young, politically attuned couple? Both? Neither? It's probably safe to say that Roth strongly identifies with the opinions expressed by the young couple. He is on record as having been appalled by the Bush Administration ("Bush is too horrendous to be forgotten", he says in the linked interview). And yet one can easily see him making common cause with Zuckerman, a sort of "this too shall pass" attitude. So, it could be argued, Roth splits his own attitude on the then-current situation. Possibly, yet it seems to me that this kind of speculation is quite beside the point. I make no great claims for Exit Ghost; it's a perfectly worthy, if sort of slight--in the way that Roth's recent books have managed to somehow be both slight and fascinating--coda to the numerous Zuckerman books. But the question of politics and fiction is important and too often dismissed out of hand by critics like Ozick who find the political novel anathema to aesthetic success, while many who desire the political in their art seem to me to be all too reductive.

I hope to return to these matters in the near future. But before finishing up here, I'd like to hint towards the nature of my problem with the overly reductive approach. I was struck a while back by a comment by jane dark at Ads Without Products, which Ads drew attention to in an excellent post the other day about Lars von Trier's new film, Antichrist:

The most compelling approach to "truth" in the novel is probably Jameson's account of "the real of history" in Political Unconscious and it is exactly what can't be inserted via choosing to do so, as both Ballard and the bourgeois novelists would have us do.

I'd like to meditate on this, and on that which is "exactly what can't be inserted via choosing to do so". . .

Appropriately Insular

Two weeks ago at The Elegant Variation, Mark Sarvas posted in four installments his interview with Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland. Much of the interview is of little interest to me, but I admit that I made a point to skim through the whole thing because Sarvas hinted ahead of time that they were going to be getting into the much-blogged-about Zadie Smith essay from last Fall, in which Smith discussed Netherland alongside Tom McCarthy's Remainder (for example, I wrote about it here, and, sort of, here). In the event, that particular part of the interview doesn't really go anywhere terribly fruitful. Nevertheless, there are a few interesting points I'd like to highlight, since they have bearing on questions that some of us have been discussing of late. I'm posting this now as a placeholder, which I hope will lead into future posts on these topics.

First, from the third part of the interview, in reference to Nobel Committee member Horace Engdahl's controversial remarks about the alleged insularity of contemporary American fiction:

TEV: Do you think that this question of the insular nature of contemporary American fiction afflicts the younger generation in a way that it didn't the Mailers and the Roths and the Bellows?

Joseph O'Neill: No, I think part of the problem for the young generation may be that they're not insular enough. I mean, Updike and Bellow and Roth achieved their finest, most resonant effects by disregarding conventions of universality. You wrote about what American Jews, or what you have you, were up to in these little towns, and the world followed you.

TEV: Very particular and very personal.

Joseph O'Neill: Yeah. There is no space between these writers and their concerns. You rarely get the sense with them that they are just trying to write a novel. I’m talking about their most successful work. And I think they were appropriately insular with regard to their raw materials.

"Appropriately insular". Whatever one thinks of the particular writers mentioned (I'm much higher on Roth and Bellow than I am on Updike, and I couldn't possibly care less about Mailer than I do), this is an excellent observation. I think it speaks to something important about literature, and has bearing on discussions about writing in general, modernism, post-modernism, and so on.

Then in part four they finally come around to addressing Smith's piece:

TEV: Because I agree with you. It's interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up some false oppositions. I feel like this form of the novel is capacious enough to accommodate all different styles

Joseph O'Neill: Yes.

TEV: And the notion that one has to chose [sic] between Netherland or Remainder just seems silly. I liked Remainder a great deal, as well. I don’t feel that they're mutually exclusive, that one must declare an allegiance.

Joseph O'Neill: I'd actually read and liked Remainder before that piece. And I thought it was a perfectly good piece of writing. I'm not sure I would describe it as unconventional, not least because that description, as I've said, would not mean very much.

