BOOKS
651
in the modern era.
This
is the hand we've been dealt, and anything else
is an evasion and a lie-
As though the battle that is each person's singular battle could
somehow be abjured, as though voluntarily one could pick up and
leave off being one's self, the characteristic, immutable self in
whose behalf the battle is undertaken in the first place.
This "singular battle" is, as I read it, what Roth's fiction has been
"about" from the beginning. Not that this singular battle isn't muddled
and often made more dangerous by one's own hang-ups, which are
fairly likely to include ethnicity, family, the works, and about which
Roth has written with humor and fire and really like no one else. And
not that this singular battle can be waged in exile from the hangups of
the people around you, to which Roth has also paid a lot of attention.
But the essential step to maturity, Roth seems to say right from the start,
lies in accepting the radical autonomy that, in modern America,
is
the
way we live, and that anyway is ultimately and inescapably the ground
we stand on in the existential "battle" of being. In
The Human Stain,
through Coleman and Faunia's relationship, Roth delicately, I am
tempted to say sweetly shows the purpose of the battle, if I can put it
this way, to be the affirmation or better the realization of being, of being
pure and simple, the humanist's "goal" for the examined life. And if
that seems paradoxically unintellectual, it's no more paradoxical than,
as Montaigne says, that you need a good deal of knowledge and in par–
ticular self-knowledge to understand that you don't know anything.
The last third of the novel occupies itself less with Coleman and Fau–
nia than with the imagination-this is, after all, a Zuckerman novel. I
want, in closing, to say two things about Zuckerman's imagining. First,
that it is rendered, sentence by sentence, in an absolutely beautiful
American prose-vulgar and sacred, utterly colloquial (no one has a bet–
ter ear for talk than Roth) and gracefully intellectual, mundane and elo–
quent, slapstick and high-toned, ethnic and "standard," street-smart and
book-wise. A prose of great verve, intelligence, and suppleness, it's pre–
cisely the melting pot become writing-which, in Roth's hands anyway,
is just a great pleasure to read. The second point I want to make has to
do with "what happens," in Zuckerman's words, "when you write
books," with Zuckerman as author. "There's not just something that dri–
ves you to find out everything," Zuckerman says, but "something begins
putting everything in your path. There is suddenly no such thing as a
back road that doesn't lead headlong into your obsession."
