The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  As a seven-year-old, he hid under a cloth-covered table and listened while nine peasants, two of them women, killed his father. Mario is now about thirty years old: this would have happened during the period known as La Violencia (though there is barely a period of Colombian history that could not be so called). When he was twelve he made a start on his venganzas, killing the first of the nine peasants with a knife. He then went on to kill the other eight. Then he gravitated to Cali. That’s who they are in Aguablanca, in Siloé: peasants, and now the children of peasants, drastically citified.

  After a spell in carjacking, then in kidnapping (a vast field), Mario was called up for military service. On his discharge he took his improved organizational skills and “went to the woods,” supervising the production and transfer of talco (cocaine) in rural Colombia and in Ecuador. This was itself a kind of military tour; your adversary was not the police but the army.

  Mario speaks of his time in the woods with fondness and awe. “The cocaine came in blocks, all stamped—very pretty [muy bonita], how it shines [cómo brilla],” he says. “Once I saw a whole room full of money.”

  He came back to Cali, equipped with discipline, esprit, and (one imagines) a ton of pesos, and started “enjoying life.” It is not hard to imagine Mario enjoying life: in a city full of terrifying men, he would have been universally feared. He took a job in an office, and in this capacity he killed about 150 people in six years. But that’s a lot of venganza to be storing up, and in December 2003 they came for him in force. He was at a stoplight when four men on two motorbikes pulled up on either side of the car.

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  Now Mario’s sister served coffee—a profound improvement on the Tizer and Dandelion & Burdock you are usually offered in Colombia. It seems deeply typical of Aguablanca that there is never any coffee; you trudge from place to place whining for a cup.

  Time to go. I asked Mario to describe the difference between his first murder and his last, and he said: “The first, with the knife? It was awful. I had bad dreams. I cried all day. I had paranoia. But the last time? Nada. You do it and you just think, Now I get paid.”

  Mario called for his cloudy trophies, and lay half-immersed in them: his handgun (very heavy—to its wielder it must have had the divine heaviness of gold), his X-rays (the lucent second bullet in the arched thorax), and his stainless police record (which cost him 750 pounds). He also had his clicker, his clock, and, of course, his transparent wallet of urine, taped to the side of the bed.

  They are still after Mario, so it was double deliverance to get out of his house. When I thought about it later, though, it seemed to me that Mario, with his provenance, was entitled to his hate; and that the nonmonstrous Raul, with his slight frame and his bellhop’s smile, was the more representative figure—a leaf in the wind of the peer group.

  Machismo, in its Latin American mutation, has one additional emphasis, that of indifference—unreachable indifference. You felt that indifference very strongly with John Anderson, the sixteen-year-old on the central divide. Any kind of empathy is not just enfeebling—it is effeminate. You have no empathy even for yourself.

  So it appears that the Aguablancans are playing a children’s game—kids’ stuff—of dare and taunt and posture, in which they all feel immortal. Except that the sticks and stones are now knives and guns and hand grenades.

  As you drive back into the heart of the city, you see boys—jugglers—performing for the spectators who sit wedged in their cars. They are juggling not with clubs or oranges but with machetes and brands of fire.

  7. THE RETURN OF DEATH

  On my last day I went to the MSF exhibition of photographs and case histories. There were familiar names and faces: Ana Milena, little Kevin. On the night the exhibition opened, all the featured victims attended, except Edward Ignacio. Still recovering from his multiple panga wounds, Edward was shot dead earlier that day.

  From there to the cemetery in the middle of town, a small, crowded plot of land between the football ground and the busy Texaco. Its entrance was almost submerged by roadworks: a steamroller, a cement mixer, hillocks of hot tar. Tradesmen had gathered with soft drinks and ice cream. A storm was coming, and you could smell the moisture in the dust.

