The Ghost Writer, Deception, Operation Shylock, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America.
 

The Ghost Writer (1979)

I loved it so much I read it twice through; enamoured of the mechanics of literature. First for the story, then for the driving pleasure and aerodynamics. Of note is the way every narrative tangent-line is about writing/writers in some way: the fawning young over-imaginer, the starlet identity-thief, the validation of the spiritual father at the expense of the biological, the particularities of Jewish literary personalities in America (I was tempted to collate pieces of Bellow from the mosaic). And most importantly, the corrective realities behind the literary daydream ('the religion of art'), especially for those who have to live with the artists. Which drama is pointedly crisp, contained and efficient.

I love the canny juxtaposition of Zuckerman's love of light, airy ballet dancers with his earthy desire to pin them (and others besides) to the floor.

I love the confident association with literary predecessors and giants, with literary savvy (Zuckerman quotes boldly). The mix of youthful/brash imagination and solidifying confidence is just right. I keep thinking that Roth is precise in his wideness, which may sound a little non-sequiturial but I mean he can capture a wide gamut of narrative (character, anecdote/tangent, drama, pointed contrast and choice detail), at times with extreme, nearly conspiratorial brevity, especially as they relate to the becoming-writer or humour. Though there is an occasional tendency to lead/preach, everything rolls and slots in neatly, everything is sufficient. Which is the high water-mark of literature. This one also has one of his least ambivalent endings.

Quotable prose:

My guess was that it would take even the fiercest Hun the better part of a winter to cross the glacial waterfalls and wind-blasted woods of those mountain wilds before he was able to reach the open edge of Lonoff's hayfields, rush the rear storm door of the house, crash through into the study, and, with spiked bludgeon wheeling high in the air above the little Olivetti, cry out in a roaring voice to the writer tapping out his twenty-seventh draft, "You much change your life!" And even he might lose heart and turn back to the bosom of his barbarian family should he approach those black Massachusetts hills on a night like this, with the cocktail hour at hand and yet another snowstorm arriving from Ultima Thule. (I wonder how Rilke would appreciate such reduction to barbarism, p27)

[On Betsy] ...those elegant, charming tableaux she could achieve, even when engaged in something so aesthetically unpromising as, half asleep in the middle of the night, taking a lonely pee in my bathroom. (love that 'unpromising', p35)

Hope tried her luck with a self-effacing smile, but the wattage was awfully dim. (p41)

The charm [of Felix Abravanel] was like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect. You couldn't even find the drawbridge... It was a head that the Japanese technicians, with their ingenuity for miniaturizing, might have designed, and then given over to the Jews to adorn with the rug-dealer's thinning dark hair, the guarded appraising black eyes, and a tropical bird's curving bill. A fully Semeticised little transistor on top, terrific clothes down below — and still the overall impression was of somebody's stand-in. (p58-59, possible deliberate close skirting to racial stereotypes {he is projecting the 50s and mild naivety} to echo the young writer flirting with cliché)

"We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." (Henry James, p116)

Deception: A Novel (1990)

At last, a literary breeze. OK, literary, qualify that term. Well, it is strange (or rather, comforting) for all us pretend- wannabe- and manqué-writers that a book comprising of little more than notes and short vignettes can get published as a novel/story. Having a name helps, true. Having great dialogue helps too. Riding on the implication of a lot of sex, even better. Though ultimately this ain't a novel in the Balzac sense (ah, now there's a novelist), it's still a lot of fun to read, a breezy read easily taken in a single sitting (say, of an evening one's forgotten the house keys and the lady is several hours away).

As a transition work, Deception plays and enrages the idea of unreliable narrator as he morphs through the mirrors of fiction. Deception of the lover's husbands or deception of the reader's interpretation, like. It consciously sits between some of Roth's major novels so it's got great bibliographical/contextual value and biographer-baiting; but for us wannabes it's far more interesting to tune into the writer's mind at work: to intuit his literary sensibility and the awareness of what will work as drama on the page; the traps and incongruities of a life lead literarily, or noted directly; and the strange fluidity between private and real experience and the written imaginative representation. To hear Roth try things out and ask for suggestions. Above all, to hear Roth the listener — he is an amazing listener and subtle question-leader — and this is of course central to his writerly sensibility. How many times does Zuckerman listen to heroes reciting their tale. The artifice then, with all these little pre- and post-coital whisperings and phone calls and private exhalations, is that we're listening to listening. Again, the value is primarily of benefit to writers. Not because Roth reveals himself clearly at all, but because he gives so much of his technique away (if you know how to read for it).

