Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories by Philip Roth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I made it a bit of a project this summer to read a bunch of Philip Roth books. I started with his latest (and final?) novels Nemesis and Indignation and finished by re-reading his first book Goodbye, Columbus. In the back of my mind I was expecting the recent work to display a seasoned mastery and the early work to pale in comparison. What happened was the absolute contrary. The stories in Goodbye Columbus are loose, ingenious, lively, crafty, profound, surprising and generally thrilling in a way the later books aren't. The late Roth is tempered, measured, nostalgic, reserved, pessimistic and plodding in comparison. The titular novella was not my favourite in Goodbye, Columbus. The much anthologized story "Defender of the Faith" and in particular, "The Conversion of the Jews," are as fine as any stories I've ever read, amazingly self-assured for a debut. I've read about a dozen of Roth's novels spanning his career and can not think of any of his fiction I've enjoyed more, even the second time around.

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Nemesis by Philip Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was the best of years, it was the worst of years. The summer of 1944 Newark, New Jersey, that is. That's kind of how I felt about this novel, sort of ambivalent. There is an ennervating nostalgic 'sheen' that coats the polite (almost antiseptic) prose of the narrative - I guess symptomatic of writing in the mode of a reminiscence - in spite of the creeping horror called polio that is terrorizing the children of the community. The character of Bucky is so unfalteringly the schoolyard hero, so without edge as to verge on bland. This despite being raised by his grandparents because his mother died in childbrth and his estranged father is an ex-con. He is apparently utterly without bitterness or anger because his grandfather taught him how to be tough. Bucky does all the right things, defends and cares deeply for the fitness and well-being of his kids as their playground director, and offers his condolences to the families of the ones who suddenly succumb to the childhood scourge. The first real sign of conflict comes when about half way through the novel Bucky, or Mr. Cantor as he is referred to for most of the novel, makes the fateful and 'unheroic' decision to abandon his anxiety-ridden kids and fearful community (not to mention his aging grandma) to escape the ravaged city for Camp Indian Hill in the idyllic Poconos to join his fiancee the unblemished Marcia Steinberg, where they canoe out to an island for lovemaking trysts surrounded by white birches. The decision to leave Newark happens in a flash, engendering some inner conflict but not very much, when it becomes clear to Bucky that life as a member of the upstanding and intact Steinberg family (the very model of an Ozzie and Harriet assemblage) offers escape from his own disjointed roots (of course, he doesn't think of it that way). He does hesitate once in camp for abandoning grandma and the kids - everything just seems way too perfect in the mountains - but I expected much more gutwrenching guilt. The reader knows this can't end well, and thus two things happen at this point in the story; it becomes apparent that this is all a set-up (which is the way it feels from page 1) and, the disastrous ending has been precisely telegraphed. It's all very tidy and we rush to see how Bucky is going to deal with the inevitable. Only in the last few pages, in the present, does the writing start to sing with the depth of Bucky's inner turmoil. But when he starts arguing about theological matters it feels forced, sounding more like Roth than his protagonist. Bucky simply doesn't seem like the type to go there. Still, his anger with himself at the end comes as a refreshing show of genuine emotion.

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The Ravine by Paul Quarrington
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel kept me at a distance most of the time. Partly, this was due to the nature of the protagonist, a guy who is essentially in denial (or as he puts it The Twilight Zone) about a traumatic incident that has supposedly altered the path of his life culminating in screwing up every decent and worthwhile relationship he's ever had (wife, brother, friend). Phil is a hard guy to like and the only thing that keeps his voice from sounding self-pitying is its comic edginess, which kept me engaged. The other aspect of the narrative that distances the reader is the novel within a novel gimic. Phil is a bullshit-artist of the highest order, believing his own lies (part of living in denial), and partly why he ends up writing for teevee, the flakiest and most commercial medium of all. So now he has taken to writing the novel - for reasons he can not quite understand himself - that the characters of the novel are reading and reacting to. This is either Phil's therapeutic act of re-constituting memory and coming to terms, or just another attempt at rationalization and denial, we're never quite sure which. The novel playfully ties together a variety of narrative motifs and allusions, factoring in a Twilight Zone Episode, with a play that Phil has written for his ex-wife Veronica, and an episode of the TV show he writes, as well as the fateful childhood event he is trying (or not) to remember. Finally, it's enjoyable to watch Quarrington/Phil, the author qua author, pull the ends together into a tight but forgiving slipknot.