  The cemetery was more like a morgue than a graveyard, with the dead stacked into a series of thick blocks, each berth not much bigger than a paving stone. Every panel had something written on it (at the minimum just the name and the year of interment) in Magic Marker; others were more elaborate, with framed photographs, poems, avowals (“yo te quiero”), figurines, crosses, hearts, angels. We had come with a woman called Marleny Lopez. Her husband was one of the few who had been buried in the earth. The tombstone gave his name and dates, Edilson Mora, 1965–1992. This was an engraver’s mistake. Edilson was in fact thirty-seven when he died, two years ago. He was playing dominoes with a policeman, and he won. This was perhaps survivable; but then the loser had to pay for the beers.

  Most of the other dates showed shorter spans than Edilson’s: 1983–2001, 1991–2003. On the whole they got longer as you moved deeper in and further back in time. Further back in time, too, the names ceased to be anglophone. And so went Diesolina, Arcelio, Hortencia, Bartolomé, Nieves, Santiago, Yolima, Abelardo, Luz, Paz…

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  I returned from one of the back alleys and found myself in the middle of a burial service. There was a coffin, with four bearers, and scores of people had come to mourn. This wasn’t a gang slaying, a drive-by, a bala perdida. A woman had died of a heart attack at the age of twenty-eight: 1976–2004.

  What happened next happened suddenly. I had spent the recent days making believe that death didn’t matter. Now a bill was presented to me. I felt—suddenly inconsolable. It was a great chastisement to see the bitter weeping of the husband, the bitter weeping of the mother. It was a great chastisement, long overdue, to see death reassuming its proper weight.

  The Sunday Times 2005

  Literature 3

  Philip Roth Finds Himself

  Claudia Roth Pierpont Roth Unbound

  American anti-Semitism, which was running a high fever throughout the 1930s, steadily heated up after the onset of war. During the entire period, polls showed, well over a third of the populace stood ready to back discriminatory laws. Nor was this a mere offshoot of the general xenophobia spawned by isolationism. Every synagogue in Washington Heights was desecrated (and some were smeared with swastikas); in Boston, beatings, wreckings, and defilements had become near-daily occurrences by 1942. This woeful delirium, which ruled out all but a trickle of immigration and so cost countless lives, reached its historic apogee in 1944. The Holocaust proper began in the summer of 1941, and was fitfully winding itself down by the beginning of 1945—thus the temperature surge in the American temper exactly coincided with it.

  And what of the media? News of the mass killings of Jews emerged in May–June 1942: a verified report with a figure of 700,000 already dead. The Boston Globe gave the story the three-column headline MASS MURDERS OF JEWS IN POLAND PASS 700,000 MARK, and tucked it away at the foot of page 12. The New York Times quoted the report’s verdict—“probably the greatest mass slaughter in history”—but gave it only two inches. We may venture to say that such reticence is slightly surprising, given that the historiography of the events outlined above now runs to many tens of thousands of volumes.

  Philip Roth would use this soiled and callous backdrop in The Plot Against America (2004), his twenty-sixth book; but anti-Semitism and its corollary, anti-anti-Semitism, wholly dominated the publication of his first, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959). “What is being done to silence this man?” asked a rabbi. “Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.” Roth’s cheerful debut, some thought, shored up the same “conceptions…as ultimately led to the murder of six million in our time.” So he wasn’t only contending with a “rational” paranoia; he was also ensnared in the ongoing anguish of comprehension and
absorption, as the sheer size of the trauma inched into consciousness. After a hate-filled public meeting at Yeshiva University in New York in 1962, Roth solemnly swore (over a pastrami sandwich) that he would “never write about Jews again.”

  It was a hollow vow. But Roth, remember, was still in his twenties; and one of the snags of starting young is that you’re obliged to do your growing up in public. He was a proud American, as well as a Jew; a robustly bloody-minded talent, such as his, would have known at once that fiction insists on freedom: that, indeed, fiction is freedom, and freedom is indivisible (hence, later on, his passionate support for the writers of Czechoslovakia). Still, it could be argued that with one thing and another Roth took about fifteen years to settle into his voice. The later career was conventional; the early career was wildly eccentric—a mysterious and fascinating flail.

