Philip Roth, Part VI: The End

So, only three more books, all of them having nothing to do with any Kepeshes, Zuckermans, or Roths. The journey was fun and immensely helpful in regards to my honors stuff, and I hope to do this again with another author. But which one? Probably a white male. I fear I will spend the rest of my life feeling that I am woefully under read. I can now carefully consider myself a Roth scholar, but I want more. Indignation comes out in October.

Sabbath's Theater: If I were to choose one book from Roth's oeuvre to read again immediately, this one might be it, despite its comparatively massive length and the pallor of decay and gloom hanging over it. Make no mistake, this is an absolutely perfect novel that distills all the best aspects of Roth: comical scatology; spot-on dialogue; a feel for even the most minor of characters; an ability to pace; and a predilection to do new, interesting and novel things with the form. He squeezes every last drop of narrative potential from what could have been a very ordinary story about an aging, disgraced puppeteer near the end of his life, mourning the loss by cancer of a very special mistress and yearning to redo the whole thing again. Mickey Sabbath is an incredibly disgusting and vile, yet he is a lovable character, and his relationship with the doomed mistress, Drenka, is as touching as it is vomit-inducing (I swear, I don't know how he does this stuff so well). There are a good dozen or so brilliant moments that I feel like rereading immediately, including a transcript of a phone sex conversation (can't think of any better one off the top of my head), a Ulysses-esque digression imagined by Sabbath on a subway, Sabbath trying in vain to buy some vodka so that a woman he met at a rehab facility--where he was supposed to be visiting his wife--would sleep with him, Sabbath revisiting his home, the description of various depraved sexual practices that Sabbath and Drenka engage in without abandon, and several others. This is a very special book that packs an emotional wallop right to the very end, and has probably the best opening and closing lines of any Roth book I can think of. This book is about as depraved as Roth got, and it isn't for the faint of heart, but it's as moving a character study as I believe Roth is capable of constructing.

Shop Talk: Not much to say about this book: like Reading Myself and Others, this is straight non-fiction (a rarity for the author), although this time Roth is smart enough to take himself out of the equation, mostly, and presents a series of mostly interviews and appreciations of authors he admires. I found this book only intermittently interesting as I had yet to read many of the authors he interviews in this book, but it's always nice to hear Roth talk about how enamored he became with the artistic scene in Czechoslovakia (the book contains interviews with both Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima, both of ramble on intelligently about the positives and negatives in choosing to represent a society that is so hostile to open ideas and art) and also how he views himself in the pantheon of 20th century Jewish writers, via his appreciations of Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud (there's also a quick interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer--having read Singer, I really don't see how they would have much in common, but they are respectful). It should also be noted that his interview with Aharon Applefeld showed up almost verbatim in Operation Shylock. This is not necessary reading by any means unless you happen to be interested in the authors Roth is talking about, which in most cases I was.

Everyman: This book was quite a doozy to end on, and I'm sort of sorry I chose to end it this way. This is a very short and powerful read, although it doesn't offer much beyond this very novel notion that it is a biography (the protagonist of which is nameless) that consists entirely of Everyman's illnesses: Roth will mention in fleeting how his character lived 25 years with no health problems and move on to the next operation or hospital visit. The intent is obvious, to convey the horror and depression of someone who knows he is inching ever closer to the end of his life, and cursing the failings of his body and mind. As one can imagine, this does not make for happy reading. There is virtually nothing in the way of humor in this book, a rarity among Roth's works, and the descriptions of Everyman's few infidelities aren't terrible interesting compared with what we know Roth is capable of. There are many powerful sequences, but I suspect Roth intends them to be secondary to the overall mood of the piece, which is to convey his own anxiety about growing old and seeing his body fail (I'm told that Roth, unlike his older characters, is more or less in excellent health). This would have made a fitting epitaph had Roth chosen to end it this way, particularly the scene where he goes to the graveyard to visit the grave of his mother and father. I felt this passage to be absolutely heartbreaking:

Aloud, he said to them: "I'm 71. Your boy is 71." "Good, you lived," his mother replied. And his father said, "Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left."

I don't think that this is a sentiment that can only be understood by 71-year olds. If there's anyone in any of Roth's book that says anything worth taking to heart, it's Everyman's father.

Philip Roth, Part IV

Sorry. In case you're wondering, I'm done, and have been for a while. I have already mentioned before how ridiculous it was to start with someone as prolific as Roth. In fact, he has a new book, Indignation, coming out in October. I'll read it when I get the chance and probably review it.

I'll do these all in quick succession. You might notice that pretty much all the books reviewed here border on straight up superlative--this was a man who had quite a winning streak later in life. It's been a pleasure, and immeasurably helpful in honing my honors thesis. I begin with the pseudo-continuation of the Zuckerman saga.