TEV: Yes. But I think that some of the sentiments that she expresses hold sway among this younger generation of writers, whether it’s people coming out of the McSweeney’s School or the purveyors of the uber-ironic, the tendency toward a hip nihilism or something like that that. That they mistrust, in essence, the idea of a beautiful sentence. Some people find that corny, the notion of a beautiful sentence.

Joseph O'Neill: Well, it depends on how you define them as beautiful. I mean, you know, Foster Wallace wrote many beautiful sentences. I mean, there's nothing but beautiful sentences in his work. Even though he had a particular way of doing it. What makes a sentence beautiful, for me, is its conscientiousness. A hip, ironic sensibility is not necessarily conscientious. Neither is a sensibility that latches on to dusks and dawns and roses.

Obviously O'Neill is put in a weird position, having to comment on such an essay, but TEV sets the terms of the discussion in a not very helpful fashion. Though he's not wrong to observe that Smith set up a false opposition of sorts, I would argue that the much celebrated "capaciousness" of the novel is actually a problem (and by the way think that TEV is one of those who drew "the wrong kind of conclusions" from the essay). But I'll leave further remarks for future posts.

Solving the Problems

In the course of writing my last post, I was reminded of an interview with Philip Roth that appeared in the Guardian four years ago, in which Roth said the following:

My interest is in solving the problems presented by writing a book. That's what stops my brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow, obsessing about nothing. Some people do crossword puzzles to satisfy their need to keep the mind engaged. For me, the absolutely demanding mental test is the desire to get the work right. The crude cliché is that the writer is solving the problem of his life in his books. Not at all. What he's doing is taking something that interests him in life and then solving the problem of the book - which is, How do you write about this? The engagement is with the problem that the book raises, not with the problems you borrow from living. Those aren't solved, they are forgotten in the gigantic problem of finding a way of writing about them.

Aharon Appelfeld and historical fact

I read Philip Roth's novel Operation Shylock years before I ever heard of Aharon Appelfeld. Which you could say only goes to show you how much attention I paid to that novel, since Appelfeld makes numerous appearances in it (before he learns of the "other" Philip Roth impersonating him, narrator-Roth's stated reason for going to Israel is to interview the Israeli novelist Appelfeld). In defense of my younger self, when I read the novel I was not nearly as informed as I am today about Israel and Palestine and the United States' role in that land's politics and history, and as for Appelfeld himself, his name simply must not have stuck in my mind, though I remember other aspects of the novel fairly well, all things considered. (I think a re-read is in order.)

Ellis Sharp wrote about Operation Shylock and Appelfeld not too long ago. The real-life Roth is an admirer and champion of Appelfeld. In his post, Ellis quotes for us a passage from Operation Shylock in which the imitation Roth lambasts the "real" Roth:

he had picked up Aharon's Tzili and was showing me how far he’d got in reading it. 'This stuff is real poison,' he said, 'Everything Diasporism fights against. Why do you think highly of this guy when he is the last thing we need? He will never relinquish anti-Semitism. It's the rock he builds his whole world on. Eternal and unshakeable anti-Semitism. The man is irreparably damaged by the Holocaust – why do you want to encourage people to read this fear-ridden stuff?'

This is interesting for a variety of reasons. One of the recurring ideas in Roth's fiction is this battle between "Diasporism" and, not orthodoxy, quite, but let's call it "un-Diasporism". Roth's characters assert, argue, and act out their own Jewishness, and their own humanity, in the face of community and family pressure on what being Jewish should entail, or in the face of responsibility to community needs. In his trip to Israel in Portnoy's Complaint, Portnoy is ridiculed for his Diasporism, whereas in the States, he is constantly aware of his Jewishness in the context of his experience of the WASP-y superculture.