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The Disgrace of the Jew in JM Coetzee's novel

Since finishing Disgrace by JM Coetzee something has been nagging at me: The sense that there were an abundance of Jewish characters and references, that may have explicit and implicit meanings. Coetzee loves to write in multiple layers. My favourite of his recent novels, Diary of a Bad Year, set in a three-story building and offering three interconnected narratives, demonstrates this not only in meaning but structurally as well; each story is separated and alternating on the page. That the protagonist of Disgrace may be Jewish is never mentioned, but his name, David Lurie, suggests it, just as it suggests his "lurid" behaviour. As the spiritual/quasi-religious layers of the story began to reveal themselves I started thinking less of Lurie as a 'fallen angel' or a lucifer-type character whose arrival spells disaster for his daughter once he has been cast out of the rarified ivory-tower 'heaven' of academia. Instead, I thought of him as the marginalized disgraced Jew of history, cast out from the center of social acceptability like his daughter's farmer neighbour Ettinger (another Jewish name) whom she relies on for support and protection. And the reference to rabbi Isaac Luria, the famed Cabbalist, became apparent, especially when joined with the name of his student paramour Melanie Isaacs. The lechery for which Lurie is disgraced, his unrepentant stance before his academic inquisitors, and the way he appears to represent a Cabbalistic worldview - in which the spirit of the Creator is regarded in female sexualized terms (the Shekinah) and penetrates the world to provide the lifeforce for all of creation - convinced me of David Lurie's Jewishness. Lurie carries all of the hallmarks of the Jewish liberal, urban, art-loving, secular intellectual. There is even a section of the novel about Lurie's sense of having been scapegoated. If true, Coetzee is peddling in some disturbing stereotypes, the lecherous Jew, the selfish Jew, the unrepentent Jew, the Jew in need of reform and rehabilitation.   

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't like Waiting for the Barbarians because it was so earnestly allegorical (a story that has self-conscious aims of being important, statement-making literature) and Disgrace teeters on the edge but manages to stay on the safe side. David Lurie is a fascinating character, a middle-aged man who, on principle (a romantic notion of the eminence of desire) is unrepentant about his relationship with one of his students and is prepared to suffer the consequences for the sake of his ideals. And yet he is a man for whom love exists only in the poetic abstract, the component of selflessness, all but absent from his life. Lurie is exquisite in his loneliness and disconnectedness. Everything begins to change when, after being dismissed from his university teaching position, he seeks refuge with his daughter, a lesbian farmer living in the dangerous townships. The realities of life lived close to the ground and hard choices begin to impinge on Lurie's privileged (urban, elitist) worldview. The main strength of this novel is in Coetzee's multi-faceted evocation of the psychology of exploitation and its political echos in a post-apartheid South Africa struggling with self-transformation. The weakness is when it begins to feel heavyhanded and too earnest. The sections of Lurie writing an opera based on the memoirs of Lord Byron in Italy dragged down a novel that otherwise moved at a solid clip. In spite of his avowed dislike of traditional religion, Lurie eventually finds that salvation, for one who has fallen from grace, requires a form of self-sacrifice.