I also realised how acutely characterised his dialogues can be — not just in the broken English of foreigners but in his subtle modulation of syntax that differentiates the Brits from the Yanks, for example. Deception is a series of exercises in brevity, easy pieces of dialogue, and another study on the pace and terrain of affairs. Though it won't quite give you the sang-froid of the average Frenchie in dealing with wives and mistresses, it's full of lessons.

Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)

A strange novel, almost a failure, Shylock is Roth in maximum literary-game-playing mode. The game is mostly played at serious novel-writing's expense, a little at Roth's and ultimately the reader's expense. As satire, or post-modern jesterism, Roth manages to pass off some serious and cutting invective (particularly against Israel's post-Holocaust morality and the Palestinian occupation), as well as loading up on literary-double humour and sly digs at himself. Particularly when he limns the Big Woman of the Book (Jinx/Wanda Jane) — "She might, in another life, have been a fecund wet nurse from the Polish hinterlands" — it's horsy fun as well as being a Roth pisstake.

Split roughly, the first two thirds of the book are in the reality-game mode. The final act is the serious novelist trying to draw in the funny strings and return to seriousness again. Roth the normal novelist returns, still slightly playful, but at least more attuned to regular detail and colour. Especially with the peculiarities of the American Jewry. But it just falls apart – too many fakes spoil the reader's trust. If the novel's deep theme is reality, or whatever reality and truth can be distorted through fiction, or even Roth and the Real Roth, then the whole fake/real omission of the Mossad mission and all the layers of political use/abuse intrigue become dissatisfied dead-ends. The last third doesn't service the literary game-play of the brilliant Double theme started before — it even announces its closure as a hypothetical closure. It doesn't cross well from mock-serious literature to deadly-serious politics, but leaves huge hulking bridges of prose — maybe a sign of the whole political mess of Palestine.

The humour is not as screeching/hysterical as Portnoy, but it does leave the novel in a lumpy state by its deflated-serious end. Considering much of it is set within the Israeli situation (does Roth feel hysterically absurd there?), there's more on Jewishness in this book than probably any of his others, and this also throws the balance out.

Somehow I get the feeling that Latin American writers handle this territory (if not that territory) much better.

I Married a Communist (1998)

A testament to betrayal set in the treacherous period of McCarthyist America. The crush and crumple of another vivid, rangy athletic male and his passionate particularity. A brilliant establishment of a political era, but in equally tall and rangy prose — though lacking the verve and raciness of Sabbath's Theatre, that hysterical desire machine. I guess this is part and parcel with a novel told in recollection whilst building a double, triple, then quadruple character portrait. Roth handles it effortlessly of course, but the fare is drier (less sexy) than his contemporaneous books.

The US fetish for righteous blamelessness and betrayal is worked up though no one really knew what Communism was; the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in Red-baiting; the destructive tides enveloping the righteous socialists, usually to further some personal or petty cause. The pleasure of betrayal. The purifying acid and abrasion of the purely literary Glucksman. The rather brilliant rundown of the Nixon funeral (p278) fittingly closing the Tricky portrait elsewhere; the hilarious account of getting laid for the first time at an Abbott & Costello drive-in movie, the windows steamed and the engine flooded.

Memorable quotes of prose:

… nothing so audaciously creative in even the most ordinary as the workings of revenge. And nothing so ruthlessly creative in even the most refined as the workings of betrayal. (p184).

The entire page of 223 (Politics is the great generaliser… and literature the great particulariser… in an antagonistic relationship [to each other] is full of exemplary advice.

I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world's oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith… the American unthinking. (p284, cf The Human Stain)

And of course there's Roth's sustained work of memory, painting a complex background to go some way in explaining the world we inherit and inhabit today.