In Appelfeld's fiction, there can be discerned a consistent rebuke to assimilationist Jews. Jews who tried to live within the larger society, who considered themselves German, say, or Austrian, only to have that sensibility mean nothing when the Holocaust rendered everything outside of racial categories null and void, seem perhaps foolish in the full light of history. I think there is a tendency to think that because the Holocaust did happen, that it or something similarly horrible was inevitable, given the centuries of entrenched European anti-Semitism. I think it could be argued that Appelfeld's fiction, undeniably powerful as much of it is (The Age of Wonders is particularly remarkable), in a sense contributes to this line of thinking. For in his fiction, the lives he depicts are doomed, are they not? We know the Holocaust looms, either a few years away, or perhaps decades. We know that their daily struggles will amount to nothing in the face of such an enormous, monstrous historical inevitability. For in the novels, the Holocaust is inevitable: don't they rely on our knowledge of it? And yet, let's be fair: it's not as if any of our daily struggles amount to much. We are all doomed, finally. But, we are not all doomed to succumb to a racialised, historical, group calamity.

A consistent rebuke to assimilationists may be discernible in his fiction, though I don't sense that this is Appelfeld's focus. He is writing about a world, a world that has ceased to exist. This world consists of Jews in various different guises. His Jews are just trying to live their lives the best they can, though no doubt they are often shown at their worst. Some are assimilated, some are not. Debates, arguments, about Jewishness are common among these Jews, just as they are among those in Roth's fiction. And his fiction, his world, is haunted by the unimaginable destruction that we know as readers is coming.

Ellis thinks of Appelfeld as no more than "at best an interesting minor novelist", but he reserves most of his criticism for the man and his role within the politics and memory of present-day Israel. Of the passage quoted above from Operation Shylock, Ellis says:

as a perception of Appelfeld the man it is stunningly accurate. Appelfeld’s sensibility is lodged deep in a past and in a society which no longer exist. This supplies an exemplary source for his fiction but is disabling when he has to address why the contemporary Zionist state is widely regarded with hostility. Representing the European condition as a seething sea of anti-Semitism is the lazy trope of Zionists not prepared to scrutinise the history of their sectarian state or the priviliges it affords them as members of the master religion. Roth, I think, shrewdly understands this. He sees that there are two Aharon Appelfelds – the novelist, whose work can only ever be judged on its own terms, and the wounded, fallible man.

At least Roth the novelist--the artist--shrewdly understands this point. I've seen some indications in interviews that Roth the man might not be quite as shrewd.

I have not read Appelfeld's very highly regarded memoir, A Story of a Life. The sense I get from some of the notices I've read is that it's not unlike some of his novels, with much passed over in silence. This, I expect, could make for some powerful reading. However, I find Ellis' lengthy piece from last summer on the memoir persuasive on certain key points. The piece is titled "The Blindness of Aharon Appelfeld". The blindness refers to Appelfeld's apparent inability or unwillingness to see the similarities between Nazi treatment of the Jews in Europe, and Israeli treatment of Arabs in Palestine. So saturated in anti-Semitism is Appelfeld (as the Operation Shylock passage has it) that he can't see what is happening right in front of him as he begins his life in what was still called Palestine when he arrived, soon to become Israel. Again, I haven't read the memoir, so I can't comment on it directly. But the problem Ellis identifies with it and Appelfeld's attitude about being a Jewish writer living in Jerusalem, is still all too common among Anglo-American liberals and leftists (not to mention others). Even though Israel's prestige has lessened considerably in recent years, liberals and leftists are still sensitive to the charge of anti-Semitism (a charge often carelessly made) and it's still common for Israel to be seen as a righteous cause (and as a bulwark of modernity in a sea of primitive fundamentalism), in the face of all facts or reasonable moral argument to the contrary.

In his piece, Ellis provides various passages from A Story of a Life, juxtaposing them with certain passed over historical facts about what was happening to the Arabs at the same time. Appelfeld, Ellis writes,

has never shown the slightest interest in any other perspective about his homeland other than that of Judaism. And where exactly was Appelfeld during the height of the Naqba [the catastrophe]? He doesn’t say. Palestinian suffering has no existence for Appelfeld: his gaze is inward. "The years 1946 to 1950 were years of verbiage; when life is full of ideology, words and clichés abound. Everyone talked."

