Philip Roth - 1933 - 2018

2 giants in 2 weeks, in their mid-to-late 80's. I don't write obituaries for everyone, but I try to write them when I think I can speak properly to their import. In the case of Tom Wolfe, I wasn't familiar enough with his oeuvre to say anything of substance. The New York Times Book Review podcast briefly addressed his passing and while I had intended to do Bonfire of the Vanities and maybe The Right Stuff (one day), their comments seemed to indicate that Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is his seminal work. So maybe that will have to come first. 

Wolfe will be remembered for "New Journalism." What will Roth be remembered for? Not winning the Nobel Prize. He was a Nobel Prize-level writer. I think he will be remembered for demarcating the line between toxic masculinity and horniness. Among other things.

Recently, there was a very scandalous book published that apparently details an affair with a fictional stand-in for Roth. The author admitted that she did, in fact, have an affair with Roth, and not all that long ago. Roth was also recently in the New York Times for an e-mail exchange checking up on him, after all the #metoo revelations, to get his take on the finer points of male desire. He had been retired from his occupation as a novelist over the past several years. 

I read Everyman over 10 years ago now, and that seemed to be his comment on retirement. Indignation still came after (as did The Humbling and Nemesis). American Pastoral was the best. I still haven't read everything. 

Here I've only written about American Pastoral and The Professor of Desire. Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint should be re-read. Both are essential. People have said The Plot Against America is prescient and/or prophetic. I want to read that and Sabbath's Theater.

It's hard to do better than Roth. That is the only thing of substance I can say here, and I'm not even sure that qualifies as substance. 

We wrote about Salinger eight years ago. Salinger was silent for years. He practically hadn't published anything since Roth had first published. They were 14 years apart in age. I consider them equals. They're two of the best 20th century American writers to have lived. Surely there are many great writers that nobody knew about. They both relayed truths rarely spoken, yet often felt. 

Roth's prolific career is a work of art on its own, and this writer is not so deeply familiar with it that an authoritative tone may be struck. Suffice to say, this entire site is filled with instances of exhortations to read so-and-so and while I do truly try to be careful not to overwhelm the casual reader, everybody knows that Roth was a true modern master (in the same way that I know Bellow was, though I haven't read him). He's in the Pantheon. Our world is rapidly evolving and one expects a similar change in the way we consume literature, as well as our expectations of how we expect to be transported by it. So maybe there will be a new literature, and Roth is a relic from a bygone era. History has shown that writers will be remembered if their words can stand up to eternity. Roth is not Plato and he will likely not be referenced by Westworld-types of entertainment 2,000 years from now. Roth may not even be Hemingway. I see many parallels with Vonnegut in terms of output and cultural relevance. Vonnegut was not seriously rumored to win the Nobel. Both were zany, though Vonnegut was zanier. People will inevitably compare him to Wolfe if only for their sense of timing. They were true writers. They made their living off writing their books. Roth was popular, but never commercial. One hopes that writers such as him may still exist and prosper. 

Fires - Raymond Carver (1983)

Fires, a collection of essays, poems, and short stories by Raymond Carver, was published in 1983, the year I was born.  Sometimes, I used to think that I was lucky to live within the lifetime of some of the greatest writers.  Raymond Carver is definitely one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, but I wouldn't be surprised if some people consider him to be overrated nowadays.  Anyways, he passed away in 1988, when he was about 50, way, way too young.  He would have just turned 80 a few months ago.  Fortunately, Milan Kundera is still kicking around somewhere in France at 88.  (Note: I had no idea that The Festival of Insignificance existed until a moment ago.)

The only other American authors that I can think of that are on similar footing are Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth.  I might have said John Updike, but I haven't read enough of him, and he passed away 8 years ago.  Perhaps JCO and Joan Didion belong in that category, but again, not familiar enough with oeuvre.

