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like ours, whose key documents are all about emancipation. . . . It would be
another matter if you were living in Nazi occupied Europe. The specter of
Nazi occupation, the threat of the Holocaust, haunts numerous characters and
heightens the sense of the doubled America” (qtd in Kaplan 11, ellipses in the
original). A particularly Jewish pursuit of redemption and hope would follow
from remembering. Walter Benjamin contends that remembering is manifest-
ing historical responsibility and that memories become relevant to the present
and hence enable us to see the past in a new light. How does Kaplan relate
remembering to the heroism of Roth’s characters that is expressed in almost
psychotic rebelliousness against moving on? Does wrestling with the self and
with acculturation create an option to remember and usher in a new form of
historical relevance and responsibility? In relation to The Human Stain, Kaplan
specifically writes that Roth develops a bleak vision and according to it our
belonging to the world is disclosed by the stain: “there is no hope for redemp-
tion or reconciliation. Roth thus demonstrates how we are all stained with the
blood of our past and with the immobility of that past” (142).

WORKS CITED
Miller, Jacques-Allain. “On Perversion.” Reading Seminars I and II, Lacan’s Return to Freud. Eds.
Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus. New York: State U of New York, 1996. 306-20.
Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. New York: Vintage International, 1997.

Tel Aviv University Idit Alphandary

Ann Basu. States of Trial—Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America. London:

Bloomsbury, 2015. 200 pp. $110 hardcover / $29.95 paperback.

“I think everybody here is wondering where the limit is,” says Bill Orcutt, the
neighbour of Swede Levov in American Pastoral (365). Orcutt, who is helping
Levov’s wife Dawn redesign the family home and is also sleeping with her,
says this in answer to a helpless plea by the Swede’s father, Lou, about the
proliferation of divorce in American society: “Where will it end? What is the
limit?” (Pastoral 364). Swede, asking himself how much more he can take after
his daughter Merry’s estrangement from the family, her transformation from
lisping little girl to troubled teenager to domestic terrorist to born-again Jain,
must now contend with performative moralizing from the man who, by hav-
ing an affair with his wife, has further broken down the edifice of Levov family
life. Swede might be wondering where the limit is; so might we readers, for
whom experiencing the attritional suffering represented in American Pastoral is
no passive delight either. The five main texts at the heart of Ann Basu’s States

102 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2016

of Trial, of which American Pastoral is one, share this quality of tryingness, of
pushing their protagonists to the limit—sometimes with exhilaration, some-
times in a spirit of mischief, sometimes for a purpose at least cagily political.
For Basu, the personal trials undergone by Roth’s characters in these five works
(Operation Shylock, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human
Stain, and The Plot Against America) resemble the sorrows of earlier Roth
protagonists, but their pains “gain greatly in significance by being figuratively
aligned with tests generated by historical and political processes” (Basu 7).
Basu is not alone in detecting “a decisive turn towards a broad historical
consciousness” (31) in late-period Roth, although, as she admits, she is unusual
in placing that turn in 1993 with the publication of Operation Shylock. Her
justification, which makes good sense, is the importance of a literal trial to that
work, the trial in Jerusalem in the late 1980s of “Ivan the Terrible,” or John
Demjanjuk, who pled not guilty to having been a guard at Treblinka concen-
tration camp. Basu puts the concept of the trial at the center of her reading
of Operation Shylock, which enables us to see the rest of the novel’s events,
in all their freewheeling, maddening implausibility, as trials too. Early in her
introduction, Basu confirms that we are to read the word “trial” in its “three
interwoven but often conflicting senses of testing, suffering and experimenta-
tion” (1); “states,” meanwhile, can refer to a character’s condition, or to the
United States, or, in the case of Operation Shylock, to the warring states of Israel
and Palestine. Basu points out the oddity by which procedural trials are “arenas
in which the compulsion to hear competing narratives wrestles with the urge
to artificially reconcile or to flatten contradictory narratives so as to reach a
‘fitting,’ but artificial, conclusion” (12). For Basu, trials demand the expression
of their antagonists’ opposing realities only, of necessity, to subdue them; but
there is no conclusion, natural or artificial, to the trials that Operation Shylock’s
“Philip Roth” is put through by the doppelgänger he playfully names Moishe
Pipik—only confusing, irritating, frequently frightening contradictions, tor-
tures seemingly without limit.
“How could I be both that and this?” Roth imagines Demjanjuk asking
himself, as he stands trial for crimes he either never committed, or else com-
mitted a lifetime ago (Shylock 63). “How could I be both that and this?” is one
of the animating questions of Operation Shylock, and of Roth’s whole oeuvre,
which brims, as Emily Miller Budick notes, with “neurotics of a highly visible
and juicy sort” (Budick 73) at pains to reconcile their divergent and conflicting
impulses. In Roth’s hands, being “both that and this” is the Jewish-American
condition; it is certainly the condition of his many writer-protagonists, whom
we so often see in the process of fictionalizing themselves even as their narrative
describes the deceptions and self-deceptions of others. As Basu convincingly
suggests, we can also connect the many suffering bodies strewn across Roth’s
work—Zuckerman with his back pain in The Anatomy Lesson and his pros-
tate cancer later in life, Kepesh’s transformation into a giant, blind breast,
Consuela’s breast cancer in The Dying Animal, the hallucinatory breakdown

