by Martin Amis
With its elaborate double-time scheme, its cunning rearrangements and realignments of the past, its blend of impetuous candour and decent reticence, Palimpsest is a work of considerable artistry. And Jimmie, the hidden other, illuminates its core. As a character, as a creation, he seems to shine through unassisted, all by himself; but this is an effect wrought by great authorial guile. He becomes universal – like the German soldier in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ CI am the enemy you killed, my friend’). Of course, Jimmie was an American. In a late letter to his mother, he signed of as follows: ‘All my love to the swellest Mom in all the world.’ It was very intelligent of Vidal to quote another letter, from another marine on Iwo Jima, whose ingenuous repetition (‘he was a joy’) give the right sense of there being nothing more to say:
We were all real proud of Jim Trimble, and everybody else was. He was a joy to be around. He had a good personality. He was always joking. I know he wanted to go back and go to school and play professional baseball. He was just a joy to be around.
Sunday Times October 1995
Philip Roth and the Self
My Life As a Man by Philip Roth
Although Philip Roth’s novels have got steadily sillier since Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the quality of his prose has continued to improve. Indeed, the panache with which Roth recreated the soft fantasies of The Great American Novel (1973) makes even the most impressive pages of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) seem rather pietistic by comparison. My Life As a Man, Roth’s miraculous mess of a new novel, marks a return to the heartache-in-the-humanities circuit of the early books – most obviously that of Letting Go (1962) – but in other respects it keeps up the recent tradition: however lazy, fanciful or lugubrious he gets, Roth’s sentences are dapper and sonorous, always eventful, never congested.
We still have problems, though. My Life As a Man begins with two autobiographical short stories, presented as the autobiographical work of an autobiographical novelist, about a young autobiographical writer. The rest of the book is a first-person account of the autobiographical novelist’s attempt to write a new autobiographical novel and his final abandonment of it in favour of unadorned autobiography. Intimations of the confessional are not, then, easy to pooh-pooh, and I had to resist the temptation to get the dirt on Roth before starting to write this review. In fact, there’s enough internal evidence to settle the matter. There always is. One could even have forgone the po-faced disclosure on the title-page that parts of the book have appeared, ‘in somewhat different form’, in periodicals as various as the New York Times, Modern Occasions and (best) Marriage and Divorce.
The resulting patchwork tells of the suicidal alliance of a young Jewish novelist, Peter Tarnopol, and a world-class predator called Maureen, their separation, his protracted analysis with Dr Spielvogel (another refugee from Portnoy), his subsequent affair with a WASP non-predator, and his attempts to exorcize Maureen, even after her violent death, in literary form. Along the way we encounter the standard Roth preoccupations. The perils of having an over-literary mind – perils which The Breast (1972) so unenlighteningly dramatized – are once more examined; Tarnopol marries Maureen because it’s the sort of thing people in tortured novels do, and then tries, in turn, to make a tortured novel out of her: ‘Literature got me into this,’ he writes, ‘and literature is gonna have to get me out.’ Allied to that complaint is the old Portnoy one about the temperamental inability to get ‘on good terms with pleasure’, a syndrome that persuades you to ditch girls for being too sexy and intelligent and then to give yourself a nightly stroke in an attempt to bring unintelligent and sexless bedpartners to orgasm. As for experimentation, the province of Roth’s last three books, we get only the odd gentle-reader interlude (an improvement, admittedly, on the thick-lout reader, scum-of-the-earth reader asides of The Breast) and some routine confusion between Lit Crit and literature. And then there’s the Jewish blues, too, of course.
Now either these events and concerns are the stuff of self-revelation or My Life As a Man is a museum of perversity. The solipsism takes two main forms. First, it shows itself in Roth’s neurotic deference to his neuroses. (The only dead section of the book is the Spielvogel chapter, and some of the duller anecdotes read like experiences recollected in analysis.) Psychological accuracy, after all, is not the same as literary shape. One thing shrinks don’t do is shrink. As with lawyers and other social parasites, it is in their interests tediously to augment; and artistically Roth would be better employed baying at the moon once or twice a week. The second giveaway has to do with the novel’s surface. My Life As a Man sags with the minutiae that belong to life and not to art; it displays a wooden fidelity to the inconsequential, a scrupulousness about detail which isn’t significant, merely true.
