Odd Jobs (70 page)

Israel means “he who wrestles with God.” From Genesis 32:

Even the interchangeability of “he”s in this epochal passage seems pertinent to
The Counterlife
. Nathan’s Maria, who also writes fiction, in a genteel/gentile fashion, says to him, “You didn’t seem to realize that writing for me isn’t everything about my existence wrestling to be born.” In the modern absence of Jacob’s ghostly opponent, Jews wrestle now with such ghosts as the id and the superego, and with the question “What is a Jew?” Nathan asks, “What is a Jew in the first place?” The question has taken on fresh dimensions in Israel—“a whole
country
imagining itself, asking itself, ‘What the hell is this business of being a Jew?’ ” Here, where every cloud and tree and acre can be said to be Jewish, the pacific and pushed-around Jew of the Diaspora, at the mercy of his Christian or Islamic host nations, is superseded. Here Jews can live “a life free of Jewish cringing, deference, diplomacy, apprehension, alienation, self-pity, self-satire, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness, nervousness, inwardness, hypercriticalness, hypertouchiness, social anxiety, social assimilation—a way of life absolved, in short, of all the Jewish ‘abnormalities,’ those peculiarities of self-division whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.” Thus thinks Nathan, having gone to rescue Henry from his frontier settlement in Judea, among the West Bank Arabs. In his three-day visit, he talks with disillusioned, almost anti-Israeli Jews, with rabid expansionist Jews, with doggedly religious Jews, with Jews as crazy as those he meets in New York. He is less than enchanted; the pervasive social challengingness, the gun his brother totes, and even the terrain disturb him: “Judea … could have passed for a piece of the moon to which the Jews had been sadistically exiled by their worst enemies rather than the place they passionately maintained was theirs and no one else’s from time immemorial.” Aggressive, unapologetic Israel represents the timorous and massacred Diaspora Jew’s “construction of a counterlife.” At first, most of the non-Arab world cheered: “All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go
ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland.”
^†
Now, with the little nation convincingly tough in its Begin-led militance, anti-Zionism has crept into respectable intellectual circles, as Nathan discovers in his adopted land of England. As he is forcibly told on the plane back, “You think it’s the Jewish superego [the goyim] hate?
They hate the Jewish id!
What right do these Jews have to
have
an id? The Holocaust should have taught them never to have an id
again
.”

The Israel sections are interesting but perhaps in too journalistic a way; the variety of possible opinions is paraded past almost as brutally as standpoints on Communist Czechoslovakia, from anti through antic and anarchic to stolidly pro, were marshalled by Roth in “The Prague Orgy.” The conversations deteriorate into blocks of
talk
, one babbled essay after another. As the novel goes on, the topic of Jewishness overrides plausibility: airplane security thugs allude to T. S. Eliot’s symbolic, cigar-toting Bleistein, and sisters-in-law in church crypts give quick seminars in the anti-Semitism of John Buchan. In England, with its faded but distinctly Christian heritage, Nathan encounters anti-Semitism as if for the first time, and becomes an American patriot. “To say Jew and goy about America is to miss the point, because America simply is not that.” Affronted repeatedly, he tells Maria, “I didn’t run into this stuff there—never.” (He has evidently forgotten how, as related in “Salad Days,” his
superior in the Army, the Southerner Captain Clark, would aim cotton golf balls at his most Hebraic feature, saying, when successful, “Ah, they we go, Zuckuhmun, rat on the nose.”) Zuckerman, who loves to hear his shiksas screech, finally succeeds in goading his English wife into admitting that even she sometimes asks herself, “Why do Jews make such a bloody fuss about being Jewish?” and into delivering a three-page tirade that ends by advising him: “Go back to America, please, where everybody loves Jews—you think!” Tirades, philippics, self-expositions: reading a Roth novel becomes like riding in an overheated club car, jostled this way and that by the clamorous, importunate crowd of talkers while glimpses of the outside world tantalizingly whip past the steamed-up windows. The train slackens momentum and clanks to a halt, and we press our forehead to the glass only to see that we already
were
in this station, an hour or two ago.

