The decision to make a sequel is almost always a business decision. Though spinoffs may be good for the bank account, they’re usually bad for art. The general rule is that with each new installment the overall quality drops (think “Meatballs III,” “Lethal Weapon 4,” “Rocky V”). Serious artists don’t work on the installment plan.
But don’t tell this to Philip Roth.
Over the past 21 years the 68-year-old novelist has published the most ambitious literary series of our time: the Nathan Zuckerman books. Taken together, these eight interlocking volumes — a trilogy and epilogue (“Zuckerman Bound”), a stand-alone novel (“The Counterlife”) and a second trilogy (“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain”) — form an awe- if not envy-inspiring masterpiece. Who knew that authors could still write on such a Proustian scale? The Zuckerman oeuvre weighs in at 2,215 clothbound pages, not counting Nathan’s letter to Roth in the author’s autobiography (“The Facts”).
The hubris! The chutzpah! The word count! Who but Roth would dare pen eight books featuring a single embattled novelist — “a being,” as he writes in “The Facts,” “whose existence was comparable to my own and yet registered a more powerful valence, a life more highly charged and entertaining than my own”?
Of course, neither Roth nor Zuckerman is a universally beloved character. Many readers have criticized them both for being narrow, misogynistic, self-involved and self-loathing. And while Roth’s fictional Song of Self was too much for some people, he seemed, for a long time, incapable of writing any other way. “One’s song isn’t a skin to be shed — it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood,” he once wrote. “You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.”
The Zuckermania begins with the brick-thick “Zuckerman Bound.” This book, which combines the early Zuckerman novels (“The Ghost Writer,” “Zuckerman Unbound,” “The Anatomy Lesson”) and a novella (“The Prague Orgy”), covers events from 1956 to 1976, with the odd flashback to Nathan’s Newark childhood. It engages us not just because of Roth’s formidable intelligence and humor but because Zuckerman’s themes — the familial ambivalence, Nathan’s women problems, the difficulties caused by autobiographical fiction — intensify as we page through the stout volume.
The genius of the first four Zuckerman books is their recursive nature; they illustrate in vivid detail that the child is the father of the novelist, and that analysis is always interminable. We’re shown the origin of every twitch of Zuckerman’s psyche. For instance, when the 30ish Nathan explains to his mother about his third divorce — “I just don’t have the aptitude for a binding, sentimental attachment to one woman for life” — we remember how the unmarried Nathan cheated on his girlfriend Betsy when he was 23. (He recalls struggling to undress this second lover, while she, “not resisting all that strenuously … told me what a bastard I was to be doing this to Betsy.”) We also recall what Nathan’s mentor, the short-story writer E.I. Lonoff, told him in “The Ghost Writer”: “You don’t chuck a woman out after thirty-five years because you’d prefer to see a new face over your fruit juice.”
Father figures like Lonoff abound in “Zuckerman Unbound.” Usually Nathan is out to win their approval, but sometimes he squares off with them in Oedipal battle. Consider Milton Appel, a literary critic who tears into Nathan’s work in print and then asks him to write an Op-Ed piece in support of Israel for the New York Times. This prompts Zuckerman, who worshipped Appel when he was young — and who, in “The Anatomy Lesson,” suffers from an undiagnosable pain — to pick up the phone and shout (at the top of his doped-up voice):
“Milton Appel, the Charles Atlas of Goodness! Oh, the comforts of that difficult role! And how you play it! Even a mask of modesty to throw us dodos off the track! I’m ‘fashionable,’ you’re for the ages. I fuck around, you think. My shitty books are cast in concrete, you make judicious reappraisals. Oh, I’ll tell you your calling — President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Literature in the Interest of Loftier Values. Minister of the Official Style for Jewish Books Other than the Manual of Circumcision. Regulation number one: Do not mention your cock. You dumb prick!”
