Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  But living writers are the subject of discussion. There is a list. There is a lot of reading to do. (In a brief moment of giddiness, when we are down to two writers and no agreement, Roth suggests that we put the names in a hat—“I have Saul’s hat in the closet!”) Most interesting is not what Roth says about these writers but what he says about them in comparison with himself. In a discussion of a historical novel, he suddenly gets an idea: “Here’s my book set in the nineteenth century: It was 1845 in the Weequahic section of Newark … World War Two was still almost a hundred years away…”

  And finally there are two stacks of books on the table, one by Cormac McCarthy, the other by Don DeLillo. We have talked for a while, and Roth is quietly leafing through a couple of the books. “These guys are interested in extremes,” he says, “nothing but extremes. They’re the opposite of Cheever and Updike: Cheever, who tried to see real life in a brighter light, and Updike, who wanted to know every detail and nuance of it.” And then, sounding rather sad, he says, “They make me look ordinary.” (McCarthy won in 2009; DeLillo won the award the following year.)

  On an extraliterary note, I have expressed some squeamishness during our sessions at the gruesome deaths of animals in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: the mules viciously kicked and shot or driven off the side of a cliff, the horse’s skull crushed with a rock, the dogs drowned and shot. At the next meeting, when I ring the doorbell at Roth’s apartment, he cries out cheerily from within: “Be right there, I’m just skinning a kangaroo!”

  You Never Got Me Down

  “He’d lost his magic.” It’s the opening line of The Humbling, and Roth spins the idea outward from there. The aging actor at its center led an extraordinary life while the magic held, but the book is about what happens after it’s gone. A renowned interpreter of Shakespeare and Chekhov, he began to freeze up onstage, to give terrible performances, and has finally accepted that he will never perform again. Very little of the pleasure that Roth takes in the theater is apparent here. This book is about a man coming to the end of his life, alone and unconsoled—like Everyman, like Exit Ghost, even like Indignation, although the man in that case is only nineteen. Unfortunately, the actor, Simon Axler, has neither Nathan Zuckerman’s ironic humor nor Marcus Messner’s fresh energy. Despite his stage credentials, Axler has something of the blank anonymity of Everyman. He has been reduced to little more than his disabilities—professional, psychological, and physical, including chronic back pain and a nervous breakdown that sends him to a psychiatric hospital for twenty-six days. The Humbling, published in 2009, is a book as strenuously reduced as its hero, and as depressive.

  Axler suffers a double downfall. It should not be a surprise, with book number thirty, that the aging man fixes his hopes on a younger woman. Not, in this case, however, an impossibly, allegorically younger woman: Pegeen is forty to Axler’s sixty-five. But Roth has added a twist that negates any chance of sexual salvation or even peace of mind. Pegeen is a lesbian, or has lived as a lesbian since her early twenties, and Axler is tormented by the fear that she will return to her former life. Yet he has been alone for so long that he has no emotional resistance, and he is soon wildly in love. And because “in her company he had begun to be rejuvenated,” he begins to dream about reconstructing his entire life: returning to the stage, having back surgery, even becoming a father—there is a scene in which he consults a doctor about the genetic hazards of fathering a child at sixty-five. The higher the hopes, the harder the fall. And this is a man who keeps a gun in his attic, and knows his Chekhov.

  How agonizingly vulnerable Roth’s men have become! Pegeen isn’t much of a character, but that hardly matters: all that’s required is for her to bring him a glass of water, and Axler starts to fall. (“Nobody had brought him a glass of water for a long time.”) And she is soon doing much more, particularly since Axler’s spinal condition “made it impossible for him to fuck her from above or even from the side.” This is a woman who, in every way, stays on top. The book builds toward a series of in-your-face sex scenes, which begin the final chapter with a bang, so to speak, but feel forced and artificial, even dull, despite an energetic threesome and a strap-on green dildo. There’s nothing wrong with providing a green dildo at this point in a very gray story, but this is the most perfunctory sex in Roth’s work since the early sections of The Professor of Desire, which seem equally strained in an attempt to be outrageous. Sex, in the best of Roth, is part of life’s relentless comedy, even when, as his heroes age, it becomes the great, tingling counterforce to death. But neither Axler’s situation nor his temperament allows for comedy; even during the threesome, he’s tempted to sit in a corner and cry. A note of wryness, at least, creeps in, when Pegeen, strapped for action, informs him that she has cheated on him with two female ballplayers and then eases his anxiety by performing fellatio on him as he thinks, “The oddity of this combination would have put off many people.”

  And it did. Roth himself wasn’t entirely happy with the book, and he kept at it even after galleys went out for review. “Fixing the surface,” he explained to me at the time: “making sentences better, more precise.” These efforts were strictly for himself: it doesn’t matter, he says, which version gets reviewed. He shrugs and laughs. The reviews, however, were exceptionally harsh. Leon Wieseltier, on The New Republic website: “There is no erotic abandon in Roth, not anymore; there is only conquest, and programmatic sex, and a sad prurience, and the bathos of a man who is most afraid of not getting laid.” Not universally harsh, it’s true: there’s always someone to call a new Roth book his “best work in years” (Jesse Kornbluth, The Huffington Post). More notably, the feminist historian Elaine Showalter, in The Washington Post, praised the novel’s “restrained eloquence” and used the occasion to make a larger statement on Roth’s career, calling him “a literary colossus, whose ability to inspire, astonish and enrage his readers is undiminished.”