Ellis rightly points out that the years 1946 to 1950 were full of much more than words, but were in fact the years of mass, forcible dispossession of the Palestinians. But surely a memoirist, one who is not a political figure, is entitled to the inward gaze? Perhaps. However, Ellis is particularly compelling, I think, as he explains why this is a problem:

Appelfeld says, “We had come to Israel, as the saying went, ‘to build and to be rebuilt.’ (p. 116) That the building of the Jewish state was done on stolen property is a matter of complete indifference to Appelfeld: he completely erases Palestine and its indigenous population from his self-serving memoir. [. . .]

No one in the West would use the word "holocaust" without an awareness that that word now carries a specific historical resonance. But Appelfeld uses the word "catastrophe" (e.g. pp. 185, 187, 189) as if it had no resonance at all in the land in which he has spent most of his life. The Story of a Life is, at a foundational level, a work of Naqba denial.

[For an interesting article about the Naqba and Naqba denial, see here.]

Interestingly, Appelfeld's fiction relies on our knowledge of certain historical facts. And, it hardly needs to be said, the Holocaust is a huge one, hard to ignore or forget (even as there are those who choose to deny it). Yet, it seems that some of the effectiveness of Appelfeld's memoir ironically relies on the reader not knowing, or ignoring, certain facts, whether Appelfeld intends it or not. And the facts of the dispossession of the Palestinians and the imposition of the state of Israel are, unfortunately, not widely known. Indeed, in the West, huge amounts of counter-facts are held to be true. If Appelfeld's memoir resembles Ellis' account of it, and he has given me little to reason to think that it doesn't, then I think his memoir, as distinct from his fiction, is problematic. His fiction depicts, often powerfully, the lost world of European Jewry. Readers could quibble about the factual basis for some of these depictions if they wanted, I suppose, but finally they are works of the imagination, rooted in history and haunted by a single, brute, ugly fact--the fact of the Holocaust--a fact that cannot be quibbled with or denied. And yet we continually deny or ignore other monstrous facts.

A generalization to close this post: I tend to approach memoirs more or less the same way I approach novels, in the sense that they are literary creations of a time and place, in their cases explicitly from the writer's life. I don't expect the writer's memory to be flawless, and I'm not overly bothered by some degree of factual embellishment or artful shaping of the story being told. However, there are facts that are larger than the author, and with these I expect more care.

A further generalization intended to point toward future considerations of literature and its relation to life: The same is true of fiction.

But, some complicating questions: Which facts are larger than the author? I've asserted that, uncontroversially, the Holocaust is one such fact. Ellis Sharp, I think, has convincingly demonstrated that the Naqba is another. Which others? Who decides? How much might it matter in each given case?

Noted

In Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson, Nathan Zuckerman has been suffering from mysterious physical ailments--debilitating pain--and has not written anything since his controversial Carnovsky four years prior brought him fame and fortune--and scorn. He is blocked, unable to continue, ready to give it up:

However bad it was, always he'd pushed sanely on until a new alliance came along to help restore the old proportions. Only during the last half year had gloomy, frightening bouts of confusion seriously begun to erode the talent for steady living, and that wasn't from the pain alone: it was also from living without nursing a book that nursed him. In his former life he could never have imagined lasting a week without writing, he used to wonder how all the billions who didn't write could take the daily blizzard—all that beset them, such a saturation of the brain, and so little of it known or named. If he wasn't cultivating hypothetical Zuckermans he really had no more means than a fire hydrant to decipher his existence. But either there was no existence left to decipher or he was without sufficient imaginative power to convert into his fiction of seeming self-exposure what existence had now become. There was no rhetorical overlay left: he was bound and gagged by the real raw thing, ground down to his own unhypothetical nub. He could no longer pretend to be anyone else, and as a medium for his books he had ceased to be.

Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth

I've read a fair amount of Philip Roth's fiction (13 novels) and have liked a lot of it. Sabbath's Theater, for example, is one of my favorite novels. But he's quite patchy, I think, and annoyingly, his books that appear to be about something "important" (American Pastoral) or can be read as commenting on current events (The Human Stain; The Plot Against America) are the ones that seem to receive the most praise. When he's on, he's very good, and even in those books that I think are over-praised there are astonishing passages in which that voice kicks into overdrive and it becomes clear to me, again, why Philip Roth is worth reading (I excerpted one such passage from American Pastoral here).