I don't want to retread too much territory from Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, which made the Best Books list, but I will need to use that as a reference guide for some of the material here to provide background information.  I first became aware of Raymond Carver via a Roger Ebert review of Short Cuts, a Robert Altman film based on a number of Carver's short stories, which was released in 1993, and I first became aware of that film because my older brother rented it from Blockbuster some random night in the early-to-mid 90's.  If you haven't seen it, see it.  If you have seen Magnolia, but not Short Cuts, see it and you will see how badly it is ripped off (yet also improved upon).  While Short Cuts is a great film, and an epic viewing experience, the ultimate power of it does not match the short stories themselves.

Only one of those stories that figures into Short Cuts, "So Much Water So Close to Home," is reproduced in Fires, but the real menace in the story is absent in the film.  It is a much, much better story.  Ultimately it is still somewhat inscrutable, and I will use this review as a way to ask questions, in the hope that other readers may provide their own interpretations.

I think there is a quality of mystery to short stories that people consider "really good"--the type of stories that get published in The New Yorker or The Best American Short Stories of XXXX.  Like, there is an undercurrent of only hinting at something that a reader may miss, whereas in a novel, it's all pretty much going to be in your face.  There's going to be a fair amount of plot, or else the reader is not going to miss the quality that makes it great by the sheer force of the word volume.  But in a short story, it can be like a poem, and maybe this is why I don't care all that much for most poetry-- that quality of inscrutability, or archness, or intellectualism.  Another reason why I don't mind Carver's poetry.  Most of the poems are closer to prose, and most of Carver's short stories only have a slight quality of inscrutability, enough that I can say I love them for the most part.  The only exception here is "The Cabin."  Also, "The Lie."  Actually I like "The Cabin" for the most part, but don't care as much for "The Lie."  But I see I am getting ahead of myself.  We should discuss the book chronologically.

It starts off with the essays, and the essays may actually be the best part of Fires, the part that made it worth publishing (because I believe most of the other material had already been included in other volumes).  This is the first mention of Fires from A Writer's Life:

"Besides the story collection for Knopf, Carver was preparing a new book for Capra Press.  Since At Night the Salmon Move and Furious Seasons were both almost sold out, Noel Young proposed combining them into one volume and adding new pieces to make 'a kind of Carver reader' to be called Fires.  The advance was under $1,000 but Ray wanted to keep his less commercial work in print.  He rearranged the poems and added thirteen that were not in his earlier collections.  He republished the long versions of "Distance" and "So Much Water So Close to Home" from Furious Seasons and also took the opportunity to include "Where Is Everyone?" (from which Lish had carved "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit").
Carver must have realized all this shuffling and reshuffling would confuse even the most earnest scholars.  Whether for his own peace of mind or theirs, in an 'Afterword' to Fires he explains that he'd 'rather tinker with a story after writing it, and then tinker some more, changing this, changing that, than to have to write the story in the first place...I think by nature I'm more deliberate than spontaneous, and maybe that explains something.'  He explained, too, that 'Distance' and 'So Much Water' had been 'largely rewritten for the Knopf book' but neglected to mention that the rewriting had been done by Lish.  'After some deliberation, I decided to stay fairly close to the versions as they appeared in the Capra Press book...they have been revised again, but not nearly so much as they once were.  But how long can this go on?  I suppose there is, finally, a law of diminishing returns.  But I can say now that I prefer the latter [in other words, earlier] versions of the stories, which is more in accord with the way I am writing short stories these days.'" (A Writer's Life, 383-384)

Nothing about the essays, but maybe there's something in there, some passages in A Writer's Life that delves into the background of the essays.  There's certainly something about the essay "Fires," as apparently it made his children hate him, or was viewed as an extremely mean-spirited piece of writing.  Frankly I think it is hilarious and true and heartbreaking, but it primarily concerns how his children are his greatest influence, and "have been a negative one, oppressive and often malevolent" (28), and that he would always find himself in the position of "unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction." (33) It has a certain sort of rambling drunk ramshackle quality, but it's an extremely entertaining and honest piece of writing.