  Still, “enrage” turned out to be a key word. On the front page of The New York Times Book Review, Katie Roiphe opened an essay about male writers with an account of a friend who had thrown her copy of The Humbling into a trash can on a subway platform after reading one of the sex scenes—not because of feminist objections but because it was “disgusting, dated, redundant.” Provoking rage was not, of course, a new experience for Roth. (“What is being done to silence this man?”) But he hadn’t done so in some time, and this development, in early 2010, was in some ways encouraging.

  “You know, I’m an old man,” he says. “And hating writers has gone out, as a style. It was around when writers were more combative. I guess I was supposed to be combative.” It wouldn’t be a bad thing, really—Salman Rushdie–style death threats aside—to have “a more vehement response to work, mine and others’, back in the culture.” To have books matter that much again. And so, I ask, is it still stirring in some way to get this kind of furious response? Does it start his own combative juices flowing? “Well,” he replies, “it’s true that it once gave me a subject.” He pauses. “But if I had my druthers, I’d rather not be hated.”

  The truly disturbing aspect of The Humbling is Axler’s continual brooding over how it feels to lose his talent. “You can get very good at getting by on what you get by on when you don’t have anything else,” he says, in a statement that applies almost too readily to these late novels, which, while a shadow of Roth’s earlier works, maintain the narrative line of a master and the troubled insistence of a man who has not yet gleaned his teeming brain. In instance after instance, Axler’s acting seems to be a stand-in for Roth’s writing: “The initial source in his acting was in what he heard, his response to what he heard was at the core of it, and if he couldn’t listen, couldn’t hear, he had nothing to go on.” Axler describes the condition necessary for his art in the same terms that Roth uses to describe his own: “You’re either free and it’s genuine, it’s real, it’s alive, or it’s nothing.” And Axler concludes, “I’m not free anymore.”

  There is no older or more
familiar trap in reading Roth’s work, of course, than to mistake a book’s voice for the author’s autobiographical confession. The facts, as Roth has explained time after time, exist to be eviscerated by the imagination—as with Marcus Messner’s path from chapel to grave. So, while it’s true that Roth did have a torrid affair in these years with a forty-year-old former lesbian, he survived it perfectly well, and they are friends today. It’s also true that he began to think about having a child and consulted a doctor about genetic feasibility—but this was a little later, and with a different lover. If this book were a conventional biography, there would be names and dates; that will come along, in time. What is important is that the affairs were becoming shorter and more difficult to maintain—just like the books. (In neither case, however, did the excitement show any sign of diminution.) And that Roth is a far braver and (needless to say) more resilient character than his hero. Axler, in the light of his artistic losses, quits the stage and, finally, uses the gun. At the time of the publication of The Humbling, Roth announced that he had completed another book.

  Titled Nemesis, the book has none of the old exuberant freedoms, yet it is bracingly taut, engaging, and alive. These qualities did not come easily; Roth claims to have written thirteen drafts. (“This only happens when you’re not getting it.”) He hadn’t had so much trouble working on anything since My Life as a Man. Published in 2010, the book is written with the blunt straightforwardness that characterizes all these late works—as though there were time for nothing but the basics—and takes up the same dark themes. In fact, Roth now decided to group, under the plural heading Nemeses: Short Novels, the quartet of Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and, finally, Nemesis itself, which is superficially the warmest yet ultimately the most savage of these small books. Roth does better with his younger heroes, in that he seems to feel obliged to fill out the worlds that they inhabit before everything is snatched away. Or maybe it’s simply that these young men, unlike their isolated elders, still have worlds to inhabit. Better yet, neighborhoods: Bucky Cantor, the twenty-three-year-old protagonist of Nemesis, is a gym teacher and the playground director at the Chancellor Avenue School, in the Weequahic section of Newark, in the summer of 1944. The prosaic charms of the place—the kids, the families, the hot dog joint—are a poignant setting for the hell that is unleashed.

  Nemesis is a goddess of retribution in Greek mythology; she metes out punishment to those who have had an excess of good fortune, or who commit some other crime that provokes the envy of the gods. But Roth’s heroes have not committed any crimes. They are punished because punishment is the human lot. Roth says today that a reasonable overarching title for his previous series of books would be Blindsided: An American Trilogy. We are helpless before history, aging, other people, our endless getting of everything wrong: the unknowable future. Roth has banged this drum again and again. He is intent on refuting not only standard religious claims about virtue and justice but the common and often misused notion, rooted in Freud’s ideas about the Greeks and our own lives, that we are psychologically complicit in our fate.