Of the 13 Roth novels I've read, however, only two date from the first two decades of his publishing life--his debut, the National Book Award-winning Goodbye, Columbus (from 1959), and Portnoy's Complaint (1969) Portnoy was the first Roth book I ever read. I was underwhelmed by it at the time but liked enough in it to continue reading him. I re-read the book last week, and found more to appreciate this time around but also more to question. It's funnier than I found it the first time (and, of course, that's it's rep: it's supposed to be fucking hilarious) and there are those brilliant flights of the Roth voice. But it has some troubling aspects, some of which may be generational, some of which are, in a sense, political. The book is in the form of Alexander Portnoy's sessions with his psychiatrist. We only read what Portnoy says. He weaves in and out of reveries about his childhood, complaints about his parents, his hard-working, constipated father, his ubiquitous mother (a lot of Oedipal business--it is in part a parody of Freudian psychosexual theories), his obsession with masturbation (admittedly very funny), his fixation on gentile women.

In his generally unfavorable review of Sabbath's Theater, which appears in the essay collection The War Against Cliché (I was looking for a specific line I thought I'd remembered--something to the effect of "Roth has always been a transgressive writer"--but of course I was unable to find such a line, though the word "transgressive" appears in the review), Martin Amis writes the following:

Erotic prose is either pallidly general or unviewably specialized. Universality crumbles into a litter of quirks. After a while it provokes in the reader only one desire: the desire to skip. You toil on, looking for the clean bits.

I differ with Amis about Sabbath's Theater (though he's quite right that it's very dirty), but his point, I think, is true enough. I'm not a prude, I'm not offended by the presence of sex in a book, certainly not by profanity, but I do tend to find an abundance of scenes like this off-putting. Aside from being often very boring, they are tiring. Or, rather, the frequency is tiring. And here's where I come to the generational point. Reading Portnoy's Complaint again, I was reminded of something I've observed in other male writers of a similar age--for example, John Updike or David Lodge--that is, how often the characters in these writers' books fuck, how much they are fixated on finding women, primarily to fuck. (I use the word "fuck" with purpose, and in a particular way: sex is "fucking" and is what is done to women.) The passages in the books that actually describe sexual acts are, as mentioned, often boring or embarrassing, but it's the passages (or the accumulation of such passages) about the obsession that are mysterious to me. I ascribe much of it to the fact that these writers were beginning their writing lives in the 1950s and 1960s, when, the story goes, sexual matters were loosening up, culturally. It's very difficult to imagine the more straight-laced mores of popular memory, difficult to imagine the milieu in which these writers were first coming of age and then writing. It must have felt liberating to be able to actually write explicitly about sexuality, but it can make for some tiresome reading.

I have a bigger problem with Portnoy's Complaint than the occasional bit of tiresome reading. While leafing through The War Against Cliché, I noticed Amis' review of The Counterlife. To Amis, this is the great Philip Roth novel, the book in which Roth finally fulfilled his early promise. It's hard to argue; it is indeed one of Roth's finest works, probably second to Sabbath's Theater in my estimation. In the review, Amis argues the following:

The agent, the catalyst, is unquestionably Israel. Here is a subject all right, and it may even be that Roth has spent half his life readying himself to take it on. He went there before, carrying Portnoy's passport, and the place defeated him: the Israel section was the only major weakness of Portnoy's Complaint, and that is a measure of how far we have come [in Roth's fiction]. Set against The Counterlife, the earlier book looks regressive and dead-ended; for all its savage splendours, Portnoy was a farewell to youth, and Roth had to say goodbye to all that. Yet Jewishness in one form or another--and the more obsessive the better--has always been the real goad to his eloquence. [...] In any event, Roth has now come home, artistically. 'Jews Jews', 'Jew-engrossed, Jew-engorged', 'JewJewJew': this is the front line of the talent.