Two of the others directly concern his thoughts on writing and being a writer, one of which is focused on John Gardner, who was his teacher at Chico State College in the summer of 1958.  The other essay is about his father's life.  All four are excellent, but "On Writing" and "John Gardner: the Writer as Teacher" seem to run around some of the same territory.  If pressed, I would have to say "On Writing" is the best of the four:

"I have friends who've told me they had to hurry a book because they needed the money, their editor or their wife was leaning on them or leaving them--something, some apology for the writing not being very good.  'It would have been better if I'd taken the time.'  I was dumbfounded when I heard a novelist say this.  I still am, if I think about it, which I don't.  It's none of my business.  But if the writing can't be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it?  In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labor, is the one thing we can take into the grave.  I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven's sake go do something else.  There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living.  Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don't justify or make excuses.  Don't complain, don't explain." (25) (underline by me, circa 2001 or 2002)

All of these essays are great because they are imbued with the quality that makes all of Carver's writing special.  The simplicity of its style and clarity, and his ability to beautifully evoke a scene, is perhaps influenced by his desire to "write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring--with immense even startling power.  It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine--the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it." (24) I think we should move onto the poems before I run the risk of excessive excerpting.

The next 74 pages or so are devoted to poems, in four sections.  The first section is the most accessible and the best, in my opinion.  "Fear" is not included, but I feel that "Drinking While Driving," "Luck," "Bankruptcy," and "Iowa Summer," are all amongst his best poems.  The second section consists solely of a long poem about an evening with Charles Bukowksi, which seems to mimic his literary voice, or at least further his legend.  The third and fourth are more impressionistic and not as interesting to me (others that are into more naturalistic writing about fishing and the outdoors may like it more), but "Morning, Thinking of Empire" and "Trying to Sleep Late on a Saturday Morning in November" are two of my favorites.  Then you get to the stories, which run roughly 72 pages.  

"Distance" is about a young couple growing irritated by their baby waking up all throughout the night, and plans to go hunting, and co-parenting responsibilities.  The framing device in particular makes the story especially heartrending, with the father telling his adult daughter a story from when she was a baby.  

"The Lie" is so short that I hardly know what to say about it, but seems to be about a quarreling couple, something heard from a friend, purported to be a lie.  It is probably my least favorite in the selection, but its brevity might make it another's favorite, as it is one of several Carver stories that could be seen to influence "flash fiction." It also may or may not be a total ripoff of "Hills like White Elephants" (except that it could be about any number of things besides abortion) by Ernest Hemingway, whom Carver acknowledges as a kind of spiritual forbear in one of the essays.

"The Cabin," however, is generally the more enjoyable of the two mentioned above as "inscrutable."  It is about a man going away for the weekend to a cabin to go fishing, and a menacing encounter with a gang of unruly youths, and his plans and how they change.  If anybody can shed light on the ending (why he decides to leave earlier) I would appreciate it.  Is it just because he got scared during the encounter, and he didn't want anything worse to happen?  Because he missed his wife?

"Harry's Death" concerns the death of a friend, and dealing with the aftermath and how it ripples throughout all of their shared relationships and how it changes his life.

"The Pheasant" is an interesting story about a couple with a fairly large age gap (12 years) and a spontaneous trip from L.A. to Carmel and an unfortunate road kill incident that is revealed to be semi-intentional and other moments of self-sabotage.  For its lightness and strangeness, it is probably my favorite story.

But then, "Where is Everyone?" is pretty great too.  It's definitely not as light, but it is arguably as strange, as it eventually settles onto a thread after going off on a bunch of weird tangents like the narrator's 65-year old mother's dating life, his kids and his casual hatred of them, going to AA meetings drunk because "[y]ou're scared and you need something more than cookies and instant coffee," (177) and his father's death at age 54, drunk in his sleep.  The thread concerns Ross, or "Mr. FixIt," an unemployed former aerospace engineer whom the narrator's wife has a "thing" with after meeting at an AA meeting.  Ross collects old cars and appliances and tries to repair them and .  It is basically a character study on Ross.  But it is also about the narrator and how he wishes him well now.