The Counterlife: Where this fits in the continuity spectrum of the Zuckerman novels is unclear; I get the impression that Roth never has really concerned himself with those issues, anyway. While the books that comprised Zuckerman Bound were essentially straightforward narratives with a fair amount of metatextual embellishment (such as the Anne Frank chapter in The Ghost Writer), The Counterlife is on a whole different level entirely. He experiments with the Zuckerman character using different fragments of narrative that often aren't elaborated upon or even referred to in the next chapter. A synopsis would be best served by addressing the individual chapters, but I don't think it's in your best interest for me to do so. Several aspects of Roth's work are worth talking about: for the first time, he takes on the gigantic subject of Israel, in a chapter where Zuckerman's brother leaves his family to join a fanatical Zionist kibbutz. The conversations that Nathan and his brother, Henry, have regarding the necessity and the foolhardiness of establishing the state of Israel strike me as being a far better attempt at political commentary than Our Gang. Some of the later chapters, which deal with anti-Semitism in Zuckerman's adopted England, seem less powerful, if only because I was shocked to find Roth aiming his vitriol at Christians, of all people. Not that they don't need it, but what sort of middle-ground is he suggesting, between fanatical Zionist bloodletting and a English passive-aggressive anti-Semitism? Zuckermanism, or something else none of us can subscribe to.

American Pastoral: And then, of course, is this beauty of a novel, which I have actually read before. It's often referred to as the "second" Zuckerman trilogy (The Prague Orgy counts as an appendix to the first one, and The Counterlife has no choice but to stand alone). What differs this trilogy from the previous one is that, while Zuckerman is once again the author, he takes a secondary role, instead choosing to highlight (and subsequently fictionalize) minor figures in his life and devise a way in which to make these lives reflect the tapestry of American social upheaval. American Pastoral is about "Swede" Levov, a Jewish Adonis and former sports hero who is the most fundamentally decent character I think Roth has ever created. He takes over his father's glove factory (leading to some brilliant exposition from Roth about the science of glove-making--you probably don't believe me but it is mind-blowing stuff), marries a former Miss New Jersey, and has a daughter. As good a husband and father as he is, he can't prevent his daughter from becoming increasingly radicalized by the situation in Vietnam, and she starts hanging out with unsavory, Weather Underground type characters. Eventually, she bombs a post office and kills someone, and subsequently vanishes. Seeing "Swede" Levov try to reconcile these feelings of paternal love with the knowledge that her daughter murdered someone is affecting, as is their final confrontation. I should add that their daughter, Merry, struck me as such a loathsome toolbag that it almost justifies the Vietnam war.

I Married A Communist: Once again, Zuckerman writes about a childhood figure, although ostensibly this time his recount of the life of the actor Ira Ringgold is less fictionalized than it is stratified through the minds of both Zuckerman and Ira's brother, who recounts about half of what goes on. This is often considered the weak link in the trilogy, and I agree with that assessment: Unlike Swede Levov and Coleman Silk, Ira Ringgold seems more of a victim not of the times but of his own pathetic attempts to stay attached to his communist ideology. Not that a great book couldn't be made out of this, and admittedly, it is filled with great stuff. While painted in broad strokes, Roth's depiction of the communist witch hunters is certainly entertaining and well thought out, although Roth has the habit of making all the enemies of communism by extension closet fascist sympathizers, with the exception of Ira's brother. Ira as a character still seems somewhat of a mystery, and his relationship with the young Zuckerman seems to be a tad on the convenient side: considering all that Zuckerman has been through, the fact that he never mentions this person before makes us wonder if Zuckerman isn't writing fiction again. As I stated before, I don't think that's something Roth is ever very concerned with.

The Human Stain: Almost unbearably emotionally resonant, in the manner of My Life as a Man and The Anatomy Lesson, this book packs quite a punch, even if Roth spends much of it attacking the shallowness and intellectual dishonesty of my age group (the "dumbest generation," Coleman Silk says at one point). Unlike the first two parts of the trilogy, this is set in the recent past, during the Clinton Whitewater hearings, and Roth makes much of how ridiculous it was that America was concerned with the sexual habits of the president. Against this backdrop, Roth tells the story of Coleman Silk, a neighbor of Zuckerman's and a professor at a small liberal arts college who gets kicked out for a supposed racial slur (he calls two students-- who happen to be black--spooks, referring to their continual absence from his classroom, not their race). The subsequent stress and disappointment ends up taking its toll on Silk's wife, so he implores Zuckerman to write his story. At first, Zuckerman refuses, but they become friends nonetheless. Silk, who is 71, starts having a torrid love affair with a 33-year old janitor whose life has been so tragic it verges on being a Chekhovian cartoon. All of this stuff is excellently told, and Roth easily manages to pull of the feat of having Zuckerman get in the minds of these different characters who don't even know who he is. While far from an impartial observer, Zuckerman manages to stay out of the fray until he is needed in the final sequence, which is quite a good one. This was made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, if you remember. This would seem at first like the least filmable of the trilogy, but I guess others disagree.

