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Nov 16, 2009 04:43 PM

An old dog's new trick

by Michael Weiss

Has any novelist been as gifted with so many earnest critics trying to rehabilitate his terminal talent and grant him the benefit of every artistic doubt than Philip Roth? For a man obsessed with a loss of ability—sexual, literary and otherwise—his greatest insight into the ravages of old age seems to be his self-exampled imperviousness to being called out for pap. A characteristic case of this indulgence is Judith Shulevitz’s all-too-kind review of The Humbling, Roth’s latest installment in what he’s labeled a “quartet” of nocturne emissions. Should we consider it a sign of courage in a critic who, by novel’s end, is not able to decipher if what she’s just read is an unholy mess or not?

And if its self-travesty, as Simon asks himself, "how had it happened? Was it purely the passage of time bringing on decay and collapse? Was it a surprising manifestation of aging?" We never really find out why Simon lost his magic. I consider it proof of Roths courage—of his will to experiment, no matter when or with what—that by the end of the The Humbling we cant tell whether he has lost his.

Simon, in case you’re interested, is a thespian with a serious mojo deficit, a new lesbian girlfriend (who apparently goes hetero for washed-up Oliviers) and a nice place in the country. I’m already sure that I prefer Shulevitz’s précis of the relationship Simon strikes up with the Sapphic Pegeen to whatevers contained in the source material:

Pegeen is a lesbian waif with a bad haircut and a 16-year-old boys taste in clothes, albeit also a professor of environmental science, and, improbably, she becomes Simons lover. Simon buys her expensive outfits and gets her hair expensively styled, making her over as a viable heterosexual. He regains some of his lost vitality. He even dreams of having children with her. Very quickly, however, the affair turns ugly. Pegeen sleeps with two young softball players with bobbing blond ponytails. A green dildo comes out of a bag. A threesome is arranged. Simon is too weak to stop the downward lurch, and Pegeen, who appeared so innocent, begins to seem demonic.

That “albeit” is unnecessary following the taste in clothes and preceding the job tile, and the color green strikes me as slightly otiose in this context. But really now, what can this be but the butt of some dirty Philip Roth joke? Christopher Hitchens not long ago suggested that our graying satyr only ever runs to the keyboard anymore to produce his own masturbatory fodder; I submit, that we’re the real objects of Roths cumbrous, geriatric fumblings. Every book in the last decade is a dare to the reverential reviewer—and none are more reverential, oddly, than the women—to recapitulate these wince-making self-parodies and find them proof of “courage” or a willingness to “experiment.” What would be laughed out of the column inches as bad writing is entertained seriously as the mature offerings of a septuagenarian. Like Bellow before him, though with lower artistry and higher volume, Roth has plied the intelligentsia for areas of willed gullibility or combativeness, borrowing his Kulturkampfen freely and turning them into broad comedy. The result is that nobody knows when hes kidding or just terrible. He doesnt have readers anymore; he has mugs.

And no wonder, given what he does to his dissatisfied clientel with his fiction. Recall in The Anatomy Lesson, Nathan Zuckerman is on a flight to Chicago and tries to shut up a chattering fellow passenger by saying that his real name is Milton Appel (the name of a liberal literary critic who accuses Zuckerman of all of Roths vices), hes the publisher of a pornographic magazine called Lickety Split, and his business partner is one Mortimer Horowitz, editor-in-chief of the highbrow journal Inquiry. This was a double pasting of Irving Howe for the offense of that critics own anatomy lesson on the author, “Philip Roth Reconsidered," in a review of Portnoys Complaint. The editor-in-chief of Dissent came away thinking that Roths breakout (one hestitates to say seminal) masterpiece was obscene, patronizing and morally obtuse. From foul deeds with "The Monkey" in 1969 to the lunatic bleatings of an unpregnant Upper West Side shiksa in 2004 who wants to run out and have an abortion in protest of the re-election of George W. Bush (Exit Ghost), Howes judgment is the conventional wisdom that never was. Could this owe to the fact that Roth skillfully cowed others into abandoning a harsh assessment of his work by turning it preemptively into little more than an American Jewish Committee press release? We can be sure that it isnt a sign of authorial confidence that he turned his most intelligent non-flatterer into both a prig and Larry Flynt in the course of the same novel. (The one lousy review that never rankled him belonged to Kingsley Amis, probably too English to matter. Though surely it testifies to a major comic failing that Amis, no natural ally of overbearing Jewish mothers, found Mrs. Portnoy more sympathetic and likable than her mewling prat of a son.) The funniest joke that the high-minded Yorrick of pud-pulling ever told was convincing successive generations of Jewish litterateurs that narrative cohesion and good characterization are little more than symptoms of the Semiticist’s complaint, a reactionary capitulation to "not in front of the goyim." Punchline: a rebellion that petered out decades ago has as its chief yield an unduly indemnified literary reputation.

“I wouldn’t write a book to win a fight,” Roth once told an interviewer, mentioning Howe by name. “I’d rather go 15 rounds with Sonny Liston.” Maybe. But he might write a book to see what he can still get away with. Roth’s last novel, Indignation, read like a postmodern prank at the expense of Roths own inflated stature, consisting of lesser 50’s-era shenanigans like midnight panty raids, unpleasant encounters with seed-sodden socks and dithyrambs on freethinking over conformity. The purpose of Indignation was to determine whether or not regurgitating the book that made him famous would earn strained plaudits from writers who, forty years on, should know better. (Some did, some didn’t; but even Shulevitz worries now that charges of “thinness” attached to the last novels have been sublimated thematically in The Humbling.) Wildly performative, if a little tired in the prose, Roth’s 200-page gag actually commenced with an act of self-plagiarism. How’s that for nostalgia and flouting the Grim Reaper? Is it death or Michiko Kakutani who be not proud? Indignation’s title was taken from his protagonist’s avowed fondness for a Chinese war song that Marcus Messner hums to himself in an act of atheist defiance of his small college’s mandatory chapel attendance. Where had we heard this before? Here’s Alexander Portnoy about halfway through his own onanist rhapsody:

“Just the rhythm alone can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army, and the song we learned in grade school during the war, which our teachers called “The Chinese National Anthem.” “Arise ye who refuse to be bond-slaves, with our very flesh and blood”—oh, that defiant cadence! I remember every single heroic word!”—“we will build a new great wall!” And then my favorite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: “In-dig-na-tion fills the hearts of all of our coun-try-men! A-rise! A-rise! A-RISE!”… It is just with such patriotic incantations as these that I have begun to put myself to sleep at night, after jerking off into my sock.

Ya, I’m sorry, our time iz up.