Then you get to the end, "So Much Water So Close to Home," which must be the longest story here and is certainly the most epic.  This is probably the most "classic" story collected here, because it just seems to be of a more substantial nature.  Perhaps because a lot happens in it, but it is really very simple: a man discovers a dead body while fishing with his friends for a weekend, and they decide to keep fishing for the weekend before reporting it to anybody.  The narrator is the man's wife and expresses her disbelief at how he could do something like that.  She becomes suspicious of her husband and obsessed with the young woman who died, traveling to her wake, and having a scary encounter with a man that may have been her murderer.

There are other Carver stories that I love more, and I hope to review a couple other collections in the near future.  I was taking college creative writing classes a comparatively long time ago, now, and I'm not sure if Carver is still all of the rage and cited quite as frequently as the late 20th century master of short fiction--he had only been gone 12 years then, and 16 years have passed since--but I think he still is, and he's one of the few writers whose entire oeuvre is worth digesting.  I hope to review Beginners soon, which I got for my mother for Christmas in 2015, despite her not having ever expressed any desire to read Carver.  I did the same for my oldest sister with Where I'm Calling From in 2001 or 2002, putting asterisks next to all the stories I thought were worth reading.  Basically I think he belongs in a person's library, and perhaps over the next thirty or so years I will continue to foist upon each family member's shelf a different Carver volume.  I remember thinking Where I'm Calling From as the more essential volume, so Fires is not going in the Best Books list but it is probably the most essential for a creative writing teacher to photocopy and share with students.

American Pastoral - Philip Roth

We have a new first on Flying Houses--the first book to merit two different posts. This is what I wrote back in May: http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/05/american-pastoral-philip-roth.html

Recently my parents were lent a copy of American Pastoral and after finishing Ulysses, decided to finish off the last 120 pages before I went back to something even easier to read than Roth in comparison with Joyce. I loved the beginning of American Pastoral--up through page 300 at least, but I have to admit the ending is a bit of a letdown. It is still a good book all in all.

But I see I am getting ahead of myself. I wanted to deliver on an unkept promise of the story of the beach reader in Nantucket. This occurred in the summer of 2007--early July. I was on a beach there with my family. The five of us or so tromped in, laid down our blankets, and chattered a bit as we completed this process. We put on suntan lotion and prepared to either go swimming or lay in the sun and read. Nearby us was a man who appeared to be a hippie, and I only say that because he had long hair. This is not to cast aspersions on hippies, but perhaps sometimes they possess this quality of being total asses when all along they feel they are behaving in line with the commonly-accepted paradigm of the hippie--which is, it's all good, I don't care, everything is permitted. Anyways he moved the five or so feet over to us that separated our spots, and said, "Hello. How are you?" We said, "Good." He said, "Are you enjoying yourself to day here on the beach?" And we said, "Yes, it's nice, thank you." And he said, "Well, I am trying to enjoy myself too, and I would appreciate it if you would keep it down a bit. We're all trying to enjoy the beach here, let's share it respectfully." Or some garbage like that. And I said, "I'm sorry! I'll shut up!" And he said, "Don't misunderstand me." And I think I said, "Oh, I understand you perfectly." And that was the end of it. He went back to his beach chair and he was reading The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.

