BOOKS
Not even Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah have been able to stamp out the
fun you can have with a Polaroid. Gloria Steinem herself can't do it.
In the contest between Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, and Gloria on the one
side and on the other the innermost itch that gives life its tingle, I'll
give you the three boys and Gloria and eighteen points.
707
Rushdie limited himself to Allah. What is Roth up to? Can he
count on the FBI to protect him from the anger ofJews, Christians,
and
Muslims?
Yes, the book is outrageous. It is so explosive that if there were still
a serious reading public to be rocked, there would be an uproar over
what Roth has wrought. Instead we have a letter of mild protest in the
New Yorker
reminding us of the legal definition of obscenity. And no
doubt there will be a bitchy review in one of the "literary" papers by a
militant defender of the feminist faith. After that the morally righteous
will have to go back to the newspapers for their daily outrage-fix.
It is too bad that the feeling and intelligent audience (if such there
be), for whom Roth has written this most serious comic novel, will be
so put off by his first chapter that they may read no more. I can't
promise that with reading the subject matter will become less sticky
(okay - let's call a spade a spade - pornographic); it will not. In fact,
Roth continues to the very end to up the ante (on the principle of
something for everyone). So if you manage to get through the first few
chapters without being unendurably offended, you will certainly find
something to gross you out before you have finished. This is done
designedly by the author. For he has given us a protagonist on the rocks,
a man headed for full collapse. Mickey Sabbath will tell you so himself:
Wifeless, rnistressless, penniless, vocationless, homeless ... and now,
to top things off, on the run. If he weren't too old to go back to sea,
if his fingers weren't crippled, if Morty [the brother] had lived and
Nikki [the first wife] hadn't been insane, or he hadn't been - if there
weren't war, lunacy, perversity, sickness, imbecility, suicide, and death,
chances were he'd be in a lot better shape. He'd paid the full price for
art, only he hadn't made any. He'd suffered all the old-fashioned
artistic sufferings - isolation, poverty, despair, mental and physical
obstruction - and nobody knew or cared. And though nobody
knowing or caring was another form of artistic suffering, in his case it
had no artistic meaning. He was just someone who had grown ugly,
old, and embittered, one of billions.