Exit Ghost: Roth's most recent book, and reportedly the last one to involve Nathan Zuckerman. This is probably a good thing, because after three straight books where he tried telling other people's stories, he has become self-involved to the point where he strikes me as being a bitter old phoney (sp?). Zuckerman, now in his 70s, is completely incontinent and impotent from prostate surgery, but is told that a possible cure is awaiting him in New York City. So, the reclusive Zuckerman travels to New York for the first time in several decades, and immediately starts kvetching about all the cell phones and iPods he sees. If anything, Exit Ghost is meant to mirror many of the themes and strands of the first Zuckerman book, The Ghost Writer. E.I. Lonoff is long dead, and a young hotshot writer tries to interview Zuckerman about his relationship with the writer, to be part of some sort of revelatory biography. In response, Zuckerman treats the young man like shit, vowing to go so far as to ruin his literary aspirations if he publishes this biography. Meanwhile, he starts having sexual feelings for a woman whose apartment he plans to rent for a year, feelings of course he cannot act upon due to his impotence. Meanwhile, he complains about how hard and humiliating it is to have to wear diapers, and the surgery doesn't do much to help him. This is a sad and very slight book, a bizarre end note to be sure. Zuckerman, towards the end of his life, no longer seems to be an interesting or enlightening character, but rather an old and disgruntled man furious about his impending death. It doesn't make for the most compelling reading.

Next: all of the Roth books, including The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, Deception: A Novel, Patrimony: A True Story, Operation Shylock: A Confession, and The Plot Against America (Why did Roth become so enamored with colons all of a sudden? Why have I?).

Reconciling myself

Well, I certainly dropped the ball on this thing. I was seized, unfortunately, by one of those Salinger (or Residents!) moments where I felt like being a bit more anonymous. In fact, I don't even know what I'm trying to do right now. I'll give you a brief lowdown on what you may have missed, had you not been present during every moment of my life and don't happen to be a nu-nu. This is in relatively chronological order.

-On what I believe was 4/20, I delivered my symposium project on Philip Roth. Entitled "Telling a Man by the Songs He Sings: Claims and Counterclaims of Anti-semitism in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go," I had spent the last several months, reading through as much of Roth's work as I could while simultaneously producing a 15-page paper that my sponsor would find of enduring quality. Luckily, she didn't find my thesis or anything I said to be that bad (I was probably helped by the fact that, even as an American literature professor, and a Jew to boot, she wasn't that familiar with Roth). Of course, the day before I had to pare down the fucking thing to a manageable 10 minutes. It turns out that reading my entire 15-page paper took something like 25 minutes, so I spent all of Friday hacking it until I was pretty sure I had produced something utterly unintelligible. No matter: very, very few people showed up. I would wager there were maybe 10 people there, and that includes the three students also speaking during my session (entitled "Literary Landscapes: Paradise, Politics, and Religion"--check out my abstract and stuff here) and their respective sponsors, although my sponsor couldn't be there because, irony of ironies, she had to go home for Passover.

Anyhow, I finally did it, and at least my moderator seemed to like it, and was particularly impressed that I did all the research outside of class. I asked her if (as department chairman) this would be good to go as an honors thesis, and she said yes. So at that point I was pretty happy.

-All of the internships I applied for--and I won't bother naming them all here--turned me down. Every single last one of them. So, faced with few other ideas, I decided to go back home once again for the summer. Turns out this was a bad idea.

-I did, however, receive an academic award from the school, which was cool because along with the prestige (I'm aware, don't laugh at me) of it I got $100. It was the Winifred Van Etten award, in case you were wondering. It's not a big deal, there are enough of these to make me feel not so special. Still, it was nice, particularly because I had no idea what I was getting until it was announced at the English awards/Open Field party. Mouton, or someone in the English department wrote a lovely introduction for me too. The only reason I enjoyed it was because it was poetic justice for none of my stuff getting into Open Field, which is the campus literary magazine. This is even though Freeman thought one of my stories was good enough to be entered into the Nick Adams short story contest (which I lost unsurprisingly, although I should add deservedly--I read the story that won, and it is actually an amazing piece of work). Apparently, my peers didn't think anything I did was good enough. I was depressed, but that made it a bit better.

Weirdly, I was invited to attend the English awards night as well as the interdepartmental awards night. Since I had already gotten my award previously, I was just asked to stand up to be recognized. There was no reason why I should have gone. The whole thing was like three hours and nearly unbearable, despite what was supposed to be fancy food. Apparently, there are a lot of awards here.

