Philip Roth, Part I

I think I mentioned previously that I was in the middle of reading everything ever written by Philip Roth in chronological order. That isn't exactly true--rather than read them in direct chronological order, I'm going to read all the books with the same characters (i.e. Zuckerman, Kepesh, Roth) in order, and apart from that read everything chronologically. You may also happen to recall from a previous post that one of my goals for this year was to read the entire repertoire of at least four authors. Philip Roth is a stupid place to start. I've read 5 of what I calculate to be 28 books, so this is going to take me some time, especially since ILL won't give me "The Breast" anytime soon. So far, though, I have read:

Goodbye, Columbus: Not technically a novel but a novella with five short stories tacked onto the end of it, all dealing in some way with the rejection of Jewish identity. Goodbye, Columbus itself is a pretty good if slight read, and it ends pretty abruptly, which is not true of virtually anything else in Roth's repertoire. His protagonist, Neil Klugman, is the first in a line of several Roth protagonists that I find are eerily like myself. He even works at his college library. The story basically details his romance with this rich shiksa, and how it eventually deteriorates due to the rules and strictures of her society, which includes not having sex. This is something Roth is going to come back to again and again. The language is right on, even if there are long stretches where nothing really happens and some of the characters of purposefully eccentric. I personally enjoyed a subplot involving a young black kid who goes to the library Neil works at every day to look at this book of Gauguin paintings. Roth doesn't do this very much, but I think he is much better at using African-American characters than, say, Saul Bellow.

The remaining five stories are very good, perhaps even better than the novella. I personally enjoyed "Defender of the Faith" and "Epstein," if you care, but you should definitely read all of them. This is a good place to start with Roth, not necessarily because it is first chronologically, but also because it introduces themes that would become much more pronounced later.

Letting Go: Technically Roth's first novel, alternately horrifying, confusing, gut-wrenching and silly. Reading about this book online, I get the impression that people don't seem to really like it, and particularly object to the 600-page length. I can sort of see this book being a decent 400-page book, but I don't know what exactly I would take out first. I don't know if this is a success, but there are scenes of astonishing power. Chief among them, to me, is Roth's description of a young couple sitting in a diner, passing time until they are scheduled to meet with an abortion doctor. Also, towards the end, a scene where the protagonist tries to argue with a man whose wife gave up her child to adoption to that same couple. This can sound kind of melodramatic, and it actually is at times, but there is still a lot of power there. My main quibble is that the book seems to be set up half first-person and half third-person, for whatever reason, but then Roth gives up the first-person aspect at the 400 page mark. Don't ask me why.

When She Was Good: This novel is unique in Roth's work in that it has a female, non-Jew protagonist, Lucy Nelson. It is also unique in that she is by far the least sympathetic and most cruel protagonist Roth has ever had, a jerk who continually makes selfish and unreasonable demands of her husband and her family, and then chastises them to the point of tears when they inevitably fail her. As a result, I think this book gave Roth somewhat of a reputation as a misogynist, and I think I remember reading that he happened to write this book at a time when he and his wife were having some problems. I don't think Roth is a misogynist, but I think his female characters are definitely skewed, if not in this book than in others. Apart from how shockingly evil Lucy turns out to be, this book is about as melodramatic as Roth ever got, and while he does some interesting things with the form, it seems like the first 50 pages amount to nothing and the ending is almost a cartoon.

Portnoy's Complaint: I've already read this book before, but it is a phenomenally easy book to reread. Those of you who haven't read it, I beseech you: it's very important that you do. As embarrassing as it is to say, it can tell you a lot about Nathan Sacks. Not the stuff about masturbating copiously into liver pies, I swear: more just my continual need to reject my identity, my uneasiness with having a double life being on the one hand "socially conscious" and on the other being completely selfish, and, as Portnoy says, "Heaven is a shiksa under your arm saying love, love, love," or something like that (a prize to whoever actually knows what the quote is). Basically I just can't play with Jewish girls, if only because my mom told me I should. Philip Roth knows my life!

Anyway, there's nothing else I need to say about this book. It's fantastically structured (an extended monologue to a silent therapist) and merits repeated readings. The dialogue is very loose and very hilarious. There are moments of this book that are absolutely disgusting (although the liver part is probably the peak), but only a prude could say this is not a great book.

Our Gang: This book seems to have been written by a different author. For starters, it's not really a linear novel, it's actually more of a "closet drama," which I learned from Wikipedia is a "play not intended to be performed onstage," despite the fact that there are a few stage directions.

Basically, Our Gang is posited as a very blunt political satire starring Trick E. Dixon (get it?) and numerous unnamed cronies both in the White House and in the press. It's supposed to be a satire of Nixon's supposedly secretive administration, his warlike tendencies, and his tendency to just lie, lie, and keep lying. There are some very funny parts to this book, particularly in the beginning, where Dixon supports William Calley's massacre of villagers in My Lai, but is given pause when he is asked if it is possible that some of the villagers could have been pregnant, and therefore Calley might have unknowingly performed an abortion, which Nixon viewed as, "an unacceptable form of population control." That's about as deep as the political satire in this book gets, which in a way is sort of good, because if it was any more subtle chances are it would be a lot more dated than it already is. It isn't helped by the fact that compared to today's politicians, Dixon seems relatively par for the course. It's an interesting footnote in Roth's career, and definitely worth reading (it's also really short), but I don't know why he wrote it.

Coming up, when I get the chance: The Breast, The Professor of Desire, The Dying Animal, The Great American Novel, and My Life As A Man.