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PARTISAN REVIEW
For a long time the American take on this trajectory between past
and present, this modern pilgrim's progress, was captured in the hope–
ful (albeit slightly uncomfortable) metaphor of "the melting pot." Peo–
ple from all over came to the United States and were dissolved and
reconstituted into a new whole. Where once identity was almost alto–
gether determined by place of birth, caste, class, religion, race-now it
would be determined by the activity of the self (and if you were born in
the States, a kind of analogous internal emigration and immigration was
assumed). Although this was a supremely secular and thoroughly social
matter, it was also, as emphatically, an existential one. Where once you
were promised a soul's due in the afterlife while you were hobbled on
earth with identities which seemed to embrace everything except your
self, now you could at last live a life that joined self and soul. This was
the American adventure.
Milan Kundera has said about Roth that his "nostalgia" for his par–
ents' world-the lost world of the upstanding American-has imparted
to his work "not only an aura of tenderness but an entire novelistic
background." In Roth's recent books this background has become fore–
ground; maybe it always was the foreground, that is, the location for the
main line of exploration in Roth's work, which is the exploration of the
conditions of freedom (not liberation, but freedom) in the American
melting pot.
In a book full of subtle and definitive reproach to the currently dom–
inant view of America as a "multicultural" collection of unhappily con–
tiguous nationalisms, and in a book that also, incidentally, makes
several bows to Faulkner, Roth invents for Silk a wonderfully diverse,
mixed up, miscegenated American lineage: Silk learns from his mother
that his family (and his Jersey black community) are
descendants of the Indian from the large Lenape settlement at
Indian Fields who married a Swede. . .descendants of the two
mulatto brothers brought from the West Indies...of the two Dutch
sisters come from Holland to become their wives...of John Fen–
wick, an English baronet's son...[of Fenwick's daughter], Eliza–
beth Adams, who married a colored man, Gould. . ..
Silk sees even this past as something to be honored, rather than
worshipped-"To hell with that imprisonment!" he says. Instead, Silk
opts "to pass," chooses in other words the path of radical autonomy
that, Roth maintains, is the fabulous fate of the American, especially