-Got hired to be the new Arts & Entertainment editor of The Cornellian, which, unlike my job back in high school, actually pays a salary. I was going for Opinions editor but I'm not surprised that they didn't choose me. To date, I have written pieces about the new Portishead album, the new R.E.M. album, and Iron Man. As is custom, the new editorial staff does one issue at the very end of the year, and it ended up not going so well for me as the result of some advertising mishaps, so I basically had to do the whole thing over again. The result: an epic piece on Iron Man that took up the entire page. It wasn't my proudest moment, and it was sort of another reason to be depressed. I couldn't look at it afterwards, that was for sure.

-I saw Iron Man. Loved it. I don't think my review is online, but I'll post it at some point.

-Took two classes, both of which fucked me up in unexpected ways: Grammar & The Politics of English turned out to be a mind-blowingly frustrating class, although not so much with the politics part as it was with the grammar. I don't know if anyone here has ever had to diagram sentences. I certainly hadn't before, but now I can say that it is a loathsome, disgusting, and surprisingly helpful activity. I think I am a better writer for taking the class, and it was sort of nice to have a professor who didn't like anything I did at all. I definitely needed that, but too bad it killed my straight-A winning streak for the semester. I'm not as concerned with that as I am with the way I was demoralized--somehow, even as someone with enough knowledge and passion of issues pertaining to language politics and linguistics, I found I had little of value to say. I did, however, get to do a paper on Salman Rushdie, who readers will know I am a big fan of. I think my thesis was something like the Ayatollah couldn't have possibly read The Satanic Verses before he issued his fatwa, and he definitely didn't read it afterward either. I know, it's so obvious. Story of my life.

Contrast this with Contemporary Fiction, a class I owned unequivocally. I found, astonishingly, that I was more in my element doing literary analysis, and what's more, I found myself enjoying the theory--yes, the theory--of postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. Plus, we got to read some wonderful books, including one of my favorites, If on a winter's night a traveler. We also read Breakfast of Champions and J.M. Coetzee's Foe, amongst selections from a big Norton anthology of postmodern literature from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Sherman Alexie, Marilynne Robinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others. Philip Roth was in the anthology (excerpting The Ghost Writer) but we did not read him in class. I felt very much on top of things and was very proud of the writing I did in the class. In fact, I feel like I might put it on here, except it doesn't seem that profound on the internet as it did in the classroom. Anyway, my professor seemed to like it, and me, a lot. I think he liked that I would actually talk about some of the postmodern theory while most would complain it was impenetrable. As he would likely say, that's the point.

-I keep chugging away at Philip Roth. Just finished Deception, by the way, so I'm entering the home stretch. In my next post I'll talk about The Counterlife through Exit Ghost, assuming I can remember anything about them.

-I ended my junior year by doing my take-home final while having an extreme headache, and later, after attending quarter draws night at the bar, getting extremely feverish. Also, I hate packing and I knew I would miss my roommate, Jeremiah, although I'll see him again next year.

-Came home for the summer. The drive back was excruciating. Not only was I feeling extremely sick, to the point where I couldn't eat anything, but it was raining as hard as I've ever seen, to the point where I couldn't really see on the road. It was risky business, but I made it home okay. I've looked, in vain, for a job. It's hard, because pretty much everything has been filled up by people who came back for summer long before I did, as a result of Cornell ending pretty late. I need money and I don't know what to do.

So that's it. I'll get back into the swing of things, slowly. My question is this: from reading this, does this constitute a life well-lived? Obviously I'm not including stuff that is personal, but let's just say that that part is covered. Am I doing enough with my life? What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong?

Philip Roth, Part 3

I managed to read five more books in a far shorter period of time, mainly because unlike last time I didn't have to wait for inter-library loans. Anyhow, I'm 15 books in now: more than halfway there and 4/9 of my way through the Zuckerman saga. It occurred to me that this might have been more interesting if I had devoted a post to each of the books but some of the books aren't really worth that--although, I should add, some of them are worth far more than that. I'll try to keep my comments to a minimum, but hey! If you want to see me talk for a really long time about Philip Roth, come see my symposium project in late April.

Reading Myself and Others: This is Roth's first piece of non-fiction, basically a collection of random things written since Goodbye, Columbus, including several meditations on writing about and receiving criticism from Jews, dissertations on his work and others' (Alan Lelchuk, Kafka, Milan Kundera), a few angry political essays and some memoirs. All of this is pretty iffy and even slighter than I could have possibly imagined: what's more, reading Roth talk about his own work is somehow unbearable, especially considering he already does enough of that in his fiction. He loves comparing himself to Kafka, which I already knew, but I didn't know he would compare himself in such a favorable way. This is not the self-deprecating Roth as I have come to know and understand him. It's like he's writing a college thesis on himself. However, his ending essay on Kafka is probably the best part of the collection and definitely worth buying the book for. In it, he imagines the author surviving tuberculosis and escaping the Nazis only to become an English teacher in New Jersey. I'm not sure what purpose it serves, but maybe it was a way for Roth to foist some sort of happy ending on one of his gloomier heroes. I don't know why anyone would read through this unless they would read everything else by Roth.

