Indignation – Philip Roth
About a quarter of the way through this novel the narrator makes the following statement: “And even dead, as I am and have been for I don’t know how long, I try to reconstruct the mores that reigned over that campus and to recapitulate the troubled efforts to elude those mores that fostered the series of mishaps ending in my death at the age of nineteen.” A few things to note: Is the voice right? Would a boy talk in such a formal, stilted way? As for his declaration, “mores” are not Marcus’s problem. His troubled efforts are directed at coping with people whose actions are hurtful and inexplicable. When he calls out, “If only my father, if only Flusser, if only Elwyn, if only Olivia – !” he’s identifying his real dilemma. It’s a complex one that Roth never addresses; he simply lets characters do their damage and then disposes of them. This seemed especially evasive in the case of Olivia. Instead of dealing with the emotional quandary this appealing and deeply disturbed young woman presents for Marcus, Roth gets rid of Olivia by shipping her off to a mental hospital. What Roth does turn his attention to are unlikely and somewhat ridiculous events (an epic panty raid, etc.). As for those “mores that reigned over that campus,” Marcus chose to go to a conservative, religious college (where he’s one of a handful of Jews), so why would he go into a long rant in the dean’s office espousing his atheistic beliefs? Actually, he wouldn’t; his words come “almost verbatim” from a Bertrand Russell lecture entitled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Roth acknowledges this source; but a question arises: why would he use his main character as a mere mouthpiece? In the short final chapter, which is told in the third person, we learn that Marcus was expelled from Winesburg College and was drafted; he winds up on Massacre Mountain in Korea, wounded beyond recovery; to put him out of his physical suffering he’s given a heavy dose of morphine; the only thing functioning is his mind, and what we’ve been reading are his last thoughts (as if his last thoughts would be “to reconstruct” and “to recapitulate”). Fact is, by steadily reducing Marcus to a shadow of what he had once been, Roth had killed him off before the Chinese forces do the job. In the closing two page “Historical Note” we learn that in the seventies Winesburg was forced by student protests to change course: “ . . . the chapel requirement was abolished along with virtually all the strictures and parietal rules regulating student conduct . . .” Is this a summing up of Marcus’s story? Was the indignation all about the unfair conservative mores of a Midwestern college? What a copout.

The Humbling – Philip Roth
What gets humbled is Philip Roth. The novel begins with a once-great stage actor, now in his sixties, agonizing over his inability to perform. He becomes suicidal, but he can’t pull the trigger; he checks himself into a mental hospital; there he meets a woman who asks him to kill her husband; he declines. In the second chapter (called “The Transformation”) Pegeen enters his life. Axler had been friends with her parents, and had known her from infancy. He also knew that since age twenty-three she had lived as a lesbian. When her previous lover had decided to undergo a sex change – something which Pegeen considered to be a betrayal – she had left her and taken a job at the university near where Axler lives. There she carried on – and abruptly terminated – an affair with the female dean, who goes bonkers over this. (Don’t we have a lot of people acting oddly?) Anyway, Axler and Pegeen become lovers, and he’s transformed into a happy man. But he has misgivings, mainly about their twenty-five year age difference; his worries are reinforced when Pegeen gives him a verbatim account (in a seven page long paragraph) of a conversation she has with her mother; regarding her affair with Axler she says, “I’ve been very surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed it. But I couldn’t yet declare it’s definitely the permutation I will always want.” (Is this how real people talk?) Up to this point the novel was a bit staid, so I wasn’t prepared when, on the first page of the last chapter (“The Final Act”), Roth abruptly plunged me knee deep in kinky sex. It was both explicit and clinical, a distasteful combination, but I kept reading so that I could witness a famous author flushing himself down the toilet. He achieves this when describing, in ugh-inducing detail, a threesome (“Your turn. Defile her,”orders Pegeen). As things turn out, Pegeen decides it’s over with Axler; she takes her bag of sex toys and moves on to her next permutation (probably with the defiled woman). Axler is again in suicidal despair over the loss of this gem (he wanted her to be the mother of his child). Since everybody in this novel is a robot, I could care less. Roth resurrects the woman in the mental hospital (I knew she had to be in the story for some reason); he learns that she had killed her husband with two shotgun blasts, and in this act Axler finds inspiration: “If she can do that, I can do this.” Still, he hesitates, shotgun in hand, until he gets a great idea: he can “pretend he was committing suicide in a play.” Chekhov, it is, The Seagull. And he brings it off, his final act. Thankfully, this demeaning book wasn’t Roth’s final act – there would be one more before he called it quits.

See Philip Roth's Final Quartet for more.