Roth’s inquiringness, the fervid delicacy of his subdividing investigations of mental and moral and emotional states, produces novels of sentiment as lacy, in their way, as a Victorian romancer’s. In this novel, the decisive events take place on operating tables and the actors are surgeons we never meet. Otherwise, all is thought, feeling, second thought, and speech. And like a Victorian the author takes us into his confidence with a flattering concern for our good opinion. Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly. The portrait of the English Maria is a gorgeous, long-limbed, indolent Gainsborough, complete with horses and towpaths and gray stone walls in the background. The English in-laws are as perfectly “done” as bit parts in
Masterpiece Theatre
. Henry’s final revenge on his brother stirs up a stunning anthropological metaphor: “Henry, like a cannibal who out of respect for his victim, to gain whatever history and power is there, eats the brain and learns that raw it tastes like poison.” Henry not only eats Nathan’s brain but has his number; he is the writer’s sharpest critic—the writer as social animal and devious psyche—and an entire anthology of scathing and penetrating remarks about writing and writers could be extracted from their fraternal by-play. The novel as a whole is a performance to cap performances, a defiant round-up and topping-up of the hang-ups and obsessions that wearisome critics like the undersigned have been shyly suggesting Roth has perhaps sufficiently exploited. Nathan himself claims, “As a writer I’d mined my past to its limits, exhausted my private culture and personal memories, and could no longer even warm to squabbling over my work.” But, going to the same old well with a vengeance (and with some
new geography), Roth shows that more can be still more; this is Zuckerman’s most rousing outing since
The Ghost Writer
, and one in which the inspirational value of personal resentment seems blessedly reduced. Do we dare hope it will be Zuckerman’s last ride? As Henry might ask, Who
cares
what it’s like to be a writer? Having now pushed confessional fiction into meta-fiction, Roth might trust himself as a simple realist, a superbly alert witness of what is; the fringe characters—landladies and taxi-drivers miles removed from the claustral travail of a writer’s self-impersonations—have a blunt humorous actuality that patiently waits for Prospero’s undivided attention.

I wish I had liked the ending better. It seemed inflated and coyly Pirandelloian. And Zuckerman’s concluding vow to have his son, if any, circumcised moved me as much as would a richly nuanced plea, in a novel by a Kikuyu, in favor of tribal scars and clitoridectomy, or an old Chinese poem hymning the symbolic beauty of bound feet. That a narrator so scornful of church and synagogue ends by praising ritual mutilation is a strange twist, in a tale of strange twists. Perhaps the author, who has repeatedly managed to offend Jewish sensibilities, set out in his last chapter, “Christendom,” to give gentiles a rub of his abrasive satire. British anti-Semitism certainly exists—British anti-everything-un-British exists—but here it appears too bald and savage; it primarily testifies, as Maria observes (the characters get to read the book and complain about it), to Zuckerman’s own “great verbal violence” and “aggression.” At one point in his concluding stream of self-awareness he expresses dread and revulsion during an Anglican service of Christmas carols. Christmas carols! Christianity at its absolute sweetest!! No, that Nathan Zuckerman is definitely not a nice boy.

T
HE
F
ACTS:
A Novelist’s Autobiography
, by Philip Roth. 195 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.

The creator of Neil Klugman, Gabe Wallach, Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, and Nathan Zuckerman here bares the
actual life behind these variously animated and anguished alter egos. The younger of two sons of a Newark insurance agent, Roth attended Weequahic High School, Newark Colleges of Rutgers, and Bucknell University; baseball, literature, and sex concerned him, each in its season. While studying for his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he met and married a gentile divorcée with two small children; he is still licking the psychic wounds left by their unhappy relationship. Another wound has been inflicted by critics, amateur and professional, who absurdly find his exuberant portrayals of Jewish-American life anti-Semitic. The autobiography would seem merely a thinner version, simultaneously dry and watered-down, of the author’s droll, explosive, and fearless novels did not one of his characters, Nathan Zuckerman, contribute a long epistolary epilogue that lifts
The Facts
into the liberating uncertainties and revisionary cross-references of fiction. “Sure,” Zuckerman portrays himself telling his charming English wife, Maria, “he [Roth, his creator] talks so freely about all his soft spots, but only after choosing awfully carefully which soft spots to talk about.” Not so brilliantly convolute and argumentative as the author’s last novel,
The Counterlife
, this new raid on Roth’s private reality shows, once more, that what interests a good enough writer will interest us. “You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation,” he told
The Paris Review
in 1983. He also told it, “Writing for me isn’t a natural thing that I just keep doing, the way fish swim and birds fly. It’s something that’s done under a certain kind of provocation, a particular urgency. It’s the transformation, through an elaborate impersonation, of a personal emergency into a public act.”

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