I think Amis is dead-on here. Certainly the best parts of Portnoy's Complaint (most of the book, in truth, including the sex) consist of his riffing on Jewishness--what it means to be a Jew, growing up Jewish, and American, among the goyim, exploited by those perfect Protestants, with their ridiculous, comical Christianity. Amis is also right about the weakness of the Israel section, though perhaps not entirely for the reasons he might name. Towards the end of the book, Portnoy recounts the events of his trip to Israel, having fled his latest goyische girlfriend in Greece after a nasty fight. Arriving in Israel, he notices something: "I am in a Jewish country. In this country, everybody is Jewish." (It perhaps goes without saying that Portnoy, or Roth, does not see--or does not notice--Arabs. This I find, well, interesting, to say the least. But I won't delve into what that absence represents.) Throughout the novel, he has been obsessed with his Jewishness and how it measures up against the mainstream American culture. He has been fixated on sex ("Crazy for Cunt" as he puts it), obsessed with shikses. He has been the good little boy, getting the good grades, growing up to do good, to in fact be good (he becomes a lawyer who works for the city on behalf of the downtrodden), yet forever drawn to ever more perverse sexual relationships, inevitably--he thinks--unsatisfactory relationships, which he looks on with shame, conflicting as they do with his received notions of what constitutes "goodness"--amidst reveries in which he realizes that he really only wants the life his parents had. Again, the Freudian stuff has been laid on intentionally thick (in a passage explaining why he doesn't need dreams since his real life is "disproportionate and melodramatic" enough, he says: "Who else do you know whose mother threatened him with the dreaded knife? Who else was so lucky as to have the threat of castration so straight-forwardly put by his momma?").

Against this backdrop, Portnoy arrives in Israel, astonished to find Jews comfortable in their own skin. He tries to take Israeli women to bed (as he inevitably must, or else he wouldn't be in a Roth book), but is unable to perform. He finally meets a woman, recently done with her Army service, who grew up within the kibbutz movement, and who in his "hysterical" condition he decides, virtually instantly, he must marry:

Right off we began making serious talk about mankind. Her conversation was replete with passionate slogans not unlike those of my adolescence. A just society. The common struggle. Individual freedom. A socially productive life. But how naturally she wore her idealism, I thought. Yes, this was my kind of girl, all right--innocent, good-hearted, zaftig, unsophisticated and unfucked-up. Of course! I don't want the movie stars and mannequins and whores, or any combination thereof. I don't want a sexual extravaganza for a life, or a continuation of this masochistic extravaganza I've been living, either. No, I want simplicity, I want health, I want her!

In fact, she looks just like his mother. Yes, and Portnoy is well aware of how ridiculous it is that the simplistic Oedipal drama seems to be unfolding in the most vulgar form in his real life. But that's not my problem. My problem is what he does with this. Up till this point, at least in Portnoy's version of events (which is all we have, obviously), Portnoy may have acted like an insensitive jerk with many of the women he involved himself with, but he doesn't appear to clearly be the villain. But in Israel it's different: He wants to marry the good Jewish girl who looks like his mother. She, naturally, thinks he's insane. He tries to persuade her to have sex with him. She refuses. He persists. She tries to leave his hotel room. He tackles her. He tries to rape her (his "mother"). He is unsuccessful because he can still not maintain an erection in Israel. And in his telling he expresses no regret for trying to force himself on her, but only regret that he was unable to succeed. These paragraphs are particularly ugly and left a bad taste in my mouth.

