41>8
RICHARD GILMAN
cept an underlying subject of his book.
The Great American Novel
is
satirically "about" what the G.A.N. ought to be about and ought to look
like.
It
ought, for one thing, to have a large subject, amenable to myth–
making on its own; hence baseball, for whaling's been taken.
The story Smith tells is a complica ted, grotesque fable of our erst–
while national pastime and its service as a repository of national self–
consciousness and self-congratulation and a source of metaphors for the
"true" business of life. As old as the real major leagues (Roth makes
references to the World Series somehow being played among all three
pennant-winners), the Patriot League was composed of teams with
such names as the Tri-City Tycoons, the Terra Incognita Rustlers, the
Asylum Keepers, and the Ruppert Mundys (an appellation doubtless
derived from the Ruppert Stadium of Roth's boyhood in New J ersey).
This last team is at the center of the book, for it is the commandeering
of its stadium for an embarkation camp by the U .S. government early
in World War II that sets in motion a narrative whose major strand
concerns the infiltration of the league by Russian agents, their exposure,
and the subsequent dismantling of the league and even the renaming of
the cities so monstrously tainted by anti-Americanism in the most Ameri–
can of all human activities.
It
has to be said right off that this story is farfetched, and not in
the triumphant literary way that reaches across impossible distances to
bring back something imaginatively useful and right. No, it's farfetched
like any fantasy that doesn't spring from deeply felt experience. More
than that, its crude absurdity is a measure of Roth's inability to find a
dramatic equivalent, a plot, for the authentic feelings he has had about
baseball, feelings that he evidently wishes in this book to celebrate at the
same time as he thrusts satirically against the seamier side of the whole
enterprise of baseball as national myth: its perversion by greed, jingoism,
bromidic morality.
But there is a more purely literary, or methodological, difficulty. A
tale such as this, if it is to be the creation of a usable myth, or of a myth
about myth-making, has to unfold within a counterworld, a mock uni–
verse in which what exists and takes place has all the plausibility, the
specificity and detailed inevitability, of actual history, but with a grand
indifference to history, which is, after all,
only
factual. In this respect
The Great American Novel
more closely resembles such recent sham
epics as John Barth's
Giles Goatboy
or Nabokov's
Ada
than it does a
more or less straightforward baseball novel like Mark Harris's
The South–
paw
or Bernard Malamud's
The Natural.
Yet Roth, unlike Barth or Nabokov, isn't content (or strong enough)
