BOOKS
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altogether different light, in fact that Silk has more than one secret. In
fact, each of the novel's characters harbors a secret, some more or less
banal, but some of the kind that go to the very heart of identity.
A digression: The jacket of my copy of Roth's second book,
Letting
Go,
carries on the back a picture of him that, when I first saw it (in
1962!), produced in me a happy but also envious wave of emotion. A
meticulously trim and neat-and ridiculously young-Roth is sitting in
a rocker facing the camera. He has on a short-sleeve shirt open at the
neck, chinos, and what used
to
be called, before the age of Nike, tennis
shoes. On a low table beside him is what seems to be a board game, the
name of which you can make out to be Gettysburg.
So what's to be so emotional about? That the guy-this Jewish boy
from Jersey-could be so palpably, photogenically American, so at ease
in that New Englandy rocker, so relaxed about claiming the culture
(Gettysburg) for himself, so on top of
goyishe
informality, and yet-as
the sneakers seemed to say in particular-so much, so simply, so
autonomously, so
already
himself! That the guy seemed-to me, an
immigrant survivor of the Holocaust with a new Americanized family
name-to have beautifully, easefully overcome all the thorns and messes
of having to pass. The autonomy was a heady thing to smile about; the
sense of feeling at home a thing to envy.
Coleman Silk's big secret-kept from his wife of forty years, from his
children, from everyone-is that he's black, that he's passed as a white
man from the day he signed up for the Navy in the Second World War.
He has another secret too-that, two years after the scandalous close of
his career and two years after the death of his wife, he's having an affair
with an illiterate thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman, called Faunia
Farley, who works at the college. He has received an anonymous, omi–
nous letter saying that "Everyone knows" of his affair, a letter that, as
we discover, has been sent in tortured secrecy by the young new chair of
Silk's department, Delphine Roux, herself secretly....
And so it goes. Some of these secrets are of a wholly different order
than others, but in all they bring to mind the importance of big secrets
to
the modern novel-Rochester's Bertha, Pip's Magwitch, Gatsby's
money-there's a very long list, including of course a great many
famous illicit affairs in addition to Madame Bovary's. These secrets
seem inescapable parts of modern life, inescapable for all of "us" who
for whatever reason have been cut loose from our origins and set out to
wend our ways towards identity under circumstances of dizzying, bewil–
dering, irresistibly tempting, and often damned scary possibility.
