'the tyranny of contingency'

Nemesis
by Philip Roth

Before the title page of Roth's books the list of his previous novels isn't given chronologically but grouped into narrative approach. There are the Zuckerman books beginning with The Ghost Writer and ending with the recent Exit Ghost, the concupiscent Kepesh books, even 'Roth' books like Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America. Roth's prolific output of short novels recently are gathered together as Nemeses: Everyman, Indignation and The Humbling now joined by the novel that gives the collection its thematic title. As an exploration of mortality and chance, each of these short novels on their own has felt a little underwhelming to a committed Roth fan like myself but then gained far more when seen as part of a larger whole. With this final novel in the series I wondered whether they might be a larger pay-off or perhaps a tying together of themes and ideas. On a first reading it doesn't really feel that way, this is another standalone tale that continues Roth's study of death and the only surprise (although by now it shouldn't be) is that such a fundamental topic, and the approach taken with this book, should yield a story that for all its strengths still manages to underwhelm ever so slightly. I'll come to the reasons why that might be later but let us first look at the set-up.

Roth's alternative history, The Plot Against America, was set in his own native Weequahic section of Newark during the 1940's, a time and place he returns to here with a no-less imagined polio outbreak during the stifling summer of 1944 ('...that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb and polio'). This isn't a 'Roth' book however, it is narrated by Arnie Mesnikoff, a child at the time of the outbreak, looking back from the relative safety of 1971. The period before the development of a vaccine and before even a clear understanding of how the virus was transmitted was one of fear, rumour and suspicion. In this climate we meet Bucky Cantor, playground director for Chancellor Avenue School (for those, like me, not sure what that job is, it seems that during the holidays from school, children would play ball, jump rope and generally run themselves around in the school's playground under the watchful eye of the playground director).

He stood slightly under five feet five inches tall, and though he was a superior athlete and strong competitor, his height, combined with his poor vision, had prevented him from playing college-level football, baseball, or basketball and restricted his intercollegiate sports activity to throwing the javelin and lifting weights... His was the cast-iron, wear-resistant, strikingly bold face of a sturdy young man you could rely on.

That poor eyesight has kept him at home whilst friends and others his age are away fighting in Europe and the Pacific, something for which he feels huge guilt, which is the novel's major theme (developed more specifically as survivor's guilt). On the home front however he is a hero to the children he looks after and finds himself on the frontline when polio first strikes and then quickly develops into an epidemic. Through the playground scenes we here the chants of girls jumping rope, an alphabetised chorus going through various names and a little like the plague-associated Ring a Ring o' Roses sounding like a deathly roll call as one after another of the children falls prey to the virus. Bucky's own playground favourite, Alan Michaels, is dead within 72 hours and in a touching scene with his father, the two men struggle to find meaning in the death of such a wonderful child.

"Everything he did, he did it right the first time. And always happy. Always with a joke. So why did he die? Where is the fairness in that?"
"There is none," Mr. Cantor said.
"You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way. You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accommodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense in life?"
"It doesn't seem to have any," Mr. Cantor answered.

At the same rate with which the virus spreads, and more and more children fall victim to its most extreme conclusion, grows fear. Fear, which had driven many of the Jewish neighbourhood's residents from Europe in the first place, fear which threatens to close the playgrounds and send children into hiding or exile, fear which Bucky is advised to 'foster less' of by his girlfriend's father, the calming Dr Steinberg, for "Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us." But the relentlessness of the virus' march and the way in which this forces Bucky to confront the blocked emotions surrounding his own mother's death in childbirth lead to perhaps the only natural reaction: to blame God. When his girlfriend pleads with him to leave Newark and join her at summer camp in the Pocono Mountains he eventually relents, deserting the quietened playgrounds of Newark, adding further to his guilt.

'Ensconced in this noisy funhouse of a summer camp', which at night becomes an Eden-like idyll where he and Marcia can make love without fear of discovery Bucky is still tormented by 'the force of circumstance', the random events or smallest choices that can cause paths to diverge so wildly. For who decides each lot, who fights abroad or stays at home, who catches or carries a virus? The only surety: '...what he no longer had was a conscience he could live with.' For a man whose whole life perhaps has been clouded by guilt Bucky comes to the only conclusion he is capable of when the first case of polio occurs at the summer camp.

All at once he heard a loud shriek. It was the shriek of the woman downstairs from the Michaels family, terrified that her child would catch polio and die. Only he didn't just hear the shriek - he was the shriek.

