How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (23 page)

Dynamics of power, punishment, and pain between a younger and an older man have recurred in Peck's work from the beginning:
Martin and John
contains two arresting descriptions of S&M sex, one of which ends with the younger man begging the older to penetrate him with a shotgun. It is difficult not to see, as the origins of this fascination, the extreme Oedipal tensions at play in the passage from
The Law of Enclosures
, too: the obsession with power (Peck's as well as his father's), the son's fantasy of being able to punish or save, the constant threat of physical violence both by and against the father (“fists” occurs twice).

All this is worth noting only because of its implications for Peck's criticism. It's hard not to feel, in his book reviews, a ferocious kind of acting-out going on. The “hammer and nails” Peck mentions in the passage above seem intended not so much for constructing something—the way you're tempted at first to read this passage—as for crucifying someone; and indeed, you sense that what Peck the critic really wants to do when he picks up a book to review isn't so much to judge the writer as to
nail
the guy. (In this context, it is surely interesting that the writer he singles out for unambiguous praise, meant to serve as a kind of capstone to the collection, is a woman, Rebecca Brown, who wrote a memoir of her mother's death.)

There's no denying that all that hammering yields a lot of pleasure for Peck's readers; but it's not the road to serious critical work—if, of
course, that's what Peck wants. (Two pages into
Hatchet Jobs
, he declares that he “will no longer write negative book reviews”—“I am throwing away my red pen”—a showy gesture which suggests that his foray into criticism wasn't much more than a performance after all.) Even Aristophanes—who was, we should remember, a comedian and not a critic—seems to have been made uneasy by the sadistic aspects of criticism. “I cannot judge them any more,” his Dionysos apologizes when the word-weighing is over. “I must not lose the love of either one of them. / One of them's a great poet. I like the other one.” The lines remind you that loving and liking are as much a part of criticism as are hating and hacking; and that the impulse underlying good criticism ought to be affection for literature rather than animus toward writers. After his novels, after his memoir, and especially after
Hatchet Jobs
, we know pretty well whom Peck has hated, and why. Now it's time to say goodbye. The serious critic, after all, is measured—and judged—as much by what and how he praises as by what and how he blames; and he should be as stimulated by the pleasure he gets from his reading as he is by the pain.

—The New York Review of Books,
July 15, 2004

A
t the beginning of Philip Roth's 1979 novella
The Ghost Writer
, the twenty-three-year-old narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, tremulously approaches the secluded New England home of a famous but reclusive Jewish writer, E. I. Lonoff. Of this Lonoff we are told that he has long ago forsaken his urban, immigrant roots—the cultural soil from which, we are meant to understand, his vaguely Bashevis Singeresque fiction sprang—for “a clapboard farmhouse…at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires.” Long out of circulation, he is considered comical by New York literary people for having “lived all these years ‘in the country'—that is to say, in the
goyish
wilderness of birds and trees where America began and long ago had ended.” Still, young Nathan, an aspiring novelist, admires Lonoff extravagantly, not only because of “the tenacity that had kept him writing his own kind of stories all that time,” but because

A young man's admiration; a young man's perhaps self-congratulatory idealization of a figure who, it is all too clear, he would like one day to be.

If, thirty years ago, readers felt safe in identifying the ingenuous, ambitious, hugely talented Newark-born Nathan Zuckerman with his creator—Zuckerman indeed went on to become the hero of an impressive number of subsequent novels focused on the sexual, artistic, cultural, and moral life of the American Jewish male—anyone familiar with Roth's recent biography will find it difficult not to identify the author today with Lonoff. Like the fictional writer, Roth is a novelist whose work is profoundly rooted in Jewishness (however much Jewishness may be questioned, berated, and rejected in it); like Lonoff, Roth has ended up living “in the country”—not far from the Berkshires, in fact (whither the elderly, ailing Nathan Zuckerman also eventually repairs, in a much later novel); as with Lonoff, the recent biography suggests an aversion, if not to honors and awards (of which Roth has many), then to the whirl of New York literary life, to the ridiculously irrelevant ephemera of being a major figure in the culture. A recent profile of Roth in
The New York Times
, timed to coincide with the publication this month of the short novel
Everyman
, his twenty-seventh book, makes a point of noting that the new book is one of the rare ones in which Roth has permitted an author photograph to appear.