Even when he’s not drugged to the gills, Nathan’s indecorous honesty and novelistic ruthlessness cause him to alienate just about everyone. Things get so bad that his podiatrist father calls him a “bastard” on his deathbed (instead of offering Dr. Zuckerman a loving goodbye, Nathan lectures him on the Big Bang). This leads his brother Henry to accuse him of murdering the old man by publishing his “Portnoy”-esque novel, “Carnovsky”:
“Do you really think you can just go have a good time with the rest of the swingers without troubling yourself about your conscience? Without troubling about anything but seeing how funny you can be about the people who loved you most in the world? The origin of the universe! Oh, you miserable bastard, don’t you tell me about fathers and sons! I have a son! I know what it is to love a son, and you don’t, you selfish bastard, and you never will!”
But the bastard and Henry aren’t through. They meet again in “The Counterlife,” perhaps the most experimental of all the Zuckerman books. Here Roth imagines some life-and-death scenarios for both Zuckerman and his brother Henry (both of whom “die” in the course of the book). Yet even “The Counterlife” looks back at “Zuckerman Bound.” When Henry flees his life as a New Jersey dentist to become a gun-toting Zionist in Israel, we think of the scene in which Dr. Zuckerman squashed Henry’s college dream of becoming an actor (“not even Paul Muni as wily Clarence Darrow, not even Paul Muni live in their living room as patient Louis Pasteur could have persuaded Dr. Zuckerman that a Jew in pancake makeup on the stage was probably no more or less ridiculous in the eyes of God than a Jew in a dental smock”). In “The Counterlife,” in Israel, Henry is still fighting to act:
“Henry, to make himself more comfortable, draped his field jacket over the back of his chair, the pistol still in one pocket. That’s where he’d been carrying it during our tour of Hebron. Shepherding me through the crowded market, he pointed out the abundance of fruits, vegetables, chickens, sweets, even while my mind remained on that pistol, and on Chekhov’s famous dictum that a pistol hanging on the wall in Act One must eventually go off in Act Three. I wondered what act we were in, not to mention which play — domestic tragedy, historical epic, or straight farce?”
Had Roth dropped the curtain on Zuckerman after “The Counterlife,” many people would have been satisfied. But that’s not what happened. Instead, between 1997 and 2000, he published the new Zuckerman books. Three very different Zuckerman books: “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain.” We were unprepared.
These three works, which ushered the era of what we might call the Historical Zuckerman, finally allow Roth’s hero to move outside himself. Which, until the late ’90s, was a dangerous thing (“If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any longer you’ll disappear right up your asshole,” he writes in “The Anatomy Lesson”). The new books minimize the personal ingredient in an unprecedented way. Roth keeps Zuckerman at the helm — he remains the narrator — but he’s no longer the main subject. Instead he puts three new characters (Zuckerman’s high school acquaintance, Swede Levov; his boyhood mentor, the radio actor Ira Ringold; and his neighbor, Coleman Silk) in three historical situations (’60s radicalism, ’50 Communist witch hunts, ’90s political correctness) where Zuckerman used to be.
The new selflessness is shocking. In “American Pastoral,” for instance, Zuckerman reveals that prostate surgery left him impotent and incontinent, a fact he mentions briefly on Page 28 and then again — less briefly — on Page 51. The old Nathan would not have been so circumspect.
What happened? The new books seem to recognize the existence of other people. Or, rather, the fact that other people can be as endlessly fascinating and unknowable as Nathan Zuckerman. This new approach might well be summed up by a passage in “American Pastoral”:
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.”
But things haven’t changed that much. Family conflicts still drive these late-model Zuckerman books, but now they’re found outside the Zuckerman clan. Coleman Silk, for example, the light-skinned black man who decides to pass himself off as white in “The Human Stain,” faces a whole different family struggle. Listen as Roth describes Coleman telling his mother that she’ll never see his white wife or his children:
“He was murdering her. You don’t have to murder your father. The world will do that for you. There are plenty of forces out to get your father. The world will take care of him, as it had indeed taken care of Mr. Silk. Who there is to murder is the mother, and that’s what he saw he was doing to her, the boy who’d been loved as he’d been loved by this woman. Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom! It would have been much easier without her. But only through this test can he be the man he has chosen to be, unalterably separated from what he was handed at birth, free to struggle at being free like any human being would wish to be free. To get that from life, the alternate destiny, on one’s own terms, he must do what must be done.”