The Ghost Writer: And so it begins...kind of. Nathan Zuckerman popped up earlier as the hero of Peter Tarnopol's two short stories in My Life As A Man, but the relationship between that Zuckerman and this one seems to be only tangential, I think. Their parents have different careers, anyway. It's a weird way to start such a saga: Zuckerman, fresh off of his first novel, a great literary success, is invited to stay at the house of his literary hero E.I. Lonoff (Saul Bellow? I don't really know). Lonoff lives in isolation out in the woods somewhere, with only his wife and a young, pretty student to keep him company. The first part of the book is basically a conversation between the two, with Lonoff bemoaning the fact that he has substituted real experience for writing and how he wishes he could have that time back, while Zuckerman lavishes all sorts of praise on Lonoff. They also talk a lot about Henry James and Kafka, of course. Lonoff's wife freaks out at one point due to his passive-aggressive behavior, and then they all go to bed. While lying in bed, there is an arresting chapter (included in Norton's Postmodern Literature anthology) where he imagines that the pretty young woman is the surviving Anne Frank, who changed her name and moved to America to become a writer. It's one of the saddest and most bizarre things Roth has ever written. The whole book is sort of in that tone, however: sad, uncertain, resigned to the limits of true human interaction. It's all arrestingly portrayed, even if you don't get much sense of Zuckerman as a character yet. That comes later.

Zuckerman Unbound: This book takes place 10 years or so after the first one did, with Zuckerman fresh off the success of his book Carnovksy, which describes the masturbatory adventures of a Jewish kid from New Jersey. Sound familiar? Basically, this whole book is Roth trying to come to terms with his newfound fame, and his rationale for why he doesn't enjoy it as much as one would think, given that he is now independently wealthy. The publishing of Carnovksy, despite its success, is the beginning of the end. He loses his second wife, Laura, who views the novel as the final salvo against their marriage; his father has a stroke and dies, his last word being to his son, "Bastard," while his mother tries to fight off anxious reporters wondering about what she thinks being portrayed in such an unflattering light; he is hounded by the press and dates a famous actress on the side; and he receives threatening phone calls from parties unknown, although perhaps they come from a former quiz kid who keeps hounding Zuckerman outside his apartment. In the end he does indeed become "unbound," and I guess what we're supposed to come away with is that, despite whatever happens to him, he doesn't really seem to grow. Hell, he doesn't seem to even write anything anymore.

The Anatomy Lesson: At this point, Zuckerman still hasn't written a novel after Carnovksy, the reason being that he has just recently developed intense back pain that greatly inhibits his ability to sit down at the typewriter and write for any extended period of time. He tries seeking medical help, but there seems to be no physical cause to the pain: his therapist seems to think it's all in his head. Nevertheless, he is trapped by this intense pain, to the point where he can't even dictate his writing to anyone else. Instead, he decides to spend his time doing copious amounts of pain-killing drugs (weed, vodka, cocaine, lots of percodan) and carrying about with four mistresses who cook him food and occasionally have sex with him. Being estranged from his family (his mother dies of a tumor early in the novel), and already being called a has-been, Zuckerman sinks deeper and deeper into a mid-life crisis, eventually deciding to re-enroll into the University of Chicago, this time as a medical student. He reasons that obstetricians, unlike famous authors, don't get criticized for doing their job well. However, as we see, this doesn't help him very much. Amongst Roth's most emotionally taxing works, this is high up there with My Life As A Man. It's also probably my favorite of the trilogy, in that it is his most darkly funny, his most provocative, and his least politically naive book. I especially like the exchange he has with an enemy critic. Let's just say it's not what I expected.

The Prague Orgy: This is a brief novella that was appended to the end of Zuckerman Bound, making it somewhat like the literary equivalent of a new single a band would put on a greatest hits album just so you would buy the thing. It's definitely worth it, however: it's sort of Roth's attempt at The Trial in the way that The Breast was his "The Metamorphosis." It's much better than The Breast, however. Roth turns the previous three novels' arguments on his head. After spending all this time complaining about how American critics attack his book for not being socially conscious enough, Zuckerman travels to Czechoslovakia, where that sort of thing regularly gets people killed. It gives Zuckerman an opportunity to be grateful about something for once in his life. The goal of Zuckerman's trip is to reclaim a bunch of manuscripts written by a Czech author's (Milan Kundera) father, which are being hostage by the author's wife, who he left long ago. The wife, Olga, latches onto Zuckerman and wants him to marry her so she can leave her home, which has devolved into a thuggish police state. There is an orgy, as the title suggests, although surprisingly Zuckerman deigns from participating in it: the message is that in a place where literature, theater and film are so highly regulated, sex is about the only activity one can do, although even that is changing. It's one of Roth's funniest books, in a Kafka sort of way, and the ending is a pitch perfect end to the first trilogy, as well as a perfect lead-in to The Counterlife. My only question: when did Zuckerman's back get better?