And yet the book is alive. I read it twice with constant disapproval and no loss of interest and pleasure. As a valediction, however, one might remind Roth that there is a lot of fictional terrain between what happened to you yesterday and Richard Nixon’s attempts to coax votes out of foetuses (Our Gang), between bitching about your wife and turning into a mammary gland, between your psychiatrist’s couch and a hinterland of baseball: I mean the terrain he glimpsed in When She Was Good (1967). There are, in short, people in the world other than middle-class Jewish Professors of English Literature: to paraphrase Moe Tarnopol, one of the superbly compact cameos in this ragged knapsack of a book – enough with them already.
New Statesman November 1974
Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth
This is a new kind of autobiographical novel. It is an autobiographical novel about what it is like to write autobiographical novels … The question is: do we need this new kind of autobiographical novel? We all seemed to be getting by without it.
The hero of the book is Nathan Zuckerman. This is Nathan’s third consecutive outing as Philip Roth’s fictional alter ego. Roth has used other, more fictional alter egos in the past – Peter Tarnopol, for instance, in My Life As a Man, who differs from Roth in at least one or two bold particulars. But there is nothing very alter about Nathan Zuckerman. He is more of an ipse ego. To all intents and purposes – and it is still not clear what these are – Zuckerman and Roth would seem to be the same guy. A curious side-effect of autobiographical fiction is that it puts the reader in a state of salacious curiosity about the author’s private life. I was minding my own business before this book came along.
In Zuckerman Unbound Nathan has just published Carnovsky, an autobiographical novel about his youth and early manhood, featuring a predatory Jewish mother, an enervated Jewish father, and many a haggard handjob in the bathroom of the family apartment in Newark. The year is 1969, which, of course, is the year that Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint, an autobiographical novel about his youth and early manhood, featuring a predatory Jewish etc., etc. Both books enjoy uncontrollable success. Nathan and Philip wake up to find they are headliners, millionaires, and self-trumpeted satyrs.
‘Hey, you do all that stuff in that book? With all those chicks? You are something else, man,’ the meter-reader tells Zuckerman. The meter-reader … New York is a good place for this type of generalized paranoia, a place where everyone likes to involve themselves in the huff-and-puff of celebrity. ‘Those cover stories were enough of a trial for a writer’s writer friends, let alone for a semi-literate psychopath who might not know about all the good deeds he did at the PEN club.’ Nathan duly tangles with the wackos and crazoids of Manhattan, the self-elected alter egos of the streets, and garners his share of the fan-mail and hate-mail, the anonymous telephone calls, and the lurid speculations in the gossip columns.
Roth has written about this period of his life before, non-fictionally, in Reading Myself and Others. The essay is baffled and rueful in tone. After the publication of Portnoy, Roth’s name was linked with that of Barbra Streisand; he read newspaper reports of his own nervous breakdown (all that masturbation catching up on him); the pulp novelist Jacqueline Susann said on a chat-show that she would like t
o meet Philip Roth but wouldn’t like to shake his hand. ‘She, of all people,’ wrote Roth in the authentic accent of wounded pride – not personal pride so much as pride on behalf of his art. ‘They had mistaken impersonation for confession,’ says Zuckerman, ‘and were calling out to a character who lived in a book.’ Well, that might have been true of Portnoy. But in what sense can it be true of Zuckerman?
The main ethical and emotional burden of the novel concerns Zuckerman’s parents: though they may not be directly traduced in Carnovsky, the world certainly thinks they are. Mr and Mrs Zuckerman suffer; and Nathan, again for reasons of literary amour propre, is slow to believe in their pain. He manages to patch things up with his mother (as, you feel, Roth is doing: it’s a new-deal Mrs Portnoy in this book – she’s a sweetheart), but his father dies with the word ‘Bastard’ on his lips. ‘You selfish bastard,’ echoes Zuckerman’s kid brother towards the end. ‘You can’t believe that what you write about people has real consequences.’ Now this is meant to be challenging stuff And yet – what about this novel, and its consequences? The title, and the ending, suggest a new freedom, a throwing-off of the merely personal, the merely local. However, the promise is not realized here. Nathan is still shackled to his rock, and the vulture is still lunching on his liver.