Roth’s brilliance here — and we cannot overpraise this — is that he found an entirely new way to tell Zuckerman stories. Judging from the energy and expanded vision in the latest trilogy, you have to conclude that Roth’s not done yet. It’s hard to imagine what the next Zuckerman book will look like, though it wouldn’t be if we possessed Philip Roth’s ridiculously vigorous imagination.
A remark Philip Roth made in the Financial Times over the weekend has provoked much comment: “I’ve stopped reading fiction,” the 78-year-old author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” and dozens of other novels said. Roth isn’t alone; over the years, such writers as Cormac McCarthy, Will Self and William Gibson have made similar statements.
Some people don’t like fiction and never have. That’s quite different from having once read fiction avidly and then, in the fullness of time, giving it up. To judge informally (that is, according to what people tell me when they learn I’m a book reviewer), the latter is far from an uncommon experience. Many former devourers of novels haven’t stopped reading, they’ve just come, like Roth, to prefer nonfiction books on history, science or politics.
Roth, when pressed by his interlocutor, didn’t offer much of a reason for the change in his tastes: “I don’t know. I wised up …” he said rather enigmatically. It may be that he’s determined that reading other people’s novels impairs his ability to write his own. Most writers know what it’s like to fall under the sway of a master’s voice and to wind up unwillingly imitating it. Self told an interviewer that he couldn’t enjoy other authors’ fiction because “It uses the same muscles that I use to write with.” Still, it’s improbable that a writer with a voice as established as Roth would have this problem.
Perhaps, like McCarthy, Roth has simply lost interest. (McCarthy once said that he found reading fiction “a rather odd thing to do.”) Non-writers who have bailed on novels and short stories often say they’ve exhausted their patience for flagrantly “untrue” narratives. One blogger explained it thus: “I put it down to having experienced enough real life narrative and drama such that made-up stories no longer appeal.”
There’s a school of evolutionary anthropology that might agree with him. It speculates that fictional storytelling — a universal cultural practice — helps people imagine what others are thinking and feeling, and consequently how they might behave in the future. The value of such skills when it comes to navigating complex social groups is obvious, but perhaps people do reach a saturation point with age. No other artistic form can surpass the novel’s ability to immerse us in the inner life of another human being, yet there may come a stage when that prospect promises nothing new.
The literary journalist Sarah Weinman rose to Roth’s defense on Twitter, writing, “Actually, I am more surprised when 70-something writers read fiction. V. Rare.” Intrigued, I asked her to expand on this remark, and she told me, “To read fiction in particular is to engage with so many different creative senses, from being knocked out by a great writer’s examination of the human condition to marveling over linguistic style and voice to escapism and entertainment, or even all of the above. And as one gets older, and the ability to free up space in one’s head to properly engage with reading and not be distracted by physical and/or mental ailments, it seems to me that reading fiction would naturally become more difficult.”
Or maybe what some readers get sick of is introspection itself. The celebrated memoirist Diana Athill spent her working life reading as well as editing fiction, but wrote that in her 90s she had “gone off novels.” She blames this on the loss of a certain narcissistic taste that once dominated her reading. “Because a great many of today’s novels still focus on the love lives of the kind of women I see around me all the time, that means I am bored by a large proportion of available fiction,” she wrote in “Somewhere Towards the End.” I can sympathize. Once, the struggles of 25-year-olds to satisfactorily arrange their romantic lives was a fascinating topic to me. Now, not so much.
Of course, that’s only one kind of novel, in a world that offers many, many choices. It’s hard to muster the energy to explore new genres, however, when you’ve lost your faith. As champions of nonfiction often point out, whatever the literary shortcomings of any given work of nonfiction, at the very least you come away from it having learned something about the world. Fiction, however, doesn’t offer instruction or information; it offers an experience. And for that experience to occur, the reader has to deliver him- or herself up to the book.
This takes faith — belief that it can be done and trust that the author can do it. As Weinman suggests, you have to clear space in your head, like a party host pushing back the furniture, stocking up on drinks and hoping that everyone invited will come. If the gamble pays off, if the guests show up in a festive mood and hit it off with one another, you have a fabulous time. If the party never gels, all you have to show for your efforts are disappointment and embarrassment.
