SANFORD PINSKER
63
the device allow Roth to introduce a series of fictional counterweights
(e.g., Milton Appel) to play against, and qualify, Zuckerman's certainties,
but it also makes for the dazzling postmodernist permutations of
The
Counter-Life
(1986), a novel in which certain characters die in one chap–
ter only to be reborn in the next. Indeed, for a very long time in his long
career, one could characterize his work as playfully serious-that is,
playful when it was most serious, and serious when it was most playful.
What changed much of this was Roth's decision to turn Nathan
Zuckerman from a study in self-absorption to someone increasingly
involved in other people's stories. The result is a narrator who resembles
the Marlow of Conrad's
Lord Jim
(1900) as he pieces together a story
of a young man on the docket of justice, facing disgrace. Zuckerman
does the same detective work on behalf of the unfairly pilloried Cole–
man Silk, just as Zuckerman had earlier listened as the stories of Iron
Rinn and Swede Levov unfolded. The point is that Zuckerman seems
much more interesting when he is
not
(ostensibly) at the center of the
saga, partly because we have, quite frankly, grown tired of Nathan
Zuckerman, but also because, by taking on larger, more distinctly Amer–
ican themes, Zuckerman (and, yes, Roth) can give excess whole new
dimensions, and an even more sophisticated sense of art.
What, some readers must be muttering, does all this have to do with
Charlie ("Yardbird") Parker? Perhaps the following disclaimer will help.
I am not out to demonstrate, for example, that Philip Roth listens to
Charlie Parker records as he sits at his writing desk, or that Roth is
interested in the "musicalization of fiction" in the ways that Aldous
Huxley used the term in
Point Counter Point
(1928). In short, Roth
does not number himself with Jack Kerouac, a writer who thought that
On the Road
(1957) was filled with the rhythms of be-bop because he,
in fact, tended to have Charlie Parker records on his turntable. Nor is
Roth out to out-do what James Joyce did so marvelously in the "Circe"
section of
Ulysses
(1922) . There, one can reasonably talk about the
"musicalization of fiction" as an accomplished fact as opposed to a
piece of literary theory and/or wishfulness, as it is in Huxley'S novel.
Excess can operate-independently-across two very different artistic
venues. Parker and his extraordinary musicianship are given only a fleet–
ing mention in the Roth canon, and that in
The Dying Animal
(2001).
There, protagonist David Kepesh thinks about the co-eds he seduced
during the countercultural 1960s and mentions such pop icons as Janis
Joplin ("their Bessie Smith in whiteface") and Jimi Hendrix, their
"Charlie Parker of the guitar." Like Coleman Silk, Kepesh's own pref-
