Roth, Updike and Ozick

Brooke Allen, in “Roth Reconsidered,” has an interesting essay in the October issue of The New Criterion on Philip Roth, on the occasion of the Library of America’s commencement of the definitive eight-volume edition of Roth’s collected works:

Goodbye, Columbus, a novella of a mere hundred pages, is as perfect in its way as Daisy Miller or The Great Gatsby.  In theme it looks directly back to Gatsby . . . .  The envious, striving outsider is a classic protagonist, but Roth made this stock character memorable by localizing him within a place and social milieu that were still fairly exotic in serious fiction. 

The grubby Newark where Neil Klugman’s aunt and uncle live and toil in immigrant ignominy, the promised land of Short Hills, where the Patimkins live out a poor man’s fantasy of luxury and bounty . . . Roth made both places perfectly immediate and true.

Once I’d driven out of Newark, past Irvington and the packed-in tangle of railroad crossings, switchmen shacks, lumberyards, Dairy Queens, and used-car lots, the night grew cooler.  It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin… .  I thought of my Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max sharing a Mounds bar in the cindery darkness of their alley, on beach chairs, each cool breeze sweet to them as the promise of afterlife, and after a while I rolled onto the gravel roads of the small park where Brenda was playing tennis. Inside my glove compartment it was as though the map of The City Streets of Newark had metamorphosed into crickets, for those mile-long tarry streets did not exist for me any longer, and the night noises sounded loud as the blood whacking at my temples.

What a gift! This is prose as evocative as a Chopin nocturne.  Neil doesn’t just see the Patimkins’ wealth; he feels it through every pore.

Forty years and 21 books later, Roth would write American Pastoral, the Great American [Jewish] Novel, about the All-American Seymour (“Swede”) Levov, living a successful middle class life, and his daughter Merry, who has gone undercover in Newark after her protest against the Vietnam war turns murderous.

Brooke Allen concludes the essay by asserting that:

The only living American writer who can offer [Philip Roth] any competition at all is John Updike. One hopes that Updike will be the next Library of America author and that, like Roth, he will receive this homage while he is still alive.

Scott Johnson, at Power Line, asserts that John Updike is the foremost living English-language writer deserving of a Nobel Prize for Literature.  He cites in particular Updike’s multiple volumes of stories about Henry Bech, the Jewish “semi-obscure American author” who serves as Updike’s fictional alter ego:

In "Bech in Czech" (from the third Bech volume), for example, Bech is sent to Czechoslovakia on a cultural exchange program through the United States government in 1986, while the country is still Communist. Bech attends a party of dissident writers, one of whom had been jailed. Bech reflects:

Jail! One of the guests at the party had spent nearly ten years in prison. He was dapper, like the cafe habitues in George Grosz drawings, with a scarred, small face and shining black eyes. He spoke so softly Bech could hardly hear him, though he bent his ear close. The man’s hands twisted under Bech’s eyes, as if in the throes of torture. Bech noticed that the fingers had in fact bent, broken. How would he, the American author asked himself, stand up to having his fingernails pulled? He could think of nothing he had ever written that he would not eagerly recant.

That paragraph, buried in the middle of the story, is the product of a deeply humane sensibility. I can’t think of another man of letters who could have written it in the course of a story devoted to the ghosts of recent history.

To Philip Roth and John Updike, I would add Cynthia Ozick — who, even without a lifetime of both fiction and non-fiction of unique moral force, deserves inclusion for this essay alone.