Philip Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, deserves a place with The Great
Gatsby and Bartleby the Scrivener among the great American novellas. The
title story, about a young Jewish man from Newark, New Jersey, who dates a
rich Jewish girl from the suburbs, is exquisite - lyrical, precise, moving
and, if there could be such a thing, pitched perfectly off-key. It is
superior to The Great Gatsby, if only in the sense that any book about
prosperous American life that does not need a gunshot to round it out is
better than a book that does.
Roth's story announces the intentions on which his career has made good: to
discuss secular Jewish life, the growth and decay of big cities - Newark's
in particular -the difficulty of reconciling the sex urge and the love urge
over time, and the painful need to outgrow one's parents. The long novel
that followed it, Letting Go (1962), takes up all of these themes again; and
though it suggested the heavy influence of Saul Bellow, it proved that Roth
lacked Bellow's extraordinary gift, to be exquisite in quantity. Letting Go
isn't a bad book; there are other, perhaps higher, virtues than
exquisiteness. And one of the things that the novel revealed is what Roth
could do when he let go of his claim to finish. Scene-making, in particular,
which he does so beautifully in Goodbye, Columbus, requires a certain
finickiness, a too nice arrangement of setting and props, to bring out the
characters' carefully chosen, subtly revealing lines. It can stop them from
giving full voice to the arguments they want to have; and those are the
arguments, Roth realized, he wanted to watch them fight out.
His career has had every kind of success, not least commercial; and he has had
the wit to make of literary celebrity just the right kind of joke. Portnoy's
Complaint (1969), which described the plight of a mother-smothered Jewish
man who released his anxieties in masturbation, made him both rich and
famous. One can imagine the difficulty a writer might face in following it
up; and the course Roth chose revealed his great gift for accepting simply,
as a novelist, the problems he has been set, and making them complicated
enough.
Zuckerman Unbound (1981) tells the story of a young Jewish novelist who has
just had a big hit with a book about masturbation. It is very funny, but the
joke is not always on him. What is most striking about that novel is the
line Roth keeps between humility and arrogance. The worst thing about fame,
the book suggests, is that the strong light cast by it isn't quite false:
awkward truths show up in its glare. Roth's Zuckerman is not shy about his
gifts as a writer, but he is just as willing to mock or question his own
pretensions. Each tendency serves as ballast for the other. Among the
shameful things he shows himself willing to explore is the sly shame of
immodesty; a man who can write about masturbation can write about
self-pride.
It is worth mentioning what a readable writer Roth is. Bellow's exquisiteness
-as seen, for example, in his masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March
-often comes at the price of narrative drive. Why should you turn the page,
he seems to ask: there is enough food for contemplation, for wisdom and
pleasure, where we are now, on this page. But Roth, though every bit as
serious a writer, has always had the knack of drawing his reader along.
Knack is not really the word for it; readability in his hands seems to
involve a deeper skill. Though he often plays narrative games, Roth has the
ease with his tricks to make his storylines appear both straightforward and
obvious. Drama is conflict, as the writing student learns. Roth might add,
that conflict is argument. One is conscious, reading his novels, of a man
who at every stage in his life has been acutely aware of the large questions
he was deciding, and the large questions that were being decided for him.
The faith implicit in his secular doubts is just this: that there are always
arguments to be had, between husband and wife, brother and brother, father
and son, mistress and lover. These arguments shift over time, but every
stage of life, every change of circumstance, can be relied on to produce
them. And the job of the novelist is to listen to these questions and give
them a voice, if not an answer.
There is a bias here, what might be called a Jewish bias, towards eloquence in
argument -that gift is the flag a personality flies to declare itself.
Roth's characters, increasingly, are defined not by the rhythm of their
idiosyncrasies but by the positions, intellectual and otherwise, they take
up and defend. This isn't to say that they have only the general neutral
qualities of characters in a morality play -that they are Everymen and
Everywomen. Their back- stories, family roots, professions, personal charms,
medical histories, talents and drives, are essential to the arguments they
make, and Roth has an extraordinary appetite for such details. If they speak
in the same voice, this seems to matter less in his prose than it would in
another writer's, because Roth's voice is capable of rendering the points
and counterpoints so clearly and subtly. He does justice to difference in a
language of sameness.
Of course, one cannot value argument without, on some level, taking sides. If
nothing else, Roth tends to privilege the sorts of life- decisions that
throw up the big questions.
Adultery matters a lot to him as a writer, precisely because the decision to
commit it suggests such interesting choices: between love and family and
virtue on the one hand; and what might be called a more immediate honesty,
on the other -at least in respect of that vital and amoral urge to create or
remake oneself that Roth considers essential to being human. He may be
guilty of another bias, here, towards the male perspective. It is certainly
true that his women come across in the sharpest detail only when seen
through the narrowed eyes of one of his men.
Infidelity in his novels hardly ranks as one of the cardinal sins. A little
bit of it, in fact, belongs properly to the conventional life of a good
husband.
Fidelity poses a great problem to his muse. Nobody can keep up the intensity
of an argument when the answer to all the big questions, again and again,
stays the same.
There is another problem with his approach, one which Roth, as a narrator, is
cunning enough to make an issue out of. Writing about himself means writing
about writers.
How can his narrators join honestly in these arguments, when their main
interest as novelists lies in making sure they get fought? "This
profession even fucks up grief", his narrative alter ego, Nathan
Zuckerman, remarks in The Counterlife (1986), on the way to his brother's
funeral. The detachment of the writer, and its sexual implications, is one
of Roth's great subjects. He cannot attend any of the ceremonies of life
without taking notes -and taking pleasure from taking notes. "This
profession", in Roth's books, has a corrosive influence; it eats into
ordinary relationships, and it eats into the desire to form them. It fucks
up not only grief but fucking, too. Zuckerman, after the success of his
masturbation book, after the affairs with movie stars run dry, after the
marriages fail, accepts what time and medicine have done to his sex life and
drive. One of the questions he raises is whether the curiosity that replaces
that drive is sufficient to sustain satisfying relations with the world;
whether or not you can live, as a writer, for your work; and whether that
work can have a general interest for a readership that isn't made up
entirely of writers and the people who live with them, their children,
lovers, husbands and wives.