  Claudia Roth Pierpont (no relation), in her lively and clever monograph, says that Roth’s first full-length novel, Letting Go (1962), is “about not letting go”: not letting go of responsibility, obligation, a general frowning, crew-necked earnestness—and, importantly, not letting go of Henry James. Here, the large cast is pluralist; but ethnic anxieties seemed to linger. So what next? Well, at this point Roth put aside a book called “Jewboy,” and after “years of misery” (five of them) produced When She Was Good, a straight-faced, all-goy saga set in a prim and mannerly midwestern town. And here we were given our first real glimpse of the succubus that was eating his soul.

  I remember thinking at the time that there was something extreme and frighteningly inordinate about the heroine, Lucy Nelson (she is adhesive, devouring, remorseless); I remember thinking, too, that she was only a part of an untold story. It is a profound portrait—flaringly alive in a book that often struggles for breath. Critics said that When She Was Good could have been written by a woman, others that it could have been written by a WASP (Sherwood Anderson, perhaps). Still, what the reader was looking for, around then, was a novel that could only have been written by Philip Roth.

  That novel was Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)—a time bomb of cawing, stinging comedy (it is even typographically explosive, setting the aggregate record, in mainstream fiction, for exclamation marks, block caps, and italics). Here the tensions and conflicts of the Jewish-American experience are reduced to their core: shiksas. The word’s Yiddish root means “detested thing”; by matrilineal logic, male gentiles are tolerable suitors for Jewish girls, but for Jewish boys shiksas spell (a) apostate offspring and (b) assimilation, and shiksas are therefore taboo. Forbidden, detested—and all the more hotly desired. Roth attacked this crux with incomparable energy; and it seemed that a turbulent and directionless talent had finally found perfect pitch.

  Now the story becomes strange, becomes passing strange. Portnoy, readers assumed, was Roth’s real letting-go. But it turned out there was something else, and something quite intrinsic, to be let go of. Having ceased to care about that chimera called “good taste” (a shallow consensus of the bien pensant), Roth ceased to care about literary value. He ceased to care about Henry James. Our Gang, written in “a mere three months,” is a grimly unfunny satire of the Nixon administration (“Trick E. Dixon”?); The Breast, written in “a few weeks,” transforms its hero into a giant mammary gland (an abnormally unpromising donnée); and The Great American Novel, 382 pages about baseball, is a hobbyist’s exercise in virtuoso facetiousness. It was, you might say, remarkably bold: in tight succession, 1971, 1972, 1973, Roth—clearly something of a genius—pulled off three unqualified duds.

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  The lurid light surrounding Lucy Nelson, the five-year hiatus, the sense of an unaired wound, the mad cackle of Portnoy, the revolt against high seriousness and the embrace of frivolity: now the answers started coming in with My Life as a Man (1974). This tells the tale of Roth’s “horrific” first marriage and its aftermath, a relationship that began in 1956 and ended only with an accidental death in 1968. It is a novel you read between the fingers of the hand you keep raising to your face. The central puzzle is that Roth evidently colluded in his own entrapment; and the explanation, as his proxy in My Life, Peter Tarnopol, puts it, is that “literature got me into this.” The attraction to difficulty, to complexity, even to agony is real enough in an intensely bookish young man; there are numerous instances of writers who hunt down the most fantastic entanglements; they make misery their muse, or they try. So the dud triptych—Our Gang, The Breast, The Great American Novel—can be regarded as Roth’s vandalous revenge on the literary.

  He had found his subject, which is to say he had found himself. And the self, seen through an intricate mesh of personae, doppelgängers, and noms de guerre, would provide the framework (with a couple of exceptions) for his remaining nineteen novels. John Updike once argued that although fiction can withstand any amount of egocentricity, it is wholly allergic to narcissism. There is no narcissism in Roth; the creature in the mirror is given merciless and unblinking scrutiny. Updike again: “Who cares what it’s like to be a writer?” The short answer is, We care, for all sorts of reasons, when that writer is Jewish. (Jewish-American literature is above all new: it began with Saul Bellow, circa 1950.) And Updike appeared to concede the point when he created Henry Bech, giving his Jewish writer three full-length excursions (and wistfully awarding him the Nobel Prize).