‘Literature got me into this,’ says the wretched Tarnopol in My Life as a Man, ‘and literature is gonna have to get me out.’ It remains a good slogan. For all the self-immersion on view, Zuckerman Unbound is a frictionless read: indeed, it’s over before you know it. In the age of the how- to book, the case-history and the agony column, this sort of thing has an inordinate appeal; everyone who can read has by now cultivated the habit of reading their own lives. A talent the size of Philip Roth’s will always confer a touch of universality. Reading about his life has satisfactions analogous to reading about one’s own. Ah, life: Zuckerman Unbound is life all right. But is it literature?
Observer August 198
The Counterlife by Philip Roth
Philip Roth’s new novel is so formidably good, and so perversely surprising, that it prompts a question: how did he get here? How did he wind up with this? Over the space of ten books and almost twenty years Roth has endured an odd kind of impatience from his public, an impatience resembling pique or obscurely hurt feelings. The reason for this seems to me quite straightforward. Roth is a comic genius, and there are never enough comic geniuses – there are never enough to go around. In 1969 he published Portnoy’s Complaint. It was his fourth work of fiction; the dutiful tyro stuff was out of the way; he had found his voice. We sat back, asking for more. And he gave us less.
What did he give us? First a trio of formal satires, if you please: Our Gang, The Breast, and The Great American Novel. These were comic in shape, but contrary to our wishes, only glancingly comic in execution. Looking on with expressions of strained indulgence, we allowed Roth this holiday, and calmly waited for the comic genius to resume his obligations. Next came My Life as a Man and The Professor of Desire, two novels that, it was widely felt, were not funny enough. And where did Roth get off, not being funny enough? No, My Life and The Prof erred on the side of bookishness, introspection, and anguish. We wanted the old get up and go. For our pains we were zapped by the Zuckerman quartet, perhaps the most cramped and stubborn exercise in self-examination known to modern letters. As its title suggests, The Counterlife marks a parting of the ways, which, though, lead in unexpected directions. Zuckerman is still there; Zuckerman is still in solitary. But Roth is back on the streets.
There aren’t supposed to be degrees or intensities of uniqueness, and yet Roth is somehow inordinately unique. He is bloodymindedly himself, himself, himself. The trouble with Zuckerman, the trouble with the self as a literary idea, is that there is no subject. Ironically, it is Zuckerman whom we thank for this elusive truth, at the end of The Counterlife, 1,000 pages having gone by since the experiment began. Hence the desperate thinness, the unbearable lightness of much of the earlier Zuckerman work. How it yearned for escape into the concrete, how it sobbed and pleaded for substance. One felt that Roth couldn’t possibly go further – that, indeed, there was nowhere further to go. But on he went, with typical and (it now seems) heroic pertinacity. Like a dying star, Roth hovered on the point of catastrophic collapse. With The Counterlife, however, the supernova has arrived, and it almost hurts the eye.
The agent, the catalyst, is unquestionably Israel. Here is a subject all right, and it may even be that Roth has spent half his life readying himself to take it on. He went there before, carrying Portnoy’s passport, and the place defeated him: the Israel section was the only major weakness of Portnoy’s Complaint, and that is a measure of how far we have come. Set against The Counterlife, the earlier book looks regressive and dead-ended; for all its savage splendours, Portnoy was a farewell to youth, and Roth had to say goodbye to all that. Yet Jewishness in one form or another – and the more obsessive the better – has always been the real goad to his eloquence. One could even half-frivolously accuse the earlier, weaker Zuckermans of being assimilationist in tendency, doomed tryouts of inauthentic lives: the celebrity hobnobber of Zuckerman Unbound, the flailing penitent of The Anatomy Lesson, the cultural cosmopolitan of The Prague Orgy. In any event, Roth has now come home, artistically. ‘Jews Jews’, Jew-engrossed, Jew-engorged’, ‘JewJewJew’: this is the front line of the talent.