In the novel's final section we fully engage with the adult narrator as he meets the now elderly Mr. Cantor and converses with him about what happened next. Bucky's reaction to God is not so much one of rejection but vilification, casting him not as the omnipotent holy trinity but an evil double act 'a sick fuck, and an evil genius.' Arnie is slightly more charitable.

Sometime you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance - the tyranny of contingency - is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

So chance, guilt, cowardice, and honour are some of the major themes that crop up and we learn how much Bucky's life has been defined by this one summer, his life's potential altered by that combination of chance and decision, and crucially the role in which he casts himself. For the nemesis of the title could be the virus itself or the man at the novel's centre and one begins to wonder whether what these short novels have made clear is that man is his own worst enemy.

So having written all of that, and you now reading it, why the reservations? Why am I not immediately satisfied by these recent reads? The odd thing is that the process of writing this review has made me realise that the book is better than I thought it was initially, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the experience of reading it and the feelings it raised at the time were a little low-key. I started this book after becoming mired in another and thinking that the always well-crafted prose of Roth's would be my literary solvent to loosen things up a little. You do feel immediately comfortable in the opening pages; the ease with which he sets the scene, the economy of language, the control of period, place and persons shouldn't be underestimated. But there is a kind of professional detachment; that control over the material that in other books of his is broken down by the rage, or the sex, or the authorial play. Only occasionally did the fear feel palpable. Only occasionally did I feel Bucky really wrestling with himself. Part of this might be Roth's choice of narrator who despite his own, late-revealed back story remains a bit of a non-character, but I think the main reason might be the character of Bucky himself. The 'sturdy' man mentioned earlier as a kind of almost-hero is later described thus.

He was largely a humorless person, articulate enough but with barely a trace of wit, who never in his life had spoken satirically or with irony, who rarely cracked a joke or spoke in jest.

There is never really enough there to ignite Bucky in the reader's imagination. Like a lot of Roth's characters he is a man who seems to be decent, who tries to make the right decision and ends up a victim of circumstance. The thrill of novels like American Pastoral, Sabbath's Theatre or I Married A Communist was to see how their male protagonists took a stand and raged against their obstacles (as well of course as having moments of doubt, introspection and anguish). Bucky Cantor has flashes but remains a far more passive aggressor and it might be this that prevented me, despite the tragedy, from really engaging with him fully.

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Reading Matters

I'm moonlighting today on Kimbofo's blog Reading Matters. She has a little feature called Triple Choice Tuesday where other book bloggers choose three books: a favourite book, one that changed their world and one that they think deserves a wider audience, and explain a bit about them and why they were picked  It wasn't easy, it was even a little bit surprising and the only way you can find out more is to head on over and have a read.

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'Oh, play it however you like'

The Humbling
by Philip Roth

You can understand I'm sure how excited I was when I discovered that perhaps my favourite novelist had written a book about an actor. Imagine also my creeping sense of dread as the bad reviews piled up, followed by a nomination for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award; could the opening paragraph of the book refer as much to the author himself as his central character Simon Axler?

He'd lost his magic. The impulse was spent. He'd never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing happened: he couldn't act. Going on-stage became agony. Instead of the certainty that he was going to be wonderful, he knew he was going to fail. It happened three times in a row, and by the last time nobody was interested, nobody came. He couldn't get over to the audience. His talent was dead.

Well it's easy, and perhaps another example of what David Denby calls 'snark', to use that paragraph against its author but it ignores one crucial thing: that's a great opening paragraph. In fact the first section of this short novel (140 generously spaced and margined pages) is fantastic. Many people have the wrong idea about stage fright, they think it refers to a state where actors freeze on stage, unable to recall their lines, or perhaps are scared of going on stage for fear of failure. One renowned actor I worked with described his own experience as like being able to hear the thoughts of the audience as he spoke and they all thought he was a terrible fake. Try getting through a play with that running through your mind. What Roth pinpoints brilliantly is that many of the great actors have no idea what makes them so great, they can't identify what it is they do which makes them different they just know there's something. Imagine then the horror when for no discernible reason that something disappears.

Of course, if you've had it, you always have something unlike anyone else's. I'll always be unlike anyone else, Axler told himself, because I am who I am. I carry that with me - that people will always remember. But the aura he'd had, all his mannerisms and eccentricities and personal peculiarities, ...none of it worked for any role now. All that had worked to make himself now worked to make him look like a lunatic. He was conscious of every moment on stage in the worst possible way. In the past when he was acting he wasn't thinking about anything. What he did well he did out of instinct. Now he was thinking about everything, and everything spontaneous and vital was killed - he tried to control it with thinking and instead he destroyed it.

