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MARK SHECHNER
his nagging habit of "scoring points" instead of striving for imagina–
tive plentitude, of his failure to render a "full and precise" portrait of
his Jewish victims, and of his essential joylessness. This failure, Howe
observes, is a failure of culture. Roth's stories and novels fall short of
something like Tolstoyan amplitude because "they come out of a thin
personal culture." Roth, we are told, has uprooted himself from "the
mainstream of American culture, in its great sweep of democratic
idealism and romanticism." (How foreign such phrases sound in the
Republican pages of
Commentary
these days.) Howe is not wholly
wrong. Roth's anger is a crucial property of his art and his books bring
laughter without bringing cheer. His failure of magnanimity is con–
siderable and his ample wit sports a chilling, mechanical edge. And a
book like
The Great American Novel,
which draws its humor from an
assemblage of freaks, cripples, dwarfs, stage Jews, and stagier
goyim,
will not improve his reputation for compassion. Nor will the book's
loose collection of bits and routines earn him any points toward what
Howe has called with Arnoldian sobriety, "compositional rigor and
moral seriousness." But for all that, Howe's lecture on Roth's cultural
impoverishment is arch and gratuitous. And certainly, if it was in–
tended as salutory advice, it is self-defeating, for telling a Jew that he
lacks culture is no way to get him to pay attention.
Roth 's image of himself as perennial Jewish son .would seem to be
at the core of his identity.
It
certainly has everything to do with his
attachment
to
Kafka, another Jewish son with a painful and debilitat–
ing relationship to fatherhood (see" 'I Always Wanted You to Admire
My Fasting'; or, Looking at Kafka,"
American Review).
"Marrying is
barred
to
me," confesses this Kafka to his father, "because it is your
domain." But the sons we discover in Roth's fiction differ from Kafka's
in this crucial respect: it is not the father's power that condemns them
to impotence and bachelorhood; it is his weakness. The secret of the
terror behind Roth 's fiction is the realization that the father is im–
potent.
In
fact, Roth himself may be braced and encouraged by the op–
position of the Rabbis, for the father's enmity is preferable to his ado–
ration. "Others," he confesses in his Kafka essay, "are crushed by
paternal criticism-I find myself oppressed by his high opinion of
me!" There is no escape from the ineffectual father, for the son's oedi–
pal guilt is renewed daily by the father's failures. "Make my father a
father," cries Lucy Nelson
(When She Was Good),
and she, a daughter,
broadcasts this appeal on behalf of all the Roth sons, before and after.