The Israel section seems tacked on and unconvincing after the more assured parts of the rest of the book. But they also lay bare the ugliness underlying the basic attitude towards women throughout which holds that women owe men sex, or that they are merely the pawns moved about in the lives of men, the medium on which men work out their psychosexual problems, unable themselves to escape the simplistic Madonna/whore dichotomy. My point here is not to be yet another person accusing Roth of "hating women". Unfortunately, it can be argued all too accurately that his fiction, in this respect, simply reflects the wider misogynist societal attitudes. The point is also not that Roth should be conforming to my own sense of political correctness, but rather that a literary weakness is revealed. Returning to Martin Amis' Counterlife review, in which Amis praises Roth's ability to render a particularly clandestine--and to the English Amis, dismayingly accurate--form of English anti-Semitism. Amis says: "Roth did well to hear it, to catch it; but that is how he interprets the world--he listens to it." In large part, this observation is correct. But Roth evinces a certain tone-deafness, a certain inability to listen when it comes to women, and the degree to which this is true--even as his response that he is a man and therefore writes about men makes a certain degree of sense to me--amounts to a weakness in his art. It is definitely a weakness in Portnoy's Complaint.

Genre

Last week, Ed Champion posted a "field report" from Richard Grayson, who attended the NBCC panel discussion, The Mandarin at the Minimart: What We Talk about When We Talk about Mass Market Fiction. In the discussion it appears (as conveyed by Grayson) that the panel-members are talking past each other, that no one seems to share any definitions or expectations. In many respects, it is reduced to publishing and reviewing decisions (admittedly, the basic topic of the panel is the question of why "genre" or "popular" books are treated differently than "literary" books by reviewers and review pages). Book A is marketed as Science Fiction or Mystery, so it gets ignored, or shunted off to a genre review page. Book B is marketed as "literary fiction", etc. Panel-member Walter Mosley says that the "smartest writers wrote science fiction". Another, Louise Ermilino of Publishers Weekly, says that "good writing is good writing" no matter where it appears, and later asserts that "a hundred years from now, people are more likely going to be reading Stephen King than Philip Roth". Everyone seems to agree that it's all about story, and good stories can be found anywhere.

Ok, I have no desire to rehash the entire thing, but some points interest me, particularly in the context of my last couple of posts. First of all, I agree that "good writing is good writing". I see no reason why a nominally "genre" book could not be great art or great literature. The key word, though, is "nominally". If they are great literature, they cease to be "genre". In case it's not clear, I think the same is true of most so-called "literary fiction".

One thing said in the panel, which I've seen said elsewhere, is that "literary" writers "borrow" from genre, and get treated with more respect:

Cormac McCarthy wrote a genre novel [presumably The Road, which I gather is set in a post-apocalypse, like many dystopian SF novels; but what about Blood Meridian? Is not "western" a genre?] [...] Philip Roth can do alternate history in The Plot Against America and literary reviewers who don’t know that genre actually give Roth credit for inventing that kind of book, as if he were the first one to do it...

I think these kinds of comments are revealing. While it's probably true that many reviewers did give Philip Roth all kinds of credit for "inventing" alternate history (and more generally true that literary writers get more respect than genre writers when they "borrow"), this is because most reviewers don't know what they're talking about. The best parts of The Plot Against America (which, incidentally, I thought was wildly overpraised) were those that were the most typically Rothian. Roth, it seemed clear to me, chose his setting as an interesting way to explore certain ongoing fictional concerns of his. Whenever he had to move the plot of the alternate history along, it became less interesting and often felt rushed. As a result, this aspect of the book was unquestionably "unsatisfying". But I doubt he cared whether it was conventionally satisfying. No doubt several SF writers would have handled it better, made the facts of the alternate world more convincing, but it would have been quite beside the point; they wouldn't have been Philip Roth. Same with Cormac McCarthy. It's pointless to say that he "wrote a genre novel".

Then there's Ermilino's comment, quoted above, that "a hundred years from now, people are more likely going to be reading Stephen King than Philip Roth". No, they're not. Stephen King is popular entertainment. Philip Roth is a great writer. I see this kind of thing said all the time. This inability, or refusal, to tell the difference is depressing. But, then, what does she mean by "people"? "People" don't read Roth now, if we mean people in the huge kinds of numbers who read Stephen King. A hundred years from now, the people that read Roth will be the same kinds of people who read Henry James now, broadly speaking. Some other popular writer will be in King's place. I don't see why it should be offensive to say this. King gets routinely compared to Dickens and to Shakespeare--not their abilities as writers, of course, but their apparent popularity, as if this is any kind of useful indicator. People read Dickens and Shakespeare now, don't they?, these people observe, ergo they will be reading King a hundred years hence. And if you don't think so you must be a snob, looking down on other people's "tastes".