The two extracts I've used so far are simply the first two paragraphs. I told you that first section was great. Roth is also aware of that other quality that distinguishes the great actors from the good: 'intensity of listening'. This is interesting for a couple of reasons beyond the fact that it is an astute observation. As far as I have been able to gather one of the surprising things about Roth, the man of letters, is that in person he is actually a charming host/conversationalist/humorist - I suspect that in the flesh he is someone who can exhibit that same intensity of listening which can make men so attractive to women. For Axler the ability to listen is something he learns once again through his meeting with a fellow patient at the institution in which he commits himself when the fallout from his career crisis leads to marriage breakdown and suicidal thoughts. He and Sybil Van Buren strike up a bond of support, she needing someone to confirm that she isn't insane for feeling as she does about her child-abusing husband. We'll come back to that section and relationship later.

So the first act is complete, containing all the references to suicide you could want and even, in classic dramatic style, placing a loaded gun amongst the many props. This is why the leap made in the second act is so baffling and, at times, absurd. Axler is sought out by Pegeen, the 40 year old daughter of long term friends who has been living as a lesbian since her early twenties but who wants now to sample a man, to sample our man (despite his advanced years and bad back which make just the one sexual position possible). Is this the stuff of an old man's fantasy? Well, no, it doesn't read like that. Pegeen isn't depicted as your obvious lesbian fantasy, she is damaged in many ways and there is something that makes sense about her picking Axler as the safest option for her experiment in sexual orientation. The reader of course can see that this relationship, as it soon becomes, is doomed to failure even before Axler makes the fatal mistake of introducing a third (female) party into their bedroom.

When a man gets two women together, it is not unusual for one of the women, rightly or wrongly feeling neglected, to wind up crying in a corner of the room. From how this was going so far, it looked as though the one who'd wind up crying in the corner would be him.

The major problem with this part of the book is its absurdity. As the Bad Sex Award nomination will tell you it's very hard to read about a green strap-on dildo without laughing out loud and for many readers the idea of an elderly man being sought out by a lesbian a whole generation younger than him, who then invites another woman into the bed, will be a little too fantastical to take seriously. But let's get past the increasingly sombre author photographs, the focus on mortality in his latest string of small novels and remember that Roth has always had a sense of humour. He is surely well aware of what he is writing, he wants us to laugh, wants Axler to seem ridiculous in his pursuit of one last fling and even sadder in his desire to develop the relationship into something even further. Roth also gets in before the critics can say it makes no sense, the ease with which Axler picks up a woman in a bar to become part of their sexual adventure.

Though what did make sense? His being unable to go out and act on a stage? His having been a psychiatric inpatient. His conducting a love affair with a lesbian whom he'd first met seen nursing at her mother's breast?

The fatal misjudgement that risks jeopardising the book's place amongst this late artistic examination of mortality is that by making Axler ridiculous rather than sad he maybe isn't the best choice of suicidal hero. If this is a book about suicide then the sub-plot of Van Buren, which Roth returns to before the end, is the one that might have made a better focus. In just a snatch of conversation and a letter he manages to make her a far more compelling character than should be possible with so little. There is something empty about the dramatic gestures of Axler, an actor who knows his own weakness for applying the skills of his trade to his own, supposedly real emotional life.

If he were given this role to act in a play, how would he do it? How would he do the phone call? In a voice that was trembling or a voice that was firm? With wit or with savagery, renunciation or rage? He could no more figure out how to play the elderly lover abandoned by the mistress twenty-five years his junior than he'd been able to figure out how to play Macbeth.

When he finally makes the call, giving himself acting notes along the way he realises the futility in a statement that I think backs up what I was saying earlier about Roth's approach to this novel.

Oh, play it however like, Axler told himself. Probably you're playing it for laughs anyway without your even knowing it.

For a couple of other views on this book may I recommend the similarly theatrical Kevin From Canada and The Mookse and The Gripes, who has the intelligence to see the worth of this novel as part of a body of work.

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Top of the Roths

When James Marcus interviewed Philip Roth for a profile in the Los Angeles Times last year he asked him what he thought of the film adaptation of Portnoy's Complaint. “Unspeakable” came the reply. Whilst he liked the film version of Goodbye Columbus he went on to summarise it as a “a movie about shouting. Jewish shouting.” - going on to “give a brief, comical example, which strikes me as a specimen of literary history, like Thoreau demonstrating how to peel the bark off a birch tree.” Marcus has since set the aforementioned holler to a dance beat providing all discerning literary types with a chance to grab a ringtone with pedigree. What do you think? Did Roth miss his calling?

