Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (11/09)

Bought this old copy in a Pokhara bookshop for 105 Nepali rupees. Read it back in Delhi, falling asleep, on the metro, in rickshaws. 

Who's ready to grow up. Neil is. I'm worthless.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth (07/09)

My last Roth for a while. Time to move on to non-fiction. Remedy some of my ghastly ignorance.

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth (07/09)

Roth is not an economical writer. His paragraphs meander from association to association. He starts off discussing one character in the present and ends analyzing the death of another character's mother thirty years ago. Scenes are repeated throughout the book with slightly different emphasis. Time and perspective are in constant flux. This is especially true of later Roth, 1990s' Roth, which is when, in his 60s, he came into his own.

Also, you're never at a loss to identify the 'idea' of a later Roth novel. He repeats his thesis over and over, as he did in American Pastoral. The only unity in the life of Mickey Sabbath is incoherency. There are no explanations.

Zuckerman Bound by Philip Roth (06/09)

Three novels and a novella collected in a single volume documenting minutia in the life of Nathan Zuckerman, infamous Jewish-American novelist, the most narcissistic project I have ever read, but not bad for all that. Roth is upfront about only being inspired to write about slight variations on his own experience. He is a writer, exclusively, of the internal. The outside world only matters as far as it impacts his inner life. The best of the four was Zuckerman Unbound - the best written, the funniest, the most acerbic. The Anatomy Lesson goes on and on about Zuckerman's undiagnosed chronic pain, which he relieves with vodka, pot, painkillers, and passive fucking. The pain would be a cheap metaphor worthy of English Lit 101 if Zuckerman, being the writer he is, didn't constantly mull over its symbolic significances - the pain is his guilt for exposing his family in best-selling novels, it's the wound of an estranged brother or the presence of his mother's ghost, etc. The Ghost Writer was irritating, and Roth's trademark bon mots (so dry as to be dessicated) felt strained.

My Life as a Man by Philip Roth (05/09)

I gave my copy to Liz, and she's taken it to Brooklyn to begin her post-collegiate life. I'm not absorbing one tenth of what's been happening to me these past days, and I realize that's the most narcissistic possible spin I could put on ending college, saying goodbye to Liz, and leaving the country.

Protagonist is a recent Brown grad with writerly ambitions, high moral seriousness, and licentious proclivities. The narrative is how all that is wrung from him in a single, hellish relationship. In short, literary porn.

06/08-11/08

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
White Noise by Don Delillo
The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov
Despair by Vladimir Nabokov
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov
Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Animal Man by Grant Morrison
The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

American Pastoral by Philip Roth (12/08)

Why the long, rambling, psycho-analytic excursions? Why the repetition of action - page-long analysis - action, with each "action" often no more than a word or two, some line of dialog? Why the sudden, histrionic scenes of violence and cruelty and grotesque suffering, like Swede in the hotel room with Rita or vomiting into his daughter's face, especially when they jar so with the rest of the novel?

Pastoral has its flaws, but it is a great novel. Gripping, and not just because it's the first non-Nabokov I've read in months. Important to remember that every analytic digression is written from the perspective of either the Swede or Zuckerman, never Roth. Maybe that's just Roth's way of disguising his own bad habit - frame the whole thing through Zuckerman and blame him for any failings - but I think it has a point. We are more immediately caught up in the minds of our protagonists. Their thought processes are made explicit to us long before the characters themselves could put them into words. Roth is his characters' loquacious interpreter. I wish I had him by me, day to day, to do the same.

An Amazon reviewer points out that Merry is, at best, a hysterical parody of 60s activism, which is not to say that no one existed like her, fully sociopathic, fully a murderer ex nihilo. But she's a symbol, not a person, what the 60s looked like to an older America. The book's not about the 60s. It's a record of the death of everything that was good about pre-60s America. It's an allegory and an elegy, and it achieves this soberly, without too much sentimentality. Perhaps that's why Roth works so hard on the Moby Dick-realism, the intricate details of life, say, in a glove factory. The meticulous care Roth takes with details allows him to escape sentimentality.

The Swede is a bit formulaic. He starts off entirely one dimensional. Then we learn of his rich inner life. The course of the book is his introduction to the willfully unreasonable, the deliberately bizarre and perverse and berserk, in American culture. This goes on quite a while, this acquiring of a third dimension. Mr. Levov (aka Our Halcyon Past) is so decent that it requires over 400 pages to tear down his last illusions. "The Education of Seymour Levov." But his agony is meaningfully rendered. A parent's agony. Saves the book from grim didacticism.

Roth has his programme, and he hammers away at it relentlessly. Decline and Fall of the American Footballer, with the Weathermen as the Vandals and the Black Panthers as the Goths. High school seniors could locate his thesis with ease, since it recurs, again and again, ad nauseam, either concise or rambling, blah tortuous tedium. Here it is, on page 418, amidst an ending that finally manages to become wearisome because it's more or less exactly what you envisioned 200 pages ago: "The daughter had made her father see. And perhaps this was all she had ever wanted to do. She had given him sight, the sight to see clear through that that which will never be regularized, to see what you can't see and don't see and won't see until three is added to one to get four [murders]."

Quotes

"How could he have gone around dopily believing he was making her happy when there was no justification for his feelings, when they were absurd, when, year in, year out, she was seething with hatred for their house? How he had loved the providing." (193)

"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." (35)