Next on my agenda: I demolish the rest of the Zuckerman novels, which will probably take a bit more time. In order, they are The Counterlife, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, and finally Exit Ghost, which I just read Barack Obama has been reading recently.

I'm halfway done, and it's only going to get better from here.

Happy Birthday, Philip Roth (Part 2)

I've been meaning to update this blog regarding my reading of Philip Roth's repertoire in chronological order, but I decided to wait until today because it happens to be his 75th birthday. Three quarters of a decade with Philip Roth, and almost half a decade of writing novels. Who else can claim to have done that, and so well? Anyhow, I promised I'd update this every five books or so. Next on my list were:

The Breast: As Mendelson suggested last time, this is pretty slight, even for a novella of barely 80 pages. It's one of those books that literally begs comparison to other literary works--in this case, we're talking about "The Metamorphosis." In Roth's book, Professor David Alan Kepesh wakes up one day to discover that he has turned into a gigantic breast with 3-inch nipples. Never mind the fact that even imagining this takes a lot of work (how does he even move around, or talk, or do anything at all?), the point is basically that it's about this English professor full of all these fancy conceits who finds himself suddenly prey to a ridiculous situation that is in no way enjoyable, if only because he can't distance himself from it. It's an interesting way to go about the topic, basically acknowledging not only the ridiculousness but also the lack of originality of such a situation. I think Roth's main point in writing this novel, as is often the case, is that he gets a chance to talk about several of his literary heroes at length: not only Kafka, but also Nikolai Gogol, whose short story "The Nose" is often mentioned. I don't think this is a particularly successful or entertaining novella, and it definitely overstays its welcome, even at 80 pages. Still, I guess it's clever, for what it is.

The Professor of Desire: Honestly, I can't even remember this novel very well at this point. It's more of Kepesh--although I guess the part about him becoming a breast is ignored--basically rambling about Kafka while dealing with an evil, pot-smoking ex-wife and a comparatively decent second wife. This is all stuff Roth has dealt with before, although in this case it ends more optimistically than any other book of his I can think of. There's a funny episode where Kepesh dreams about meeting some whore that Kafka had sex with (Kepesh is a Kafka scholar, I guess). There's also some interesting digressions where he has very debased relationships with a couple of Swedish women, and also a part where he imagines writing a course syllabus for a fictional class on "desire." Hence the title. Other than that, there's nothing new to offer.

The Dying Animal: Of all the Kepesh novels, this is probably my favorite, although I am inherently critical of any author, I don't care how good, who brings out the, "I have an incurable disease" card at any point. This book is once again narrated by Kepesh, still an English professor and now known about town as somewhat of a public intellectual and cultural critic. He is also single again. He uses his fame to entice his young students, most of whom are less than a third of his age, into having sex with them (this usually happens after the class is over, of course). The book deals with his relationship with a Latina student, Consuela Castillo, and their relationship, as is always the case with Roth, is debased and filled with a lot of frank sex talk: I think particularly of a graphic scene in which Roth describes the 72-year old professor throat-fucking a 24-year old college senior. This is, as you would guess, pretty strange. Still, this short book gives Roth time to talk at length about the hypocrisies that are inherent in so-called monogamous relationships, and it's hard to disagree.

The Great American Novel: This book is not really appreciated by Roth purists, and I can see why. For one, it isn't about Roth's standard subject matter: it's about baseball. And yet, it's about as close to pure fantasy as Roth ever got. It is the very definition of self-indulgence, as one would expect from any book with a title like The Great American Novel. In fact, I'd have to say in form and tone it's closer to something like the movie Major League than it is to anything else in Roth's repertoire. Narrated by a fictional, legendary sports columnist/Hemingway buddy named Word Smith (yeah, that's about as subtle as this book gets), it describes the rise and fall of the (completely fictional) Patriot League, particularly the Ruppert Mundys, whose team members are all very bizarre and frequently have no limbs. It's this lavish fantasy of cripples, midgets, and foreigners playing baseball set against a backdrop of war and later McCarthyism, the force that ultimately brings down the League and erases it from historical record (Word Smith is supposed to be writing this as the last person who remembers, but no one dares publish his book for fear of being labeled a communist). I know a lot of people don't like this book, but I thought it was hilarious, even if there are very few points where I felt I was really learning much about either baseball or human existence. I would recommend this only for Roth purists, people who like baseball, or people who like that Abbott & Costello "Who's On First" routine. It's at about that level.