  He has been contesting these kinds of charges ever since Dr. Spielvogel, in My Life as a Man, accused Peter Tarnopol of getting into his awful marriage because his wife resembled his “phallic threatening mother”—a bit of “psychoanalytic reductivism” that sets off several furious pages of rebuttal. But Roth’s insistence on our inability to see ahead and to choose—our essential innocence—has evolved, over the years, from a personal defense into a hard-earned theory of life. (Roth likes to quote Bellow: “Truth comes in blows.”) Still, even today, he can get worked up about “the five-and-dime-store pseudo-Freudians”—I am quoting from some unpublished notes about his personal history—who “tell us that we make the future with our deliberate blindness and self-deceptions.” The Nemeses quartet, and its last book, above all, demonstrates that our blindness is real, even if we are blind to that, too.

  The nemesis this time is polio. Although the narrative’s epidemic of the summer of 1944 is as fictional as Lindbergh’s presidency, it is an easy premise to accept, eleven years before the vaccine became available. The threat of the disease had haunted Roth’s childhood—or, rather, since it was particularly a killer of children, it haunted his parents during his childhood, as it did most parents of the era. Roth recalls that he and Sandy, healthy and well protected, didn’t believe that anything could seriously hurt them. Bucky Cantor is not so lucky: his mother died in childbirth, his father disappeared, and although he was brought up by loving grandparents, his grandfather has died and he is more the caretaker of his grandmother than the other way around. There hasn’t been so unparented a young protagonist in Roth’s work since Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus more than fifty years earlier.

  Neil lived in Newark with an aunt and uncle, his parents having decamped to Arizona for the climate—a tactic that kept the author’s mocking eye trained on less intimate familial targets (until he was good and ready for them). Both Neil and Bucky are just out of college, come from scrappy Jewish immigrant backgrounds, and fall in love with girls from well-to-do Jewish families above their station. But the distance from 1959 to 2010 is immense: the writer starting off with a flourish and a wisecrack, the writer nearing the end with a solemn warning and a shudder. There is very little mockery in Nemesis. The moment of its setting is historically fraught, filled with news of soldiers dying overseas—Bucky is exempt from the draft owing to poor eyesight—and children dying at home. This is as late as “late Roth” gets, and there is too much at stake to laugh.

  Bucky, a jock and a gentle soul, is described, in fact, as “a humorless person, articulate enough but with barely a trace of wit, who never in his life had spoken satirically or with irony”—precisely the kind of challenge that Roth had been taking up since American Pastoral. Bucky isn’t trusted to tell his own story, any more than was Swede Levov. Roth’s use of third-person narration gives the book a cooler and more impersonal feel than any of the books in which a voice comes directly at us. The question of just who is telling this story—indeed, the sense that anyone in particular is telling the story—arises only with an occasional odd reference to the hero as “Mr. Cantor.” This riddle is partially solved a hundred pages in, with the passing mention of “me, Arnie Mesnikoff,” among the boys who got polio that summer. The history of this boy will come to have greater meaning. As with Indignation, Roth has tricks up his sleeve—old-fashioned tricks, but carried off so well that they make up for at least some of the interest and surprise that used to be part of the writing itself. (“You can get very good at getting by on what you get by on.”)

  Roth had reread Camus’s novel The Plague before writing Nemesis, and several reviewers noted its influence. Camus, too, plays a trick with narration—it’s a doctor, familiar from the start, who turns out to be telling the story—but Roth says that the idea of a narrating victim of his plague came to him only as he went along. Compared with Camus’s magisterial allegory, Roth’s novel seems crowded with noisily grieving aunts, awkwardly weeping fathers, and schoolboys stiff in their shirts and ties at an untimely funeral—all sweating mightily in “the annihilating heat of equatorial Newark,” as relentless as the heat of Camus’s Algerian port. Roth is ever striving for the particularity that is the novelist’s greatest strength. (Bellow, writing to Roth in the late fifties, criticized one of Roth’s stories because it relied too much on an idea. “Camus’ The Plague was an IDEA. Good or bad? Not so hot, in my opinion.”) Yet the “moral texture” of Nemesis, like that of the other books in this group, comes through in the handling of more overt moral questions, of the sort that Bucky is asked by one of those sweating, weeping fathers: “Where is the sense in life?” Or, as Bucky puts it to himself: “Why a disease that cripples children?” And, at his most urgent: “Where does God figure in this?”

  Nemesis is about conscience and duty as much as it is about the randomness of fate. The question of moral responsibility has possessed Roth’s heroes from the o
verthoughtful duo of Letting Go and the raging Portnoy—what else was he raging against?—to the battling father and son of The Dying Animal. Bucky Cantor is tortured by not being in the war, when all his friends are off and fighting; the same headline, CORREGIDOR FALLS, that filled the young Roth with fear fills Bucky with terrible shame. It’s a matter of manhood, in an era when manhood is a moral achievement; Bucky’s grandfather had taught him “that a man’s every endeavor was imbued with responsibility.” Bucky proves himself by supervising some ninety children at a playground during the summer, as shrieking ambulances become more frightening than air-raid sirens, and as the epidemic gathers the force of a “real war too, a war of slaughter, ruin, waste, and damnation, war with the ravages of war—war upon the children of Newark.” Bucky is an ordinary young man, but he is also heroic on a limited scale—a loving protector of the children who worship him.