Ink Makes the Man. Philip Roth Makes Ink.
By Victoria Looseleaf
Although I’ve been the recipient of fan letters, I had never written one, until, that is, I scribbled one to Philip Roth. This was after I read I Married a Communist (the second of his brilliant 1990’s trilogy, American Pastoral being the first which also won the Pulitzer Prize), in which one of his characters played the harp. Well, Roth never responded. Did his publisher even forward the letter to the near-recluse who lives in Connecticut? Did I actually expect he would? Would this leave a sour Rothian taste in my mouth? Would I care?
I dunno the answer to the first, I hoped the answer to the second would be affirmative and no, these were not reasons enough to go all negative on Roth, but that I bring it up now must mean I still care. Oh, well: Not even the lunacy of casting Nicole Kidman in 2003’s The Human Stain (like anyone would ever believe her playing a maid), or the folly that was Elegy, the 2008 flick based on Roth’s The Dying Animal (from 2001), could put me off our country’s greatest living novelist.
But, beginning in 2006, with the publication of his so-called short novels – Everyman, Indignation and, from last year, The Humbling – I became less enamored with the writer’s obsessions with aging, sex and the like. Indeed, I didn’t even check out The Humbling (so sue me, Philip, but your publisher, Houghton Mifflin, couldn’t be bothered to send a review copy, and I took that kind of personally).
Which brings me to my ecstatic return to Roth, now 77, and the final work in the quartet. Nemesis is his 31st novel and it feels great to be back on the Roth train, that East Coast Jewish trip that speaks for/to so many of us. Oh, yes, I see now where you were going, as Nemesis, set in Newark, N.J. during the summer of 1944, tackles the eye of the hurricane that was then the polio virus, and actually sums up the themes of the entire quartet: How the consequences of our actions – our choices – make us who we are and define us with regards to all of the existential stuff – death, grief, regrets, and oy – the unavoidable tempis fugit fear/doom/acceptance thing that never ceases to weigh on us.
A single action can change the course of many lives as easily as it can the course of one. My own father had been struck with polio as a young boy in Cleveland in the 1930’s – but he was lucky. Weirdly, he came down with the disease in the winter (it generally hit in the summer), and having a mild case for only six weeks, it then mysteriously disappeared. Would my father have gone to Ohio State and met and married my mother if he still had polio? Does he think about these kinds of things? Does my mother? Does anyone?
Yeah, Roth not only thinks about them, he delivers the goods in eloquent prose. How his 23-year old protagonist, the playground director Eugene Bucky Cantor, responds to the polio epidemic, makes up Nemesis’ 280 brilliant pages. The book is so good that now I’m going back to The Humbling, because Philip Roth continues to astonish, move, draw tears and laughter in equal degrees and, finally, ask all the big questions. He may not have all the answers, but that’s why we have HBO…(only kidding). Roth’s the man. Talk about a dude abiding, this one decidedly does. So, if you’re out there, sir, and happen to come across my musings, you know where to find me.
Note: I’m not alone in my reverence for Roth. To quote Scott Raab from his recent Esquire interview with the author: “Read the books. The Newark wiseacre spitting out novels like a bachelor-party stripper firing Ping—Pong balls out of her snatch is seventy-seven years old now. Behold a master, treasure his work, and shut the fuck up. Just read the books.”