I don’t think fiction is harder to read than nonfiction — if anything, good fiction (make that the right fiction) is easier. But, as every reader can attest, opening a novel is a crap shoot. Depending on how new and untried the books you read are, the washouts are likely to outnumber the successes. For some older readers, summoning the optimistic energy required to give it yet another go despite these discouraging odds just doesn’t seem worth it. As Dr. Johnson said of second marriages, such efforts represent the triumph of hope over experience.
Yet others are still willing to try, like the late John Updike. “It frankly amazes me,” Weinman noted, “that he still reviewed younger writers for as long as he did.” I expect he threw some great parties, too.
Further reading
The original Financial Times interview with Philip Roth
Will Self tells the BBC that he doesn’t read fiction
The text of a 2007 Rolling Stone profile of Cormac McCarthy in which he describes reading fiction as “an odd thing to do.”
Readers of Mike Johnstone’s blog discuss their diminishing interest in fiction
Last week, Carmen Callil resigned as a judge for the Man Booker International Prize because she disagreed with the other two judges’ choice for the winner: Philip Roth. The prize, which is awarded every two years, commends a single author for a body of work making an “overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.” When she announced her departure, Callil was reported saying of Roth that she didn’t “rate him as a writer at all” and that “he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.”
It took Callil a few days to present a fuller explanation. In the meantime, it was fascinating to watch various commenters respond to the kerfuffle. “I’m discouraged by what I assume is her ideologically inspired illiteracy,” Wendy Kaminer assumed for the Atlantic Online. “Is there a terrible scar of monotonous male sexuality in these inventions that limits their power or makes Roth deserve Callil’s dismissal?” fulminated Jonathan Jones in the Guardian. “To claim that,” he went on, “is to misunderstand what a novel is.” Eileen Battersby, in the Irish Times, sniffed, “The sexism and ego of Roth can certainly offend, and obviously bothers the irate Booker judge Carmen Callil.”
Not so obviously, in fact. Nothing in Callil’s initial statements about the affair indicated that her opposition to Roth’s work had anything to do with sexism or raunch. When she published a full account of her objections in the Guardian on Saturday, she expanded on a complaint that she’d mentioned from the start: Roth is the second North American (after Alice Munro) to receive the prize in its four-year history. Given that this variation on the Booker Prize is labeled “International,” and that it provides an additional grant that the winner may use to fund further English-language translations of his or her work, Callil had hoped that it would go to a less usual suspect.
She also doesn’t like Roth’s work very much, as she made abundantly clear. For the record, while I’m more or less in Callil’s camp when it comes to Roth’s fiction (particularly the face-sitting bit), her first remarks were thoughtless and high-handed. Perhaps Callil believed she was acting in the hallowed tradition of British literary prize judges who have aired their dirty laundry in the press, but insulting an author (any author) by name in such a context is uncalled for. There are enough readers who love Roth’s work to make him a reasonable choice for an important award, even if Callil can’t personally endorse that choice.
However, the really interesting aspect of the story is the straw woman erected by pro-Roth commenters like Kaminer, Jones and Battersby (among others) before Callil explained herself at length: the dour feminist scold who’s incapable of separating art from “ideology.” Instead, it turned out that Callil finds Roth’s fiction “narrow. Not in the Austen, Bellow or Updike sense, because they use a narrow canvas to convey the widest concepts and ideas. Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist.”
These are legitimate aesthetic reservations, even if not everyone agrees with them. Yet if you do agree with them, and you happen to be a woman, chances are excellent that — no matter what you say — Roth proponents will assume your aversion is based in politics. This is as frustrating as telling the chef you don’t care for lamb chops and getting a self-righteous lecture on his supplier’s humane farming practices.
As recently as 30 years ago, subjecting a work of art to a political litmus test — is it racist, sexist, classist, homophobic? — was considered the supreme critical method, but fortunately times have changed. Unfortunately, they have changed with a vengeance. Now, in many circles, critiques that can be labeled as “politically correct” can also be summarily dismissed as “not literary arguments but emotional or ideological ones,” to quote Kaminer.
Presumably, literary arguments can also sometimes be emotional and ideological (this one certainly is!), but the point seems to be that if you’re a female reader who hates Roth novels, you must be motivated by (irrational) passion and doctrinaire political animus, whether you realize it or not. Your taste could not possibly arise from anything but “illiteracy” and an inability to understand “what a novel is.” Patronizing? You bet. Why, it’s enough to turn a girl into a feminist.
