BOOKS
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general run of humanity, observes with astonishment "how people seemed
to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made
them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of peo–
ple they would have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich
and full they were secredy sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of
their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to
that other self, the
true
self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup." Zuckerman
has not disappeared from the novel. He has conferred upon Swede his own
superior writer's understanding. This is a cheerless permutation on the ludic
conception of self in The
Counterlife
in which Zuckerman declares that there
is no self, except perhaps in the impulse to impersonate. "If there even is a
natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may have been
the root of all impersonation, the innate capacity to impersonate." The self
in The
Counterlife
becomes a "troupe of players...a permanent company of
actors that I can call upon when a self is required."
The "true self" in Roth's latest novel is in the dissolution of the illuso–
ry fullness of our beings. Swede may be an exception (an "abnormality, a
stranger from real life
because
of his being so sturdily rooted"), but even the
strongest oak cannot withstand a high intensity hurricane. In a splendid pas–
sage, Swede explains the glove-making process to a messenger from his
fugitive daughter. (Roth's description of glove making is a virtuoso perfor–
mance.) In the course of the explanation, he becomes suddenly possessed by
the enormity of what has befallen him and the glove making turns into an
incantation of grief with echoes of the book ofJob.
This is called a polishing machine and this is called a stretcher and you
are called honey and I am called Daddy and this is called morning and
this is called hell, pure hell, and you have to have strong ties to be able
to stick it out, this is called trying-to-go-as-though-nothing-has-hap–
pened and this is called paying-the-full-price but-in-God's
name-for-what, this is called wanting-to-be-dead-and-wanting-to–
find-her-and-to-kill-her-and-to-save-her-from-whatever-she-is-going
-through-wherever-on-earth-she-may-be-at-this-moment, this unbri–
dled out-pouring is called blotting-out-everything
and it does not work,
I am half insane, the shattering force
oj
that bomb is too great.
In contemporary America, there are false comforters, but no Voice Out
of the Whirlwind to match Swede's Job-like eloquence. Nor are the losses
restored. Roth's sympathy is with Swede (the rooted oak), but his imagina–
tive fascination is where it has always been: the spectacle (pathetic and comic)
of our disintegration.
EUGENE GOODHEART
