PARTISAN REVIEW
467
BALL FIVE
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.
By
Philip Roth. Holt, Rinehart
&
Winston. $8.95.
All the environing elements of Philip Roth's new novel- the
title itself, the red, white, and blue dust jacket, the comments he has
made (when asked by a
Sports Illustrated
reporter why he had chosen
baseball as a subject, he replied, "Because whaling's been done") -
speak of a complex ambition, half-satiric and half-celebratory, even ele–
giac.
It
is an ambition rooted in a familiarity with the more inflated
aspects of American literary ambition itself, and in a shrewd awareness
(which in Roth's work can be a source of power, as well as of commer–
cial viability) of the ways in which myth and fact, romance and reality
tend to mingle in American consciousness.
From the first words of the prologue, "Call me Smitty," one is
aware of Roth's strategy, which is to place his book in a direct line of
"great American novels" after having disarmed them through mockery.
His Ishmael is one Word Smith (the first of many such locutions, of
which the most outrageous may be Gil Gamesh, a sensational rookie
pitcher of Babylonian origins, although a first baseman named John
"Base" Baal has a pretty good claim, too). Smith is an eighty-seven-year–
old sportswriter who has a hitherto suppressed story to tell, that of the
existence, death, and obliteration from memory of America's "other"
major league, the Patriot League, which flourished until 1946.
But before he can begin the account, he (and Roth) has to con–
front his predecessors in the business of national myth-making. The pro–
logue contains a long sequence in which Smith and a rather grossly
caricatured Ernest Hemingway debate the question of who's king of the
hill, and another in which "Nat" Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain
all have their great novels only half-humorously reduced to simplicities
small enough for the ambitious Smith (or Roth) to proceed to over–
shadow them.
To overshadow them, that is to say, not as fictional works of art
(Roth hasn't yet confused himself with Mailer), but in the flamboyance
of their use as part of the American impulse toward hierarchies, size,
superlatives, and "winners." The book has a motto from Frank Norris's
The Responsibilities of the Novelist:
" ...
the Great American Novel
is not extinct like the Dodo, but mythical like the Hippogriff." The very
canny perception here is that to wish to write the G.A.N. is to pursue
a figment, that the very concept is an invention in the order of extra–
literary appetite and aspiration. And so Roth sets out to make this con-