My Life As A Man: To date, this is my favorite thing that Roth has written, and it's certainly the most emotionally taxing. The book is structured in a bizarre fashion: it starts off with two short stories supposedly written by Peter Tarnopol, yet another English professor, who lives in New York. After we get those two (admittedly excellently written) stories, we enter into what is supposed to be an "autobiography" written by Tarnopol. Part of the fascination in reading this book is looking at Tarnopol's life and observing what parts he chose to put in his short stories and how he chose to change them (side note: Tarnopol's alter ego is Nathan Zuckerman, the main character of most of Philip Roth's novels for the remainder of his career). It's difficult to say which part of the book I enjoyed the most, as like Portnoy's Complaint, it is not really written in a linear fashion: it's basically grouped according to certain individuals that mattered in Tarnopol's life, including his horrid ex-wife Maureen Tarnopol, one of the most evil creations in the history of literature, his psychiatrist, and his new wife. The book is frighteningly dense and offers no easy answers or solutions. He even includes excerpts from a diary of Maureen's, which I don't really want to give away. It's really just amazing, really thoughtful stuff. Roth's grasp of dialogue has never been better, and for once his descriptions of world events don't seem naive and silly.

So that's it for now. Coming up next is his collection of non-fiction essays, Reading Myself & Others, followed by the beginnings of a long slog through all the Zuckerman books, starting with The Ghost Writer, and then Zuckerman Bound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy. I'm excited.

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.

Scholarship for dummies

Currently I'm in Naperville, Ill., home of my aunt and uncle, perusing their bookshelves and playing their pianos (as my uncle is a professional piano teacher, he has several). I am in between trying to finish Gravity's Rainbow and doing some Wikipedia editing (Paul Krugman, in case you were wondering). Honestly I'm not really enjoying it here right now, and I'm looking forward to going back. I decided a long time ago that I just hated any sort of trip with my family, especially long car rides. My reasons are many and varied, but let's just concentrate on one right now.

As my iPod has been dead for several months, and I am too poor/lazy/angry at Steve Jobs to seek a replacement, I was basically forced to sit in the family van and listen to whatever my parents felt like for six hours. Now that isn't necessarily bad, you think. Surely they could play some decent, non-Christmas music. Unfortunately, everyone in my family except me and my father hate listening to music. I know the very notion sounds preposterous. How can one hate music? Let's not even go there for now.

My family likes to listen to books on tape. I hate books on tape. They take forever to listen to, they're often read by horrible actors, and more often than not they are filled with stupid sound effects. Plus, I'm not really much of an auditory learner so I don't get much from them anyway. This time, however, it wasn't a book on tape I was forced to listen to but something called Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which isn't a book but rather an audio college course. The CDs are divided into lectures and posited as just a professor talking about a subject. This actually seems like an interesting idea if you've ever felt like learning about something but didn't want to do all that pesky reading and research.

My two younger brothers really like science-fiction and fantasy, to the point where they have absolutely no interest in the real world around them. I don't know if they'd be interested in someone talking about the fantasy book canon (which from what I was listening to, is an abysmally small one), though. Maybe they do. They seemed to not complain, and quite honestly the lectures about Tolkien were much more interesting than anything I've ever actually read from the man, but I'll get to that later.

The professor in charge of this lecture series was Michael D.C. Drout, apparently the biggest Tolkien nerd in the world as well as a professor at Wheaton College (the one in Massachusetts, not the one that just recently lifted its ban on dancing). In his first lecture, he argued that preeminent literary scholars and book critics of our day tend to ignore fantasy books or at least ghettoize them as mere "genre fiction," which I agree is unfair. However, Drout fails to come up with much in the way of fantasy books that should be considered mandatory reading, other than The Lord of the Rings, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, and maybe the Harry Potter books. That immediately poses a problem: of the 12 individual lectures present, seven are exclusively about Tolkien. If he wants more respect for the fantasy genre, he needs to come up with a better list than that.

I guess it's sort of unavoidable to talk about Tolkien, though. I read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings when I was very young, and I wasn't a very big fan, despite being enamored with that sort of thing at the time. It just seemed like it was chock-full of useless languages and characters. I only saw the first movie in the series, and it was so long and boring I didn't bother seeing any of the others. It just really isn't my thing. I did gain a greater appreciation of Tolkien learning about his commitment to ancient languages and linguistics, and while I'm a bit skeptical about Drout's theory that The Hobbit is even tangentially based on Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (how?), it still makes Bilbo Baggins more interesting of a character knowing that he isn't just this fantastic character devoid of human emotion or political feeling. Too much fantasy writing is like that.