Further reading
Judge withdraws over Philip Roth’s Booker win: The initial story in the Guardian
Wendy Kaminer’s appreciation of Philip Roth in the Atlantic Online
Jonathan Jones on why Philip Roth deserves the Man Booker International Prize
Eileen Battersby defends Philip Roth in the Irish Times
Carmen Callil on why she resigned from the Man Booker International panel
In “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth imagined an alternative WW2-era USA in which President Charles Lindbergh launches a pogrom against Jewish citizens. In the author’s latest novel, “Indignation,”
he has imagined an alternative Philip Roth: a young Jewish man who leaves Newark, N.J., in 1951 not for literary glory, as Roth did, but for a series of zero-sum face-offs with the WASP power establishment. In each book, the message is the same: Assimilation may at any moment be reversed. If it can ever be achieved.
Marcus Messner has his own reason for assimilating: He’s still living at home, and his worrywart father is driving him crazy. “I had to get away,” Marcus says, “before I killed him.” So he transfers from the local university to Winesburg, a small liberal arts and engineering college in Ohio that bears little resemblance to Sherwood Anderson’s story collection and no resemblance at all to Newark. Boys toss footballs on expansive green lawns, and the frat houses have “massive black studded doors,” the better for excluding non-Christians. When Marcus takes a job pouring beer at the local inn, the local frat boys bellow: “Hey, Jew! Over here!”
On a campus that so prides itself on its sacred traditions, Jews have little hope of fighting their second-class status. But fight it Marcus does, in his stubborn and pugnacious way. He engages in a protracted battle with the dean over the university’s chapel requirement, and he refuses to do what the faculty or his peers expect of him, whether it’s getting drunk or joining a Jewish fraternity or trying out for the baseball team.
Marcus isn’t the only outsider at Winesburg, but, being a solitary cuss, he can’t make common cause with misfits like Bertram Flusser, a troubled young gay man whose oppositional stance is distilled in Malvolio’s exit line from “Twelfth Night”: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!” And speaking of “Twelfth Night,” there’s a sad girl named Olivia, “an ex-teenage drunk and inmate of a psychiatric sanatorium who’d failed at suicide with a razor blade, a daughter of divorced parents, and a Gentile to boot.” Which makes her, by direct consequence, irresistible to someone like Marcus, especially when she proves to be more sexually experienced than he is. Soon, though, even this thread of happiness is jeopardized by the prevailing Midwest mores, and Marcus comes to realize he has exchanged his father’s stranglehold for Winesburg’s equally constricting rectitude, which is now “tyrannizing my life.”
“Indignation” is almost comically well-titled: It’s an angry little morality play about the harm men can do. Marcus comes to Winesburg trailing memories of his father’s kosher butcher store, where he used to watch the local shochet slit chickens’ throats and let the animals hang until the blood flowed out. (“It’s as if he took a bucket of blood, as if he took several buckets, and poured them out all at once, because that’s how fast blood gushes from the arteries onto the floor, a concrete floor with a drain in it. He stands there in boots, in blood up to his ankles despite the drain…”) But even within the pastoral confines of Winesburg, blood is never too far from the surface. In the hands of sexually repressed young men, a simple snowball fight can quickly segue into mayhem. “Within an hour, they were hurling at one another not just snowballs but beer cans whose contents they’d guzzled down while they fought. There were flecks of red blood in the clean snow from where some of them had been cut by flying debris … But their bleeding did nothing to dilute their ardor. The sight of their own blood in the white snow may even have been what provided the jolt to transform them from playful children recklessly delighting in the surprise of an unseasonable snowfall into a whooping army of mutineers…”
This violence echoes and prefigures the carnage happening overseas in Korea, where thousands of American soldiers are perishing in the name of anti-communism. It’s a dangerous world for a young Jewish man with no money and no connections. “Mark my words,” warns one of the Messners’ neighbors. “The world is waiting, it’s licking its chops, to take your boy away.” That terror infects even Marcus, whose obsessive devotion to academics is fueled by the knowledge that, if he’s expelled, he could likewise become bayonet fodder. Studying is nothing less than survival.