The other anecdote is pretty much already told, and is not such a castigation of the type of readers Philip Roth can attract. That is to say, he is very popular, and though most people that like to read are cool, many people that like to read still do in fact suck horribly. I have read Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, Everyman, and The Professor of Desire. Actually, one of the first posts on Flying Houses. http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/professor-desire-philip-roth.html. Post #4. The 2nd book reviewed after Mann's Doctor Faustus. American Pastoral is automatically the best book I have read by Roth--but I have to say that I consider it on equal footing with Goodbye, Columbus. I have liked everything I've read by him though and look forward to many of his other works. I do not know if I can find anything to quote, primarily because I am so far removed from the majority of the novel, seven months ago. But I did want to comment on not enjoying the ending as much as the beginning.

Actually, the book takes a while to get started. For the first 120 pages or so, I wasn't really that interested in it. Oh, I was going to finish it alright, but it wasn't especially great. But then for about a 180 page stretch, it became truly great--right around the point where the Swede is talking to Merry about staying overnight in New York with dangerous people.

There are long stretches about running a glove factory which may bore some readers. I was slightly bored, but Roth kept it reasonably interesting. It seems like he did a lot of research to make the depiction of this business very accurate. These characters, and their setting, are fully lived in, they are almost 100% human. I think that is what separates this from the rest of his.

The ending though, vaguely disappointed me. It's like, after Merry does what she does, and becomes a fugitive, Roth goes into this description of the Swede's marriage to Dawn (but I feel like--didn't he have another wife after her? Wasn't that described early in the book? I have a hard time remembering.) in Old Rimrock, NJ and what basically amounts to one really long scene with the Swede's father and mother, Dawn, their neighbors Bill and Jessie Orcutt, and friends and speech therapist/protector of Merry, Sheila and Shelly Salzman, having a barbeque, and talking about Deep Throat and Nixon. This scene has its moments, such as the final shocking revelation about the fidelity of their marriage, and there was at least one hilarious moment (spoiler!):

"Well, perhaps not all, the Swede discovered as he stood peering in through the kitchen door from the big granite step outside. Why he hadn't just opened the door and gone straight ahead into his own kitchen to say that Jessie was in serious need of her husband was because of the way Orcutt was leaning over Dawn while Dawn was leaning over the sink, shucking the corn. In the first instant it looked to the Swede--despite the fact that Dawn needed no such instruction--as though Orcutt were showing Dawn how to shuck corn, bending over her from behind and, with his hands on hers, helping her get the knack of cleanly removing the husk and the silk. But if he was helping her learn to shuck corn, why, beneath the expanse of his Hawaiian shirt, were his hips and his buttocks moving like that? And why was Dawn saying--if the Swede was correctly reading her lips--"Not here, not here..." Why not shuck the corn here? The kitchen was as good a place as any. No, it took a moment to figure out that, one, they were not merely shucking corn together and two, not all of the effervescence, flamboyance, boldness, defiance, disappointment, and despair nibbling at the edges of the old-line durability was necessarily sated by wearing those shirts.
So this was why she was always losing her patience with Orcutt--to put me off track! Making cracks about his bloodlessness, his breeding, his empty warmth, putting him down like that whenever we are about to get into bed. Sure, she talks that way--she has to, she's in love with him. The unfaithfulness to the house was never unfaithfulness to the house--it was unfaithfulness. 'The poor wife doesn't drink for no reason. Always holding everything back. So busy being so polite,' Dawn said, 'so Princeton,' Dawn said, ' so unerring. He works so hard to be one-dimensional. That Wasp blandness. Living completely off what they once were. The man is simply not there half the time.'
Well, Orcutt was there now, right there. What the Swede believed he'd seen, before quickly turning back to the terrace and the steak on the fire, was Orcutt putting himself exactly where he intended to be, while telling Dawn exactly where he was. 'There! There! There! There!' And he did not appear to be holding anything back." (335-336)

And the book does end on a somewhat shocking note. On the whole, something I will definitely read again, and a very tough one for Roth to top. But I look forward to trying to find something I like even better in his oeuvre, because it's possible that exists.