Book Reviews Philip Roth Studies 103

induced in both the real and the fictional Roth by the sleeping pill Halcion,
Roth’s own dying father, Herman, in Patrimony, right up to the polio victims
in Nemesis—with the suffering of the American body politic, “the strain upon
a national mythology of wholeness and invulnerability” (Basu 165).
One solution attempted by some of Roth’s characters to the problem of
being “both that and this” is the deliberate purgation or stripping-away of
qualities or circumstances that do not accord with the “that” or “this” they are
trying wholly to embody. Here, too, we see Basu’s wisdom in beginning with
Operation Shylock, where the Palestinian George Ziad speaks, not unapprov-
ingly, of the move by American Jews to suburbia as “the pastoralization of the
ghetto [. . .] the pasteurization of the faith” (Shylock 132). According to Basu,
the Levovs’ retreat to the pastoral—their move out to the suburbs of Rimrock,
New Jersey—is none other than an attempted “shirking [of ] their responsibil-
ity as Jews and Americans to remember the inherently exclusionary nature of
American identity” (Basu 63); a different kind of retreat, with a similar aim,
might be Coleman Silk’s escape, in The Human Stain, from his life as a young
black man with few chances, to the role of a white tenured professor at a col-
lege in rural Massachusetts. Both the Swede’s and Coleman’s stories are tragic,
involving losses and casualties that would seem to outweigh their gains, and
both their acts of retreat are profoundly precarious, relying on a misreading
of the very idea of the pastoral as a space “without limits,” “free of trials,”
when it is actually “highly demarcated” and must be “rigorously protected,”
or else collapse (Basu 57, 58, 60). In I Married a Communist, Ira Ringold’s
layers of impersonation—first, his assumption of the stage name Iron Rinn,
then his wildly popular impression of Abraham Lincoln—are another kind of
retreat from reality; even his Communism is a retreat from reality, but so is the
McCarthyism by which he is taken to task. The steadying “limits” helplessly
sought by Lou Levov come to seem like merciless limitations.
Basu’s characterization of Americanness as being a “state of trial” in itself
is persuasive, and she is acute in noticing how often trials, literal or thematic,
feature throughout Roth’s works, with his protagonists frequently cast as
author-defendants, their books “a public deposition” (19). In The Facts, Roth
even characterizes as a “trial (in every sense)” his interrogation by members of
the Yeshiva University in 1962, angry over his ambivalent portrayal of Jewish
characters in Goodbye, Columbus and other stories (Facts 127). The only area
in which States of Trial does not totally convince is its insistence on manhood
as a particularly trying state. Basu says she has deliberately avoided “becom-
ing enmeshed in a debate about misogyny,” preferring to explore “some of
the interesting and perhaps unexpected ways in which female characters
intervene in the trials of the male protagonists” (Basu 11). This is reasonable,
and refreshingly unapologetic, but then the word “manhood” risks being read
either as a universalizing stand-in for selfhood, or as a reference to Roth’s
express exclusion of female experience, neither of which seems ideal. Perhaps
the clue is in “post-war”: as Basu points out, all these narratives “fold back” to

104 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2016

the 1940s and their repercussions (8); and as I would point out, they are all
caught in a solipsism by which male and female characters are equally, though
differently, objectified, simplified, and otherwise sidelined in relation to the
protagonist’s personal survival. In any case, Basu’s boldness in foregrounding
this controversial aspect of Roth’s novels is of a piece with her ambitious, origi-
nal approach to his work altogether; her thought-provoking research reminds
us that there is still more to say.

WORKS CITED
Budick, Emily Miller. “Roth and Israel.” The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Ed. Timothy
Parrish. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 68–81.
Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. 1997. London: Vintage, 1998.
---. The Facts. 1988. London: Vintage, 2007.
---. I Married a Communist. 1998. London: Vintage, 2005.
---. Operation Shylock. 1993. London: Vintage, 2000.

University College London Roberta Klimt

Book Reviews Philip Roth Studies 105