And as with Lonoff, there is a sense of the literary lion become, suddenly, the lion in winter. There is, to my mind, a kind of caesura in the Roth corpus that falls exactly in the middle of the 1990s. The first half of the decade saw the publication of two novels that, between them, embody the major themes of Roth's work. In 1993 Roth published the dazzling
Operation Shylock
, a brilliant parable about the meaning of identities Jewish, artistic, and cultural: in it, the narrator, ostensibly Roth himself, sets out to find and confront a Philip Roth impersonator who is also a prophet of something called “Diasporism,” an ideology promoting the return of Israelis to their European countries of origin. (All this, to raise the stakes even higher, is set against the trial of the concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, charged with being Ivan
the Terrible, “the butcher of Treblinka.”) The connection between eros and art, always a crucial one in Roth's fictional world, was subsequently explored, with equally outré gusto, in
Sabbath's Theater
(1995), whose protagonist is a onetime puppeteer and self-described “dirty old man.” The former book won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the latter, the National Book Award for fiction.

Since then—starting in 1997, when Roth, then in his mid-sixties, published his Pulitzer-winning
American Pastoral
(the first installment of a nostalgic trilogy, largely about the failure of the American Dream, which also included
I Married a Communist
, a look back at the Fifties, and
The Human Stain
, in part a sour indictment of political correctness)—the roiling, libidinous energies and aggressive intellectual dazzle of what could be described as Roth's middle period, the period that culminated in
Operation Shylock
and
Sabbath's Theater
, have yielded more and more to a distinctly elegiac mode. It's not that the books necessarily have any less vivacity, any less imaginative brilliance (the latter amply demonstrated by the publication, in 2004, of his counterhistorical Nazified America fantasy
The Plot Against America
); it's merely that they seem, suddenly, to be written by someone who's closer to the periphery than to the center of things, who's looking back in resignation, or anger, or both. However vivid its depiction of the tumult of Sixties political fervor, the dominant note sounded in
American Pastoral
was one of idealized nostalgia—hardly untypical for this author—for the Depression-era work ethos recalled from his childhood, the ethos that was frayed during the decade the novel depicts. Similarly, in
The Human Stain
there was a tension between grouchy disdain for the novel's present-day fictional setting (politically correct academia, circa 1990) and a golden-toned reverie about the solid values of the past: in this case, the values of an aspiring black railway porter, father to the protagonist, values that have been upended and mocked by the sanctimoniousness of the present.

It occurred to you, as you read these novels and those that followed—particularly
The Dying Animal
(2001), which finds a recurrent Roth hero, the libidinous cultural critic David Kepesh, “nearing death” and, even worse, appalled to realize that the voluptuous Cuban-American student with whom he carries on an obsessive affair is mortal, too—that they were the work of an author facing his seventies. An autumnal frost had set in.

 

Roth himself has been outspoken, of late, about his preoccupation with death. In the
Times
profile he talked at length about the “gigantic shock” of finding himself at an age when his friends are dying, it would seem, en masse (in the book, he indeed describes old age as a “massacre”):

That the subject is one of great urgency to the author just now is made clear by the fact that this heartfelt sentiment closely echoes a passage from
The Dying Animal
:

The repetition is oddly moving—as of someone dazed by a sudden blow, walking around in circles. According to the
Times
profile, the worst of the blows suffered by Roth was the death of his old friend and mentor, Saul Bellow. The author disclosed that it was on the day after Bellow's burial that he sat down to write something that would, more directly than any of its predecessors, confront the specter of death itself—as the new book's title, with its allusion to the medieval morality play about
a visit by Death to a nameless “everyman,” makes clear. “I'd just come from a cemetery,” Roth said, “and that got me going.”

“Got me going” can, of course, mean “started me on my way”; but it can also mean “worked me into a frenzy.” The latter, I suspect, is the more apt here. For although what we know of Roth and how he came to write
Everyman
promises that here is a book in which we will get to witness a great novelist facing, head-on, the great subject, the book itself is surprisingly thin—in every way. This is not to say it lacks intensity: every page of this account of an ordinary man's physical disintegration and eventual death bears witness to a bitter outrage, constantly reiterated in that same dazed way, against the simple but devastating fact that the body, eventually, fails—that, in time, people's “personal biographies…become identical with their medical biographies.” But although the bitterness is a sentiment few would argue with, it is not clear that this powerful emotion has translated here into a powerful work of fiction.

