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PHILIP ROTH
acters - Gabe Wallach, Alexander Portnoy, and David Kepesh - as
three stages of a single explosive projectile that is fired into the barrier
that forms one boundary of the individual's identity and experience:
that barrier of personal inhibition, ethical restraint, and plain old con–
formism and fear, beyond which lies the moral and psychological un–
known. Gabe Wallach crashes up against the wall and collapses;
Portnoy proceeds on through the fractured mortar, only to become
lodged there, half in, half out; it remains for Kepesh to pass right
on through the bloodied hole, and out the other end, into no-man's–
land.
To sum up: the comic "recklessness" that I've identified with
myoid mentor, Jake the Snake, the indecent candy store owner, ap–
parently could not develop to its utmost, until the
subject
of restraints
and taboos had been dramatized in a series of increasingly pointed
fictions that revealed the possible consequences of banging your head
against your own wall.
Did it help the anarchic spirit along any to be writing about
baseball, a morally ((neutral
JJ
subject, rather than about Jews, say, or
sexual relations?
Maybe; though before beginning this novel, I wrote a long story
entitled "On the Air," in which a small-time Jewish theatrical agent
is put through a series of grotesque adventures, some violently sexual,
that were as extreme in their comedy as anything imagined in
The
Great American Novel.
But it was only a story, and perhaps I couldn't
carry it further because the dreadful comic fantasies of persecution and
humiliation depicted there were, to my mind, decidedly "Jewish."
Though it just could be that the story wasn't cut out to be any more
than it was.
I think one reason I have finally written a novel about baseball
is because
it
happens to be one of the few subjects that I know much
about.
If
I knew as much about forestry, music, ironmongering, or
the city of Rotterdam, I am sure I would have written novels
grounded
in
that knowledge long ago. I have not gotten around
sooner to a subject as close to me as this one because I had thought
that it could not be made to yield very much, the old bugaboo once
again of "seriousness," or profundity. Over the last fifty years some
very gifted writers had gotten quite a yield, of course - Ring Lardner,
Mark Harris, and Bernard Malamud particularly - but despite my
admiration for their ingenuity (and the pleasure I took in baseball