By design, “Indignation” is a slim and foreshortened volume, and critics are already assigning it to the shelf of “minor Roth,” maybe because its narrative freight is small in relation to its themes. But its emotional effect is by no means small. Early on, Roth springs a stunning twist on the reader — reminiscent of the switcheroo he pulled in “The Human Stain” — and the entire book is transformed into a meditation on loss and entropy, culminating in a superb set piece that gives full play to Winesburg’s pent-up demons.
Best of all, Roth has (for now, at least) abandoned the libido-in-winter theme that made some of his recent volumes a priapic chore. His ferocity, however, is undimmed as he takes up once more the conflict that has enlivened his work from the start: the unbridgeable divide between being a credit to one’s race and “an enemy of the Jews.” That last epithet was flung at both Roth and Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, whose own brother joined the attack in “Zuckerman Unbound”: “To you everything is disposable! Everything is exposable! Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families — everything is grist for your fun-machine.”
Well, Roth’s fun-machine has largely closed down, and on the evidence of both “Indignation” and “The Plot Against America,” he has begun to savor both the mixed and unmixed blessings of his upbringing. He can even allow the self-banished Marcus to reflect back on “those unimperiled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place.” It would be absurd to say Philip Roth has found religion; it would be equally absurd to say he’s immune to Marcus’ nostalgia for religion’s comforts.
In the end, Roth leaves it to Marcus’ mother to set him — and us — straight. “That old world is far, far away and everything in it is long gone. All that is left is the kosher meat. That’s enough. That suffices. It has to.”
Samuel Goldwyn Films / Joe Lederer
Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh and Penelope Cruz as Consuela Castillo in “Elegy.”
I’m finally dragging my ass to the task of writing about “Elegy,” a film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel “The Dying Animal” that’s a curious hybrid indeed. It offers Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz in the best performances of their recent careers, as an older professor and his ex-student turned lover (and, as advertised, there are long, contemplative, art-history-lecture style shots of Cruz’s naked torso). This coupling is gracefully handled by Isabel Coixet (“The Secret Life of Words,” “My Life Without Me”), a Spanish filmmaker with an exquisite visual sensibility and a reverent, slightly over-precious approach to her craft.
Then there’s the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, a Hollywood veteran whose career includes three “Star Trek” movies and a best-selling Sherlock Holmes novel, along with a previous Roth adaptation (“The Human Stain”). He sticks closely to the characters and story of “The Dying Animal,” arguably one of Roth’s bleakest and most misanthropic novels — until the end of the film, when Meyer cooks up a completely new, movieland-style denouement. The movie that results from blending all these ingredients, while excellent in many technical respects, is a muted, pretty, anesthetic concoction that’s never fully satisfying.
That said, the complementary but completely different performances by Kingsley and Cruz are worth seeing, and Coixet gets full credit for dragging both of them out of their comfort zones. As the 60ish cultural scholar David Kepesh, Kingsley has a fire and vivacity I haven’t detected in his recent roles since “Sexy Beast.” He can’t seem to play Americans without resorting to mannered, tic-laden performances like those in “The Wackness” and “You Kill Me,” but Kepesh (at least in his film incarnation) isn’t quite an American. He’s a suave, trans-Atlantic transplant, a British Jewish intellectual hardened to a point by his years in New York academia. He trades quips with Charlie Rose and presides, in lordly fashion, over graduate student gatherings.
It’s at one of these parties in his implausibly grand Manhattan apartment — OK, he’s sold some books and hosts a radio chat show, but still — that Kepesh makes his move on Consuela Castillo (Cruz), who’s just completed his class and is hence fair game. He likes her not just because she’s a smokin’ Latin bombshell but because her composure and affect identify her as a fellow outsider. She’s a Cuban immigrant from a conservative background who looks and dresses like a high-end legal secretary, which is what she was before deciding to pursue an academic career. Whether or not it’s because the director is a Spanish woman, this is Cruz’s breakthrough English-language performance. Consuela is a difficult character, both a sheltered flower and a confident intellectual, but Cruz anchors her in a soulful certainty.