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On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


My wife read this novel first and then handed it to me, which ended up making for a very interesting discussion afterward. It's essentially the story of a single moment in the life of two people on their wedding night, the fears and expectations, and ultimately the way they deal with disappointment. McEwan's prose are forensic, unsheathing layer upon layer of a point in time, to give the reader the sense of how momentous every moment truly is; personal and collective histories all mathematically adding up to a decision, an action, or inaction. He is less interested in the aftermath than in meticulously rendering the emotional and geographical landscape, subterranean as well as above ground, not to mention the importance of climate, in this the case, the late 1950s, on the cusp of the era of sexual liberation, the women's lib movement, the pill etc. Why do I say it made for an interesting husband/wife discussion? Because McEwan tells the story from both points of view, and I wasn't sure that he got the woman's side right. I was thinking that his portrayal of Florence as sexually frigid to the point of suffering was a bit extreme. But my wife said she thought it accurate, especially given the era. I was a bit disappointed that in the end McEwan raps the story up by recounting the way that the decisive moment played out in Edward's life and in Florence's it's left open-ended. Not sure what McEwan's reasoning was, but it felt like he baled, prematurely, and maybe given the events of the wedding night that's what he wanted the reader to feel. True, it left me unsatisfied, which would be clever, but in this case, not in a good way.



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Moses, you've got male

A couple of interesting recent posts lamenting the lack of masculine prose in fiction, or is it the end of the traditional image of manhood, or both. Novelist Frank Bill, whose writing I'm not familiar with, asks if masculine writing is dead, by which he seems to mean a certain style of prose that depicts a certain stereotypical kind of manly man, men who've gone from being learned by their fathers and grandfathers, to being babied by their mothers. Being learned from their fathers, to Bill, literally means hunting deer and dressing your kill in the forest. He thinks we've become "girlie-men" in the words of the old SNL skit with Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon playing Hans and Franz, soft, unrugged and unskilled in survival. DG Myers responds that Bill is confusing a romantic ideal of masculinity, what he calls 'reactive masculinity' as brought about by gender-neutralization in American culture, with true manhood, which to his mind means, "Taking care of others .... A man knows in his bones that he is expendable, especially in his bones, and if he is to be indispensable, he must make himself so—by indispensable service to others." What Bill seems to be concerned with is the connection between the image of manhood and a certain style of writing, both of which seem to be on the wane. When we forsake the traditional image we risk losing a robust style of writing that emphasizes the masculine worldview ie. individual struggle (male) over forming and nurturing relationships (female), a desire to master (male) over consensus-building (female), a preoccupation with broad conflicts (male) over domestic ones (female), descriptions of nature's harsh beauty (male) as opposed to its fluid magnificence (female). I sense that both Bill and Myers are on to something, and not just because one time a literary agent who'd read my last novel in manuscript form said that she doubted it could be sold to a publisher because she didn't see the ladies of the book club recommending it to one another. Men, if they read at all, generally like action, sci-fi, books that provide insight into the forces at work in quotidian life (Gladwell, Leavitt), what I call 'mastery'. Literary fiction is increasingly a girl thing. With Passover, and the telling of the story of the liberation from Egypt, I began thinking about the man who is perplexingly hardly mentioned in the Haggadah, and yet who is utterly present in the story: Moses. It's telling that in the mid-20th century DeMille film version, in contrast, Moses is front and center, humble and strong, the quintessence of the manly hero, a survivalist, family-man, rugged and wise, the very figure of a man lamented by Bill. But Moses is also Myers's version of a man, duty-bound, like Swede Levov in Philip Roth's American Pastoral with the "golden gift of responsibility." At last night's seder it was mentioned that the heroes of the Haggadic story are women; Shifrah and Puah, the midwives who rebelled against the Pharaoh's decree to kill the Israelite first born, and Miriam who watched over baby Moses in the basket as it floated down the river, and even the Egyptian princess who plucked him from the Nile and took him into the Pharaoh's house. But I found myself thinking about the absent males, and not just Elijah the Prophet for whom we set a place, but unsung Moses for whom no place is set, and about what that absence might signify in the story of today.