Nemesis – Philip Roth
After the publication of Nemesis Roth stated that he would write no more novels. Did the timing of his decision have anything to do with this book? Did he labor over it? Did he see signs of failing powers? Or did he feel it constituted a final statement? His last work has none of the wildness, humor, vulgarity and verbal inventiveness of Portnoy’s Complaint. But Portnoy was a warped arrow on an extended rant, while Mr. Cantor (Bucky) is a very straight arrow; morally, he always tries to do that which is honorable. He and his fiancee have sex; but, since love is motivating them, it’s treated with respect and restraint. On a few occasions minor characters spout some bad language, but never Bucky. The stilted, formal quality of the prose reflects Mr. Cantor’s personality (the same could be said for the absence of humor in the book). That he’s a plodder, and predictable, doesn’t make Bucky uninteresting. About those two names – he’s Mr. Cantor in the opening section, entitled “Equatorial Newark.” In the second section, “Indian Hill” (a children’s summer camp in the Poconos), Mr. Cantor becomes Bucky. The plot revolves around the polio epidemic that ravaged parts of our country in the summer of 1944. Though powerless, Bucky tries to do the right thing. He wavers once – in choosing to leave the hard-hit Jewish section of Newark for the safety of Indian Hill (and the arms of Marcia). The peacefulness of life in the summer camp left me unprepared when Roth shifts into another gear, and we’re propelled along by an urgent rush of events. Things end abruptly, and suddenly we’re in the closing section – “Reunion.” The reunion takes place twenty-seven years later and is between a first person narrator and Mr. Cantor. I found this section to be moving. I won’t go into why, or what had become of Bucky (and Marcia). In this expertly-constructed novel an emotional reevaluation occurred for me; it wasn’t until the last sixty pages that I knew how much I cared about Bucky. Going back to my opening questions: maybe Nemesis does contain a closing statement. At the playground where Bucky taught phys ed the boys saw him as “easygoing, kind, fair-minded, thoughtful, stable, gentle, vigorous, muscular.” To them he was both exemplary and revered. They also saw him as invincible, and in this they were wrong. The two nemeses Bucky cannot defeat are the fiend which inflicts suffering (he calls it God) and his own uncompromising sense of justice.

The Mosquito Coast – Paul Theroux
Theroux created a great character in Allie Fox. On the first page, as Allie drives along with his thirteen-year-old son (who narrates the story), he talks constantly about the awfulness of America. His emphatic opinions cover the whole spectrum of modern life. When in the town of Hatfield, he spots a woman: “Look at Tugboat Annie over there, the size of her. She’s so big that it would only take eleven of her kind to make a dozen. But that’s fat – that’s not health. That’s cheeseburgers.” He leans out the window and hollers, “That’s cheeseburgers!” That’s Allie. He often calls himself “the last man” because only he can see clearly. He talks constantly, but he’s more than talk. He can do just about anything of a practical nature: fix an engine, build a house, set up an irrigation system. He’s also an inventor, and the first invention we learn about is something he calls the Worm Tub; it can make ice without electricity. Because he’s convinced that the so-called “civilized” world is headed for extinction, he decides to take his family (wife, two boys, twin girls) to some wild outpost where he can build his own civilization from scratch. And so we wind up in Honduras. For a good stretch I found this interesting, though some nagging doubts began to surface. The rapid transformation of a raw piece of jungle into a smoothly-functioning community with all the amenities (including flush toilets) didn’t hold up to scrutiny. Allie builds a huge version of the Worm Tub, called Big Boy, and too much importance is assigned to this contraption. As disasters piled up and a murky, apocalyptic tone set in, I began to wish that the book had been a hundred pages shorter and that we had never left Hatfield. I got tired of Allie’s growing insanity, I got tired of jungles, I got tired of people talking in patois: “It were puppysho. Them people jump everyways and we ain’t get a dum bit of peace.” My disaffection was capped off by a melodramatic ending (gunplay, a getaway car). Allie had always detested and feared vultures – “Scavengers!” – but the last we see of him a vulture is ripping out his tongue. I had come to dislike the man, but obviously not as much as the author did. Theroux is a good writer who lacks good judgment; this includes the restraint to know when enough is enough. As a result that which started out so well winds up getting buried in puppyshoo.

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It – Maile Meloy
I checked this collection from the library because its lead off story was one I had liked when I read it in The New Yorker. But “Travis, B.” turned out to be the only good piece in the collection. The loneliness of the main character came across; his need for love from someone who has nothing to give him was sad; at the end he looks at her telephone number he had jotted down, then “he did what he knew he should do, and rolled it in a ball, and threw it away.” Though the tone is muted, we get inside Chet, and so we care about his predicament and his feelings. Meloy deals mostly in understatement and small events, but this works only when an undercurrent of some emotion emerges. Except for that one story, this doesn’t happen. Here’s a sampling of the comments I jotted down after finishing the others: “Goes nowhere,” “No kick,” “I don’t care about these people,” “Inconclusive,” “Pointless.” In “The Girlfriend” she amps up the level of intensity, but gaping holes in logic render the whole thing silly. With three stories unread, I decided to give “Nine” a last chance. (BTW, I think that Meloy needs to hire a title coach.) It’s told from the point of view of a young girl observing her divorced mother’s relationship with her “new lover.” He seems OK; he has a son the girl likes; the mother and boyfriend have some undefined problems; they separate; while mother and daughter are gone the man breaks into their house to retrieve a necklace and some photographs; he also destroys her vegetable garden. In this synopsis of events I haven’t left much out; you don’t need to read the story to get more because there’s not much more there. Meloy is, of course, a MFA product (she dedicates the book to Geoffrey Wolff, her teacher and mentor at UC Irvine; before Wolff she studied under Richard Ford at Harvard). She gets encouragement – fistfuls of awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship – so she will write on. According to the Boston Globe she “may be the first great realist of the twenty-first century.” I find those words ominous. Going back to “Travis, B.,” part of the reason I originally liked it was due to shock: I had actually found a good story on the pages of The New Yorker. Imagine that!