Say whatever you want about the ickiness of the older man-younger woman dynamic, but it doesn’t seem mysterious that Consuela responds to Kepesh and even falls in love with him. He’s a cultured and worldly man, an intellectual mentor, and also a man who withholds himself emotionally, a conscious or unconscious tactic that, in movies as in life, tends to drive women nuts. It’s somewhat less clear precisely why Kepesh keeps excusing himself from dates with Consuela’s parents, never introduces her to his best friend — a Pulitzer-winning poet played delightfully by Dennis Hopper — and refuses to end his no-strings sexual relationship with a divorced friend (Patricia Clarkson). I suppose the murkiness is intentional, but it leaves the psychological center of the story uncertain.
Coixet’s individual images are marvelous constructions (as captured by cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu), and she frames the human face with a Bergmanesque intensity. But she’s such a fussy filmmaker, never using one shot when five will do, that I think she subtly exhausts the viewer and drains the picture of vitality. It’s a little like bombing through the Prado until your feet hurt, instead of taking your time and absorbing the work in a couple of galleries. Speaking of art museums and the female nudes often found therein, the already-famous lingering shots of Consuela’s breasts capture them as something akin to a wondrous work of Creation, but completely without prurience. Perhaps the feminist idea that the “female gaze” is intrinsically different is valid after all. Whether Coixet’s gaze is meant to capture Kepesh’s simultaneously lascivious and infantile obsession with Consuela’s poitrine or some objective, aesthetic perspective is once again not quite clear.
Between the marvelous lead performances and the arty, enervated feeling of the mise-en-scène, “Elegy” is already a mixed bag. But the filmmakers lack the courage to stick with Roth’s original gloomy conclusion, so while Consuela, Kepesh and the latter’s estranged son (Peter Sarsgaard) face the same crises as in “The Dying Animal,” the whole sour, Rothian mess of cowardice and mortality is finally wrapped in pink tissue paper and presented to us in a tasteful gift box. There’s an inordinate amount of talent on display in “Elegy,” but it ultimately reveals itself as an upper-middlebrow commercial concoction. It’s beautiful, but nobody involved was ever sure what the movie was actually about, or why they were making it.
“Elegy” is now playing in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider release to follow.
Thursday, Oct 4, 2007 11:13 AM UTC
Philip Roth's aging alter ego returns to New York to confront his unrealizable lust and his fear that "reading/writing people" may be finished.
By Brendan Bernhard
You don’t look to Philip Roth for the sentimental, and “Exit Ghost” — starting with its curt, dismissive title — is not what you would call a five-hanky farewell to the author’s celebrated character and alter ego, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman.
Reading the novel in a restaurant empty but for two young waitresses, I was almost embarrassed to be seen with it. Between the bleak title on the front (the word “exit” in red, as in a movie theater) and, especially, the photograph of the author on the back (steely eyes boring right through you, on through the human condition, and from there to parts unknown) — well, it just seemed so old school.
Although Zuckerman played a peripheral role in the acclaimed trilogy of novels Roth turned out at the end of the last century — “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain” — he has not taken center stage since 1986′s “The Counterlife.” “Exit Ghost” suggests that time has not just taken its customary toll on Zuckerman — it’s taken a great big whack. It has also removed his cancerous prostate, rendering this most priapic of novelists (in “The Anatomy Lesson,” he enjoyed no less than four mistresses) not only 100 percent impotent, but also incontinent. He wears absorbent padding in his underwear, and when he forgets to change it, he smells.
“I hadn’t been in New York in eleven years,” Zuckerman announces in the opening sentence of the novel, set during election week of 2004. “Other than for a surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I’d hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those eleven years and, what’s more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11, three years back.” His pared-down existence, gradual accommodation to solitude, and his relationships with his few friends and neighbors are sparingly, but movingly, described. In some ways they are the best part of the book.
Yet Zuckerman is Manhattan-bound, to see a surgeon who holds out hope for a cure for his incontinence. The visit leads to two consequential encounters. The first is with Amy Bellette, the former mistress of his literary hero, E.I. Lonoff, both of whom appeared in Roth’s initial Zuckerman novel, “The Ghost Writer” (1979). Lonoff is long dead and Amy, with whom the young Zuckerman was smitten, has brain cancer.