In fact, I was just trying to think of any so-called fantasy novel that I think is any good at all. The closest examples I can think of are some of the more out-there novels of Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, all of whom I think fall under the tag "magical realism," which simply isn't the same thing. Fantasy is just too fundamentally limiting of an idea, I think. I prefer my wild ideas to have a grounding in real lives and real people. But then I guess that's the exact opposite of what fantasy's normal readership would want.

Back in Ames

I'm back in Ames finally, and I'm not really happy or sad about that given that I was here but a month ago. Nothing has changed since then. Still, it's a very nice place to be, my room is as cozy and hot as ever, and I get lambchops for dinner. My parents always give me a good dinner on the first day back home. I didn't go back home yesterday because I decided to hang out with remaining friends instead, and I ended up having some really intense conversations about Russia/Stalinism/Leninism/Marxism/Christianity/American voter efficacy/secularism/North Korea. It was interesting, especially given that I was having these arguments with Duncan, Vitaly, and Hainstock, all of whom have different areas of expertise. That's always good when that happens. As the English major, I was basically pulling for Trotsky, obviously.

My plan for this break is to read, obviously first of all. I have The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan and some short stories from John Updike, as well as Alan Moore's new comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, which I've noticed has been getting middling to downright poor reviews.

Also on my agenda is to continue writing down everything I do everyday for the entirety of winter break. This is a tradition I started back in freshman year, mainly because I felt that my adult self (except I am an adult--adulter self?) would be interested to know about my musings, philosophies, and lifestyle habits as a college student, especially during that two weeks of debauchery known as winter break. Looking back at what I had written, there was definitely some interesting things going on. I don't want to get too specific, it is my own damn business, but I would say freshman year was all about a lot of self-loathing and pity, while sophomore year was about boredom. What will this break be about? Hopefully something preferable to either of those.

Aaron just gave me his Chanukah present, the newest issue of the British mag Mojo. I think he chose it because it has the reunited Led Zeppelin on the cover. It occurs to me that I haven't commented on this Led Zeppelin reunion, partially because I'm not a millionaire and couldn't get tickets but also because reunion shows tend to be suspicious stuff. I have looked at some grainy cell phone video clips of the show on Youtube, and from what I can tell, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page play as good as they ever did, Plant sings probably better than he did before, and Jason Bonham does not even come fucking close. You can definitely tell the difference. It's a shame on the one hand, but that's what he deserves for making a career out of flogging his dad's corpse.

An idea I've had

Lately I've been kicking around some ideas to do at student symposium this coming spring. I definitely want to do something (especially considering the amount of talking I've been engaged in lately about going into academia). The problem is, I can't think of any particular author or artist I could consider myself an expert on that no one else has. I mean, I know Kerouac almost by heart, but so does every asshole. No one wants to see a symposium project on that. I was debating doing one on Hitchens, who is not a fiction writer, so I don't know about that. None of my professors have asked me to do anything, so I assume none of them are that interested in what I have to say. Whatever.

An option for the symposium, and for English honors in general, is to write some sort of short story, but I gather that not many people do this because the professors are intensely critical of fiction work. I think I could do it though. I was recently reminded of John Barth's great short story "Click," which deals very explicitly with the idea of "hypertextuality," wherein all works of science or literature could be connected to each other via hypertext links, not unlike the internet itself. "Click" was written in 1997, but when I read it a few months back I was shocked at how prescient it seemed. Whether he was presenting an absolutely new way of thinking or a new way of literature is debatable, but in these days of Web 2.0, it seems relevant, at least considering what I know.

"Click" offers a lot of interesting new perspectives on the craft of reading, but in the end, it's just basic text made to fool us into thinking that this "hypertextuality" goes beyond the printed page. My idea was to take Barth's ideas (which I don't think are necessarily his) and elaborate it into a symposium project wherein I would create a wikistory. To elaborate, I thought that I would start with a base text, perhaps only a few paragraphs long, that would contain links to other sections of the wiki, to be read at the readers' own discretion. These separate pages or articles would contain some sort of poem or prose, or even a picture, that would complement or illuminate what I was saying on the original page. Some of these pages would branch out further into other pages--the end result would add up to something along 20 pages of actual material, but the reader is free to look at it in several different ways.

My biggest problem is that I don't know how to make a wiki. My friend Karl is a very strong proponent of wikis, so maybe I will enlist him to help. This may be way over my head though. It seems like a good idea, but what about the actual plot? What would I write about? It's important that my subject matter work as a linear piece of literature as well as a pedagogical exercise, because otherwise I could write any cryptic bullshit I wanted, and I am not the kind of person that likes to do that.

Anyway it's just an idea. I probably won't go through with it. It's better than most of my ideas though.