Everyman - Philip Roth

A novel about the end of life, about illness and death. There’s no stridency, no details about the many medical procedures; the tone is elegiac. It’s not fun reading, but it’s not grueling. And I believe it’s a book that should have been written. It’s about loss – of losing this world (losing it by inches) – and fear at the prospect of becoming Nothing. But life’s bountiful riches are captured beautifully in Everyman’s memories of his youth. There are flashes of the raunchy Roth – sex scenes (memories) and an angry, obscene rant, and these were flat-out mistakes. They jarred with the muted sadness, which is the right tone. Roth, looking at mortality, accomplished something honest and unflinching.

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

Yes, Dickens was a genius. His creative abilities were prodigious. Despite that, I quit this book at page 460. I gave it plenty of time to engage me, but it wasn’t happening. Part of the problem was that I felt bogged down. Dickens over-describes everything. Nobody’s appearance, no encounter, no interior of a room is short-changed. He spreads it all out before us. I also had trouble following the convoluted plot and the huge cast of characters. Most crucial, I didn’t believe in these characters. The ones I was supposed to sympathize with are too, too good. Some human flaws, please! And some restraint. Dickens hits you over the head with emotions; they gush out (as do the tears) to the extent that mawkishness sets in. At his worst, Dickens can be sickly sweet. His excessiveness dates his work; he belongs in Victorian times, when all the aspects that I find alienating were valued.

A Far Cry from Kensington - Muriel Spark

The author, a favorite of mine, died recently. In commemoration I took up this novel. Sadly, it’s the worst one by her I’ve read. Not that it doesn’t yield some pleasures. I liked her cynical insights into the world of publishing (where there are Names and Authors; the first is valued and the other is not; aspiring Authors who submit unsolicited manuscripts are, Spark writes, sending their work “to sea in a sieve”). The problem is that the book is autobiographical and was written to settle an old score. The enemy is skewered again and again (he’s constantly referred to as a “pisser of prose”). This is a hatchet job, but it’s Spark who comes out bloodied. She tries to portray herself as a worthy person, but even the kind acts of Nancy/Muriel don’t convey warmth. The love affair she has with William is also unconvincing; they’re supposed to live happily ever after, but I didn’t buy it. Hate can be a sound basis for good literature, but beware of what you reveal about yourself.

The Spider’s House - Paul Bowles

This should be required reading for anyone wanting to understand the Moslem mind. Young Amar is a wonderful character – replete with flaws, but real. While one can relate to him, his way of thinking in some important aspects is just plain different from that of a Westerner, and Bowles captures that difference extremely well. This, and the exotic atmosphere of Morocco, are the main virtues of the book. Bowles is less successful with his two Americans – the prose gets verbose and there’s too much thinking of deep thoughts. The sudden “romance” that flares up between Stenham and Lee was pure baloney. She hates his guts (the reader can understand why) and then suddenly, with no good reason, she’s madly in love with him. Motivation is missing! The author couldn’t follow up on his own reversal – there’s not one intimate scene between the two. Bowles, despite all the talent in the world, always managed to botch things up, usually in his endings. However, this time the last chapter is strong. And, as I said, Amar is wonderful and the cultural/political issues this novel explores are relevant today.

The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud

I had greater respect for Malamud before I read this collection. Many stories are mediocre, some are downright bad – sloppy, pointless. He experiments with the bizarre quite often – always unsuccessfully. And his crudity in handling sex was hard to stomach. “The Magic Barrel” is still magic, and stories that capture the life of the small Jewish shop owner are good; but, all in all, this is a big disappointment.

Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth

The title novella introduced a writer with a bright, fresh voice. Roth captures the glow of young love – no easy task. One needs to create an appealing female character, and Roth definitely does that in the person of Brenda Patimkin. I liked her better than the conflicted Neil. There’s humor in this book (much of it provided by the colorful Patimkin clan) and it doesn’t have a boring page. Faults? The ending – I thought Roth sabotaged the affair with the business about the diaphragm (a case of the author tinkering with a plot line to achieve a goal). I also never believed that Neil was going to be a librarian, mainly because I took Neil to be Roth. It was Roth who was putting a bittersweet end to his summer love affair so that he could move on to bigger things. The novella is accompanied by five stories. None are totally successful. “Eli, the Fanatic” is a mess, floundering on much too long; it needed severe editing. Roth includes Jewishness as part of all the work in the book, but especially in the shorter pieces, where it’s at the core; I think this narrows and detracts. The stories are little more than padding – it’s Goodbye, Columbus that matters. *