  Portnoy was described in Haaretz as “the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying,” more toxic even than that (ridiculous) fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But over the years the job of chorically attacking Philip Roth, increasingly skimped by Jewry, has been taken up by Feminism. Pierpont conscientiously deals with these objections as and when they arise, rightly pointing out that Roth’s women cover a very broad range. But I think the charge of misogyny, et cetera, is just a straightforward category error. As with the rabbinical critique, there is some historical justification, but both are sociopolitical, not literary; they are in fact antiliterary. Besides, isn’t women’s fiction crammed with male louts and rats? Isn’t men’s? The right-on heroine (a harp-playing, corporation-running mother of five, say, with an enlightened husband and a virile young lover called Raoul) is of no conceivable interest to any genuine writer; besides, she is well represented in any number of admiring narratives—and you can get all you want of them at the airport.

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  Roth Unbound is a critical biography of the old school, though one invaluably topped up with reported comments and judgments from the Philip Roth of today. Eighty years old, and “done” with writing (or so he says), he comes across as droll, sagacious, securely self-deprecating (of the early books and the early marriage), relaxed, high-spirited, and warm. By the end one consents to the verdict of the Roth impersonator in Operation Shylock (1993), who says to the “real” Roth:

  But your eyes melt a little too, you know. I know the things you’ve done for people. You hide your sweet side from the public—all the glowering photographs and I’m-nobody’s-sucker interviews. But behind the scenes, as I happen to know, you’re one very soft touch, Mr. Roth.

  The corpus, it seems, is now complete. Roth tends to divide opinion—because high originality is, and should be, fairly tough to digest. Apart from Portnoy and the balefully powerful My Life as a Man, there are, by my count, three further magna opera. I am thinking of the lapidary burnish of The Ghost Writer (1979), the daunting intellectual rigor of The Counterlife (1986), and the lush Victorian amplitude of American Pastoral (1997). And, throughout, there are certain motifs that unfailingly ignite Roth’s eloquence: Israel; aging and mortality; sickness and suffering; this whole business with parents; and, most surprisingly, this whole business with children.

  In Sabbath’s Theater (1995), the rebarbative hero is shamefaced about having once had a wife, and consoles himself with the thought that at least he never had a child—he’s not that stupid. Novelists don’t always need to try things out for themselves (and believing otherwise brought him his “Lucy Nel
son” and twelve blighted years). Here we see the routine and elementary miracle of fiction. Look at Swede Levov and Merry in American Pastoral. You can write beautifully about children without having had any; you simply apply to the surrogate mother of the imagination.

  The New York Times Book Review 2013

  Roth the Elder: A Moralistic Investigation

  Philip Roth The Dying Animal

  The most significant page in any novel precedes the text and is traditionally headed “By the same author.” Goodbye, Columbus (1959), of course, lacked such a page, but the absence was still eloquent: it told us that an original and menacing intelligence now roamed the land. Philip Roth has recently been tampering with his introductory CV. Instead of simply listing his publications in sequence, he has corralled them into four different sections: Zuckerman Books, Roth Books, Kepesh Books, and Other Books. Well, you think, the author is approaching his seventieth year; perhaps there is an urge to codify the corpus and to prompt the pens of the dissertators. Later it strikes you that Roth has done away with chronological order. His fiction, and his talent, are defying time.

  It is in the Kepesh Books section that The Dying Animal belongs, together with The Professor of Desire and (fittingly) The Breast. Actually The Breasts, plural, would have served perfectly well for the new novella. In the earlier book David Kepesh, then a young academic, is metamorphosed not into a beetle (or, in one Kafka translation, “into a monstrous vermin”) but into a giant mammary gland. In The Dying Animal, which is social-realist in genre, Kepesh merely becomes obsessed with the contents of a particular brassiere. And toward the end, horribly and harrowingly, those breasts are fated to be reduced to the singular.