Jewish Shouting

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exasperation

Indignation
by Philip Roth

I struggled last year to swallow the premise of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; the depiction of a time when sex was still something barely discussed, and that the events of the couple's honeymoon could have such devastating consequences. In this similarly slim novel Philip Roth is keen to depict a very specific time (and as the college President will ask later, 'Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all?'). He was quoted himself recently, saying "This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could make it through college unscathed by oral sex." I obviously went to the wrong college. What he also wants to show is 'the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.' The very articulation of that and the important word there, comical, makes Roth's a far more successful book.

In the period during the Korean War we meet Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher and straight A student. His only wish is to do well not only to justify the expense of the education which has forced his mother back behind the counter to work once again with her husband but also of course to avoid the draft. It's difficult not to draw parallels with today when Roth describes the messy and costly war abroad and the very real fear of death for any young soldier going out there. The Communist forces with their bayonets and bugle calls are shown to be an army from a different age, and yet their deadly effectiveness is all to clear. There is another driving force at work however, 'At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, stolid father suddenly stricken with the uncontrollable fear for a grown-up son's well-being.' Marcus' father sees the potential for his son's ruin everywhere. When late home he assumes he is in a whorehouse or pool hall and his increasing hysteria pushes Marcus to attend a college hundreds of miles away in Ohio.

Here at Winesburg he eschews both the Jewish and secular fraternities, preferring to keep his head down and work hard. Because Roth reveals where Marcus is narrating his story from we know where all this is heading and can see how each decision he makes drives him closer and closer to his fate. Marcus himself picks up on his father's fatalism and '...despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.' This comes after his meeting and first date with Olivia Hutton, who will send him into a tailspin after performing that act we have mentioned before. Marcus' confusion is where much of the humour comes from, something that even I, someone born after the sexual revolution, can understand.

In the quite brilliant American Pastoral, Philip Roth describes in vivid detail the manufacture of a pair of women's gloves. Never before had I considered how it was the done let alone the care, the detail and indeed the love that used to go into making a simple pair of gloves. Now, I think, I will never forget. In his latest novel the trade he spotlights is butchery, kosher butchery to be precise and with the same skill he shows the ritual efficiency of the shochet as he slaughters chickens with a quick flick of his knife. Roth contrasts this with the scar Marcus sees on Olivia's wrist, the result of her attempt to 'ritually slaughter herself' but there's something laboured about the comparison which stops it from quite hitting the mark. The rage with which Roth has written in many of his finest works is replaced here by the titular exasperation of a student in conflict with his male authority figures.

The writing is of course excellent throughout, the humour welcome and the period evoked with skill but it's very size makes it feel like a minor work, one which fails to quite match the ambition of earlier small books such as The Ghost Writer. Another short book is on its way (dealing with suicide) and in a recent interview with Robert McCrum, Roth explained his frustration, 'Starting a new book is hell. You just flail around until something happens. It's miraculous. It comes to you out of nothing and nowhere. That's the problem with writing short books. You finish them too quickly. And that's what's wonderful about a long book. So I've decided I've got to find a big project that will take me right through to the end. Finish the day before, and - exit ghost.' That's the book I want to read.

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Gone for good

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

In The Ghost Writer, the first novel to feature Nathan Zuckerman, the young writer travelled from New York to the Berkshires to visit his hero E.I.Lonoff. In Exit Ghost, which is probably the final appearance of Roth's alter ego, the journey is reversed and after 11 years in rural exile Zuckerman returns to the city, 'where the biggest thing of all occurred', on the eve of the presidential election which, we know, will put Bush back in the White House.

I had banished my country, been myself banished from erotic contact with women, and was lost through battle fatigue to the world of love.

He has made the journey, impotent and incontinent after prostate surgery, to undergo a procedure that he hopes will return to him some control over his bladder. It is the latest in the series of mortifications which we have endured with Zuckerman and another stripping away of the vitality and virility which has been such a huge part of him. Face to face with modern life again he surprises himself by responding to a house-swap advert from a young writerly couple looking for solitude, allowing his return to the city. But confronted with ghosts from his past his attempt to re-engage with the world is doomed to be a futile gesture.

Along with the surprise of making impulsive decisions comes the surprising reawakening of his sexual self. Jamie the young female writer exerts 'a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire' but where the mind is willing the body is unable 'I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again'. But the problem here is that the mind isn't even that willing anymore. Zuckerman's encounters with Jamie come in the form of imagined dialogues which lack character,insight and any real teeth at all.