His Israel chapters, ‘Judea’ and ‘Aloft’ (aboard an El Al jet), are choric songs for vying voices, successions of dramatic monologues marshalled by the man with the golden ear. ‘The Bible is their bible,’ Zuckerman incredulously notes. Yes, and it is also their babel. Shuki Elchanan, a liberal Tel Aviv journalist: ‘This place has become the American Jewish Australia. Now who we get is the Oriental Jew and the Russian Jew and … roughnecks in yarmulkes from Brooklyn.’ Shuki’s father: ‘See that bird? That’s a Jewish bird. See, up there? A Jewish cloud … We are living in a Jewish theater and you are living in a Jewish museum!’ Mordecai Lippman, a West Bank frontiersman: ‘They are throwing stones at Jews. Every stone is an anti-Semitic stone.’ An El Al security guard: ‘The weak little shnook Jew was fine, the Jewish hick with his tractor and his short pants, who could he trick, who could he screw? But suddenly … Real Jewish might!’
Zuckerman seems to steer his way through the cacophony with flawless scepticism. Shuki says that in Israel ‘it’s enough to live – you don’t have to do anything else and you go to bed exhausted’, yet Zuckerman shrewdly reasons that here ‘everything comes bursting out of everyone all the time, and so probably means half as much as you think’. In a brush with a wailer at the Wailing Wall, Zuckerman confesses that all four of his wives have been shiksas. ‘Why, mister?’ That’s the sort of Jew I am, Mac.’ He is contentedly assimilated, contentedly ‘decadent’. When, in Judaea, Zuckerman is informed that ‘what Hitler couldn’t achieve with Auschwitz, American Jews are doing to themselves in the bedroom’, he shrugs and keeps his counsel, fondly anticipating his return to London, to his pregnant Maria, his new intermarriage, his new life in ‘Christendom’. But it doesn’t work out; it never does in Roth’s world. A radical epiphany, an uncovenanted conversion, is at hand. Maria’s baby is a boy. On Dizengoff Street, Zuckerman has told Shuki that circumcision, like every other biblical injunction, ‘was probably irrelevant to my “I” ’. Practically the next day his entire existence is hingeing on that one question, circumcision, the mark of the Jewish reality, ‘this old, old stuff’.
To engineer such an about-turn it is additionally necessary for Zuckerman to apprehend anti-Semitism in England, ‘deep, insidious Establishment anti-Semitism’, and to apprehend it, moreover, in the space of a single evening. Writing in my capacity as an Englishman, I am both ashamed and surprised to say that Roth pulls it off – he makes this murky thing happen on the page. The picture is slanted, and confessedly slanted, relying on ‘a madwoman of a fucked-up sister [of Maria’s]’ (not to mention an old bitch of a mother-in-law, called, of all things, Mrs
Freshfield); but Roth detects a phenomenon that is really there. It is peculiarly and powerfully repellent, something like a dirty habit of privilege. It is also largely clandestine, and in retreat. Roth did well to hear it, to catch it; but that is how he interprets the world – he listens to it.
There is a good deal else going on in The Counterlife. It is, for instance, a rare addition to the body of successful – one could almost say readable – fiction of the strenuously post-modern type. Here Roth is audacious, grimly playful, almost Parisian (but the Paris of exile – Milan Kundera, say). He takes a dilemma and runs it past two different lives, that of Zuckerman and that of his ‘uninteresting’ brother, Henry. How brothers ‘know each other, in my experience, is as a kind of deformation of themselves’; by crosshatching their realities, Roth can undertake his characteristic search for ‘the real wisdom of the predicament’. The predicament has to do with impotence and its opposite, death and its opposite, with the longing to escape inherited identities, and with the prostrated addiction to a supposed authenticity, the hamming-up of a self that barely exists outside the perceptions of others. ‘All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self,’ Roth concludes, not profoundly but with maximum appositeness, ‘and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetuate upon myself the joke of a self. It certainly does strike me as a joke about my self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do …’ The joke of a self: it is a bad joke, too, not a funny one.