 

Like the late medieval work with which it shares its title,
Everyman
proceeds episodically. In the play, the ordinary mortal, referred to simply as Everyman, is called to account for his life before the seat of Judgment. There he finds that he has been abandoned by Fellowship, Kindred, and Goods in rapid and rather depressing succession; but he is saved, in the end, by the intervention of Good Deeds, Knowledge, Confession, Discretion, and so on. The drama, unsurprisingly, ennobles the abandonment of material goods and ephemeral ties (friends, family) in favor of more abstract, spiritual values.

The ruthless, almost sadistic stripping away of material goods and common pleasures, at any rate, is replicated in Roth's book.
Everyman
self-consciously seeks to rewrite the premodern dramatization of a stark and terrifying confrontation with Death but without the moralizing and Christianizing—which is to say, the comforting and redeeming—elements. “It's told from the Christian perspective, which I don't share,” Roth remarked while explaining how he came to write the book; “it's an allegory, a genre I find unpalatable; it's didactic in tone, which I can't
stand.” Still, like its medieval model, this tale begins with the demise of its hero—in this case, a thrice-divorced retired advertising executive—and thereafter seeks to account for his life in a series of scenes from the dead man's past, episodically presented. But because of its relentless rejection of spiritual abstractions and its compensatory emphasis on the failure of the corporeal self, these vignettes, in Roth's
Everyman
, are in every case connected to either a medical crisis or a funeral. Hence, for instance, a narrative of the hero's early childhood is pinned to a description of a hernia operation he had at the age of nine; the collapse of his second marriage is pegged to his mother's death; and so on.

The structural relationship between everything that happens in the book and scenes of illness, hospital stays, medical procedures, and deaths is meant to underscore a glumly reductive theme: “Up and down the state that day, there'd been five hundred funerals like his…. It's the commonness that's most wrenching, the registering once more of the fact of death that overwhelms everything.” And indeed, to underscore the universality of his subject, the author presents us with an ostensibly common person: his hero, never named, is all too clearly meant to be generic. We're told, for instance, that he always thought he was “square,” that “he never thought of himself as anything more than an average human being.”

It must be said that the pose of ordinariness, crucial to Roth's intentions, is none too persuasive, not least because, try as he might to be ordinary, the hero of this book inevitably starts to sound as interestingly tormented and complex as are the heroes of Roth's other books. This everyman is, like so many of the men you meet in Roth's novels, a talented Jewish boy from the Newark area who enjoyed an idyllic childhood complete with a revered brother and hardworking parents who, themselves the children of immigrants, embody the thrifty American values of the Depression era. As often in Roth's fiction, the father in particular is idealized and heroized; what tenderness there is here—and there isn't much—is, unsurprisingly, reserved for the hero's father, the owner of a jewelry store in Elizabeth called “Everyman's Jewelry Store.”

This protagonist is, also like those others, a man who struggles, on the whole unsuccessfully, to balance a strong libido with the demands of family connections. Particularly vexed are his relationships with his
two sons (one of whom is moved by his emotions, at his father's funeral, to an intense physical reaction almost like regurgitation—a recapitulation of a connection between filial emotion and vomiting that appears as well in
The Dying Animal
). There is the usual collection of females: vaguely nice mothers, somehow never as sharply etched as the fathers; ex-wives who are inept or grasping or inappropriate or, as one is here, appreciated by her wayward husband only after the marriage has ended. And there is, too, an encounter with a tiny, young, frizzy-haired sexpot who ends by humiliating the hero—a female type, and a scene, that we have encountered before in Roth's fiction. (She turns up, memorably, in
American Pastoral
.) The one successful relationship this well-heeled New Jersey Jewish everyman has is with his daughter by the worthy second wife, but there's something sketchy and abstract about the way this relationship is drawn—you feel it's there primarily for the sake of a tenuous allusion to King Lear, a father who also has three children, only one of whom is “good.”

There are, indeed, so many ghostly reincarnations in this book of earlier characters that it occurred to me at one point that the title might have been meant as a kind of inside joke: for just as
Everyman
replays its hero's life, it seems, too, to replay quite self-consciously motifs and characters from Roth's other works, and its pages sometimes seem like a rather hastily assembled waxworks display of Characters from the Novels of Philip Roth.