More later.

Wrong Again

American Pastoral is not my favorite Philip Roth novel, and I've complained about the fact that it is, in my opinion, consistently over-praised, while the masterful Sabbath's Theater, for example, is all too often ignored. That said, I do like it, and there's no question that it has some great writing in it. For a variety of reasons that I won't go into here, I feel compelled to post the following passage (which had been brought back to my attention via this interview with Peter Carey by Robert Birnbaum in 2003):

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 all wrong 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 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 Sea, and 1000 Other Books

Ellis Sharp has gotten around to reading John Banville's Booker-winning novel, The Sea, and admits that he must agree with Tim Sterne that it "remains a listless, lifeless exercise in aesthetic pretension" and that "[t]hematically, the novel is tired and unoriginal". When Banville's novel won the Booker Prize, there was much ado in the British press about it about how it was a horribly snooty selection, proof that the Literary Establishment is out of touch with regular readers, or some such nonsense. But, comparing it to Ian McEwan's Saturday, Sharp observes that The Sea is basically plot-driven: "It lures the reader on to the end, to find out how everything resolved itself. And finally the pieces all click together, like a jigsaw. There is nothing, at the end, to furrow the reader’s brow. Both novels aspire to be serious literature but supply the sweet-tasting delights of a certain type of genre fiction."

I enjoy reading Banville's prose, and I enjoyed reading The Sea, at the surface level. However, it definitely felt slight in comparison to his other work, and the writing itself, unusually for him, I thought, was occasionally awkward. I've now read the six novels published immediately prior to The Sea, and I must conclude that it's by far the weakest of the bunch. I think Eclipse and the loose trilogy comprising The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena are all excellent novels (all "engaging the mind", too).

This is as good a reason as any to mention that ridiculous 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die business several others have noted. Both The Sea and Saturday are on it, which perhaps tells you all you need to know, but I'll bore you some more about it. Steve Mitchelmore expressed annoyance about the list because it resists "randomness; as if all one has to do is read the 1001 and you're done." He also noted its typical wrongheadness, where this book places over that one, etc, which is inevitable in any such large list. Of course, I agree with him about the random appeal of learning about books via blogs and the like, yet I like to look at lists; there's usually something interesting on them, something random, in its way, that I hadn't come across before. But this one is so huge it defies that kind of effect. And its particular wrongheadness is worth noting. It's almost as if the compilers couldn't be bothered to make decisions on what to include on their own list. Nearly half of it is taken up by books since 1960. It's actually kind of nice to see contemporary fiction get shown such regard, but this is pretty silly. And it's pretty heavily weighted towards British Commonwealth writers (generally Booker-eligible). I haven't read the vast majority of books on it, but I remain skeptical that many of them are truly "essential", that I simply MUST read them before I die. It's as if the compilers simply raked in a whole bunch of award-winning and/or generally well-reviewed novels and left it at that (and maybe they claim no different, and maybe the introduction to the book says just this). And yet they still managed to leave off Richard Powers and William H. Gass, just to name two very highly regarded writers. Meanwhile, there are ten (ten!) J.M. Coetzee books on the list, seven Philip Roth, eight Ian McEwan... Coetzee, Roth, and McEwan are all writers I have enjoyed, but their books that appear on the list are damn good indications that the criteria for what might constitute "essential" are rather lax, if not missing altogether. Once again: Roth has written some books I would call essential, but The Plot Against America and The Human Stain are not among them (Sabbath's Theater is). And Ian McEwan has written some very fine novels (I'm partial to Atonement, Enduring Love, and The Child In Time, though even among these three I don't know that all of them are quite essential), but Saturday and Amsterdam are bullshit. With Coetzee, it's like they couldn't decide at all, threw up their hands, and listed nearly his entire published works. Etc.

I find I've pretty run out of interest on this one. Glad I could share!