He also encounters the woman who played such a thrilling part in the first novel, Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman re imagined as an Anne Frank who had survived her fate. Now at the age of 75 she is transformed into a crazy looking woman in customised hospital gown with head half shaved and an ugly scar across her scalp, a horrific transformation from the woman who had so charged the young Zuckerman's creativity. Having survived her lover Lonoff she is being hounded (as will Zuckerman) by Kliman, a young writer who wishes to write a biography of Lonoff containing the 'big secret' he had kept from everyone. Zuckerman's battles with this arrogant, pushy reminder of his own youth are the closest we get to fireworks. 'You're dying old man you'll soon be dead! You smell of decay. You smell like death!' he shouts to a urine soaked Zuckerman.

Roth writes very well about what it is like to be a man losing his potency, both physically and mentally but the problem with having such a debilitated hero is that the writing as a whole suffers. Reading the dialogues between Zuckerman and Jamie is like reading a bad play script. Towards the end of the novel there is a section eulogising George Plimpton which comes from nowhere and feels very out of place. Roth is still better than most writers even when not on top form but there isn't much fun to be had reading a writer writing about how hard it has become to write.

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Enter Zuckerman

The Ghost Writer
by Philip Roth

Written in 1979 this is the novel that introduced the character of Nathan Zuckerman, considered by many to be Roth's alter ego. I first started reading Roth at the time of his superb 'American Trilogy' (I Married a Communist, American Pastoral, The Human Stain) all of which are narrated by Zuckerman. My worry was that reading a writer who was considered to be at the peak of his powers would lead to disappointment when I went back through his bibliography. Whilst there is no doubt that Roth has continued to grow as a writer there is so much to admire at various stages of his career and reading this slim volume there is so much to chew on and admire with the arrival of this seminal character in American fiction.

The novel depicts a night spent by the 23 year old Zuckerman at the house of his literary idol E.I.Lonoff (if Zuckerman is Roth then Lonoff is Bernard Malamud. Apparently). Also in the house with Lonoff and his wife Hope is a young student Amy Bellete who bears a striking resemblance to Anne Frank. Zuckerman is after a father figure after relations with his own have been strained by a story he has recently written. But in only 24 hours he gets a lot more than he bargained for. In the first section of the book the men discuss writing.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

But the writer's life has left his wife at her wits end and provoked by the continued presence of Amy, Hope Lonoff hurls a wineglass at the wall after dinner and begs to be thrown out. After this scene and forced by the late hour and poor weather to stay the night in Lonoff's study Zuckerman relates to us how he has offended his father with a story drawn from his own family which seems to show Jews as greedy. Later in the novel he will come to realise that to be free to create the art he wishes he may have to sacrifice something. Whilst searching this study he comes accross a quotation form Henry James.

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Inspired by this we have the most extraordinary section of the book as Zuckerman imagines a whole new life for the young student upstairs that so resembles Anne Frank. It is this kind of invention that can make Roth so thrilling to read, written with such vigour and bravery. There is still a lot of early Roth humour here as well.

Virtuous reader, if you think that after intercourse all animals are sad, try masturbating on the daybed in E. I. Lonoff's study and see how you feel when it's over.

All in all it is a fascinating introduction to a character who has appeared in 9 books now and I can't wait to see how he has developed for his final appearance in Exit Ghost.

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waiting for a bus

You know how it goes: you spend weeks/months not particularly enthused about what you're reading and then suddenly you realise that there's a bumper crop coming up.

I've just ordered a copy of Denis Johnson's new novel Tree of Smoke. His first novel in 9 years, it looks like a hefty tome and I can't wait. Johnson is an intriguing writer. A poet, playwright, journalist and novelist he often writes about those people at the margins, those underneath the surface of American society in particular. His novels aren't all consistent but I would recommend his first Angels, his most recent The Name of The World and his collection of stories Jesus' Son which was made into a good film by Alison Maclean starring Billy Cruddup, Jack Black and Samantha Morton.

Also soon to be published is the latest from Philip Roth. Exit Ghost looks to be the final novel featuring Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. I have always enjoyed reading Roth's work even if it doesn't all reach the heights of American Pastoral. His writing of late has been very much about the inexorable journey towards death and recent publicity shots have shown him looking, well, miserable as usual so I was cheered to see this interview recently and the picture above in particular.


Last but by no means least is Men In Space the new novel from Tom McCarthy. His first novel Remainder is quite simply the best book I have read this century (I know, it's early days). Brave, challenging and unique I urge you to read it now if you haven't already. This new book sounds very different and I had to stop myself mugging someone who was reading it on the bus yesterday.

Now that would be a headline:

Man mugged on bus for literary fiction

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