The second encounter comes after Zuckerman picks up a copy of the New York Review of Books and sees an ad in the back that might have been written expressly for him: A couple, both writers, want to exchange their comfortable Upper West Side apartment for an isolated house in the country. Seized by hope that the surgery will be successful (though he feels certain it won’t be), and by a last-gasp bout of metropolitan nostalgia, Zuckerman calls the couple straightaway. Invited over, he falls instantly for the wife, Jamie Logan, a rich, sexy Texan in her early 30s who hails from Houston oil money, but is fiercely, at times hysterically, anti-Bush. (This is election week, remember.) It is her idea, not her husband Billy Davidoff’s, to leave the city. “We’re leaving,” she says stiffly, “because I don’t wish to be snuffed out in the name of Allah … Bin Laden dreams only of evil, and he calls that evil ‘New York.’”
Zuckerman is once more in the thick of political fever, has witnessed the return of his own impotent, unrealizable lust, is about to forge, through the ailing Amy Bellette, a renewed connection with the literary idol of his youth and is both rejuvenated and saddened by his own Rip Van Winkle fascination with what has become of New York in his 11-year absence. He focuses much of his attention on the emergence of cellphones, wondering “what had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one’s surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one’s animal senses … For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too.”
Roth’s Zuckerman tirades have generally been characterized as curmudgeonly, but that seems unduly harsh. “Tired” might be a better word, in that he contributes no fresh insights. But then, as someone coming across cellphones almost for the first time, at least as used en masse, perhaps it’s contextually appropriate that Zuckerman’s thoughts on the matter — the loss of interiority, the grotesque blurring of public and private behavior — are the same as ours once were, until we chose to shelve them. Still, it’s a shame he was unwilling or unable (failing literary powers being a prominent theme) to let fly with a truly coruscating satirical blast at what Time Out memorably called “New Dork City.”
Unfortunately, there’s a lot that’s tired about the book. The depiction of liberal New York’s grief following Bush’s reelection is like reading a novelized Frank Rich column, and even Frank Rich fans have read enough of those. Worse, great chunks of the narrative are broken off so that Roth can engage in an imaginary dialogue (a kind of play-within-the-novel, with sharklike erotic purpose) between Zuckerman and his busty Texan muse. Divided into sections baldly marked “He” and “She,” they do little to enliven Jamie the character — except for her top-notch breasts, she always seems blurry — and attest only to Zuckerman’s fierce, undying inquisitiveness: seduction by interrogation.
Nonetheless, this is a novel by Philip Roth, and there are gems, as in his description of Richard Kliman, a friend of Jamie’s who wants to write a biography of Lonoff, exposing his great “secret” — a three-year incestuous relationship with his older sister. Zuckerman loathes Kliman, who is young, virile and ambitious — everything Zuckerman once was — and enviously describes him as “savage with health and armed to the teeth with time.” The fact that you can see those teeth, time and armor in one, ready to chomp on rocks if need be, reminds you that Roth is still a great writer.
And what of “the writer”? If Zuckerman feels like a “ghost” preparing his exit, it is because he no longer feels relevant on either a personal or cultural level. Amy, who claims to be in communication with Lonoff in the afterlife, says she has received the following message from him: “Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era.” As usual in Roth, there’s an alternative explanation: Since brain cancer has left Amy half-demented, that may just be her tumor talking. That Roth may not be as pessimistic about the literary future as Lonoff is also suggested by the fact that it’s Jamie, the young, contemporary writer, who, one page from the end, comes closest to summarizing everything that has come before. Chastizing Zuckerman for “having lost all sense of proportion” and acceding to “unreasonable wishes” when he asks her to visit him in his hotel room, she nonetheless admits that behaving unreasonably “is what it is to be in life, isn’t it? What it is to forge a life. You know your reason can reassert itself at any time — and if it does, there goes life and the stability that is life.”
It’s a bleak diagnosis. We can only be ourselves by not being ourselves, oscillating endlessly between sense and folly, never fully at home in either, until death ends the argument.
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Philip Roth
Cormac McCarthy, left, Philip Roth and Diana Athill (inset) 
Philip Roth and Carmen Callil (inset) 