The Professor of Desire - Philip Roth

The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth was published in 1977, when Roth was 44. Now 75, Roth is arguably the most celebrated living novelist in America (excepting J.D. Salinger, who published his last book around the time Roth was publishing his first, and who has remained one of the greatest literary mysteries of all time). Last year Exit Ghost won many favorable reviews, and the year before last Everyman proved that he could write as effectively about aging as anyone before him. He has won very many awards which are listed in the flaps of any of his books. He is extremely prolific. He is the last "youngest" great. But, as a professor of mine once stated, "Even Homer nods," and likewise, even Roth can be deemed "average" when it seems like he's doing his best not to repeat himself.

The novel (like several others apparently) features David Kepesh, who has not been turned into a breast, but who does dream of meeting the whore that Kafka used to visit, introduced to her by his childhood hero and muse invoked to open the novel, Herbie Bratasky, a young entertainer who works at the hotel David's parents own and maintain. David goes to school at Syracuse for undergrad, goes abroad to London and meets two girls/whores who have a threesome with him and then leave him always feeling as if adventure seeped out of his sexual life thereafter, then goes to Stanford for graduate study, and meets Helen. Helen is beautiful, but crazy, and still loves a man who once took her to Hong Kong and asked if she would be an accomplice in his wife's murder, so that they could be together without any troubles. Helen often wishes she went along with him, later, and starts doing lots of cocaine, and does annoying things that make David want to divorce her, and finally they do, and then he is alone in New York, subletting from an actor, seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. Klinger, somehow corresponding with the Schonbrunns, fellow professor and wife at Stanford, and eventually meeting Claire, somewhat more simple than Helen, but much more sane, and much better for David, and eventually everything ends rather happily.

There are good moments in this book. The beginning is pretty good, the middle is pretty good, but once all the action shifts to David flying to Hong Kong to find Helen and then divorce afterwards, it begins to seem more tepid. However, David's first-person-narration never really cuts himself any slack, and he constantly doubts whether or not he will be able to love Claire forever without wanting something more, and towards the end, these are the most eye-opening segments, whereas in the beginning the novel discusses nearly every sexual whim one could expect to come across in a textbook. That is the problem of the book for me. The beginning is very dirty and the ending is very nice. It goes from XXX to PG in 250 pages. It is an inconsistent tone, but I suppose, David is also growing up, is he not? And with maturity comes family, and with family comes family films, the second half of which, Professor of Desire could pass itself off as.

As previously mentioned in the Doctor Faustus post, oeuvre is an important consideration in reviews. I have only read "Goodbye, Columbus," Portnoy's Complaint, and Everyman. Where does POD rank? At the bottom of those, unfortunately! But it is still a very good book. A light read, a vaguely guilty pleasure, but meritorious nonetheless. I believe, at heart, POD is an attempt at classifying desire which cannot be realistically aligned with a long life of monogamy and temperance. For attempting to intimate the myriad complexities of the allure of crazy sex, POD earns an above-average review. Certain moments in the novel (between two and four, perhaps) approach a fragile sort of poetry which occassionally made me think it was about to kick into high gear. As previously stated though, this novel starts high and ends low, though not without its charms. Even the PG ending is rather charming. David's father is probably the most ebullient character in the novel, but it is his poverty of education that mirrors the suffocated structure of the novel, not the offbeat humor or old fashioned common sense.

Where Portnoy's Complaint may be no-holds-barred, Professor of Desire attempts a sweeter veneer, and ends sounding just a tiny bit fake (but, importantly, true to life) . "Goodbye, Columbus" is probably a more entertaining PG read and Everyman certainly contains more life lessons than Kepesh Sr. can hope to elucidate for all these crazy young people, such as the ones who turn his hotel into a ski lodge after he retires. All things considered, POD is a quality book, but little more than that. It is light, it might make you laugh, and it might be fun for you to compare the crazy things that have happened in your past relationships with Kepesh's odd experiences. And of course, any novel that has a character cry because she wants more than anything to be penetrated from behind can't be all bad.