Roth You Like A Hurricane
I've been on a Philip Roth kick lately, reading and rereading--the great thing about being a Roth fan is that you don't really have to pace yourself. There are so many of them, and he keeps making more!
I realize, of course, the folly of this attitude. I will one day have read them all many times and will wish that I had not been so greedy in my youth.
Middle age is the new youth. Really.
I just finished The Ghost Writer. Wow. I had never read it before. Wow. It has everything one looks for in a Roth novel. It is hilarious and brutal. Unsentimental. Unflinching. So sharply observed it could cut itself. A comic novel with the Holocaust at its center--only Roth can do this without diminishing the horror of history or the absurd comedy of individual lives. Even Nabokov can't pull this off--the gentle and heart-rending humor that sustains the first half of Pnin never quite recovers from Pnin's reminiscences of the girl he knew who became a victim of the Nazis. This is as it should be, of course. The Holocaust changes the ethical demands of art as it does of every other part of human life. But Roth manages to be riotously funny without feeling compromised.
The Ghost Writer has something else, too. Something that not all Roth novels have. It has a lyric intensity and a lyric refusal of sense. It's so brief it scarcely qualifies as a novel, but it nonetheless feels fully realized, generous, expatiate. It achieves a kind of perfection, in the etymological sense. It is complete. Complete in a way that novels almost never are and that we wouldn't want them to be. It manages to be complete without being totalizing.
It's a penny-plain story: young writer visits old writer, witnesses domestic unhappiness, and fantasizes about an attractive house guest. In this slender story, Roth writes libraries about the role of imagination on life and of truth in art. After a hilarious eavesdropping scene, Zuckerman reproaches himself: "Oh, if only I could have imagined the scene I'd overheard! If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life."
We are meant, I suppose, to be in on the joke--that although Nathan Zuckerman's imagination may be thin, Philip Roth's isn't. But this isn't how the scene reads. It's not a sly self-congratulatory self-reflexivity, but a genuine wonder at the strangeness of the world.
It's lovely.
I realize, of course, the folly of this attitude. I will one day have read them all many times and will wish that I had not been so greedy in my youth.
Middle age is the new youth. Really.
I just finished The Ghost Writer. Wow. I had never read it before. Wow. It has everything one looks for in a Roth novel. It is hilarious and brutal. Unsentimental. Unflinching. So sharply observed it could cut itself. A comic novel with the Holocaust at its center--only Roth can do this without diminishing the horror of history or the absurd comedy of individual lives. Even Nabokov can't pull this off--the gentle and heart-rending humor that sustains the first half of Pnin never quite recovers from Pnin's reminiscences of the girl he knew who became a victim of the Nazis. This is as it should be, of course. The Holocaust changes the ethical demands of art as it does of every other part of human life. But Roth manages to be riotously funny without feeling compromised.
The Ghost Writer has something else, too. Something that not all Roth novels have. It has a lyric intensity and a lyric refusal of sense. It's so brief it scarcely qualifies as a novel, but it nonetheless feels fully realized, generous, expatiate. It achieves a kind of perfection, in the etymological sense. It is complete. Complete in a way that novels almost never are and that we wouldn't want them to be. It manages to be complete without being totalizing.
It's a penny-plain story: young writer visits old writer, witnesses domestic unhappiness, and fantasizes about an attractive house guest. In this slender story, Roth writes libraries about the role of imagination on life and of truth in art. After a hilarious eavesdropping scene, Zuckerman reproaches himself: "Oh, if only I could have imagined the scene I'd overheard! If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life."
We are meant, I suppose, to be in on the joke--that although Nathan Zuckerman's imagination may be thin, Philip Roth's isn't. But this isn't how the scene reads. It's not a sly self-congratulatory self-reflexivity, but a genuine wonder at the strangeness of the world.
It's lovely.
posted by Feemus at
3:37 PM
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