The Novel A Biography - (45. PARIAHS Franz Kafka Saul Bellow Bernard Malamud Mordecai Richler J... )

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Pariahs
Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Mordecai Richler,
J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Jeffrey Eugenides, Paul Auster, Martin Amis
In Testaments Betrayed the Czech novelist Milan Kundera considers how certain
authors know just how their texts should look on the page: the physical aspect of
the writing is part of its meaning. “You can see the long, intoxicating flight of
[Franz] Kafka’s prose in the text’s typographical appearance, which is often a
single ‘endless’ paragraph, over pages, enfolding even long passages of dialogue.”
The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld described Kafka as a “melodic writer.”
The intended melody is disrupted if the visual aspect is obscured. The two long
paragraphs that make up the second chapter of Kafka’s The Castle are broken
into four in the edition his friend Max Brod prepared, Kundera says; in one
French translation there are ninety, in another ninety-five. “French editions of
Kafka’s novels have been subjected to an articulation that is not their own: para-
graphs much more numerous, and therefore much shorter, which simulate a
more logical, more rational organization of the text and which dramatize it,
sharply separating all the dialogue exchanges.” Editors and translators try to
make the original “comprehensible,” even when that kind of comprehensibility
runs counter to Kafka’s intentions. And not even a footnote signals the change.
“The Pleiade edition of Kafka’s novels contains over five hundred pages of notes.
Yet I find not a single sentence there giving such a reason.”
Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.
The books of stories Kafka saw published in his lifetime he wanted printed
with wide margins in large type, a wish that “was justified, logical, serious, re-
lated to his aesthetic, or, more specifically, to his way of articulating prose.” Any
serious writer or reader will understand: “An author who divides his text into
many short paragraphs will not insist so on large type: a lavishly articulated
page can be read easily”; but “a text that flows out in an endless paragraph is very
much less legible. The eye finds no place to stop or rest, the lines are easily ‘lost
track of.’ ” Kundera writes, “I look through the German paperback edition of The
Castle: on a small page, thirty-nine appallingly cramped lines of an ‘endless para-
graph’: it’s illegible; or it’s legible only as information; or as a document; in any case
not as a text meant for aesthetic perception.” It feeds the modern habit of reading
as consumption. Kundera finds a forty-page appendix including “all the passages
Kafka deleted from his manuscript.” He concludes, “In that indifference to the
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Schmidt, Michael. The Novel : A Biography, Harvard University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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THE NOVEL: A BIOGRAPHY
author’s aesthetic wishes is reflected all the sadness of the posthumous fate of
Kafka’s work.”
Kafka sent the text of Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), written in 1915,
to a magazine edited by the great Austrian novelist Robert Musil, author of The
Man without Qualities. Musil agreed to print it if Kafka would shorten it. Kafka
preferred it to remain unpublished. He knew what he wanted his page to look
like, and he knew why he wanted it to look like that. The act of reading is the
completion of the act of writing, and the size, pace, and forms the eye encoun-
ters are part of the text’s meaning.
Contemporary novelists are generally less scrupulous about visual aspects of
their work. Yet the visual can be crucial in composition and reception. Writers
with a sense of aesthetic wholeness make their own demands on publishers and
readers. Kafka was a short-story writer whose novellas and novels make the
reading demands of the short story, as though a lyric writer composed an epic
and required readers to construe the large work in lyric terms. It is less a matter
of textual density than of a concentrated attention, the process of reading slows,
the book cannot be devoured. The process is built into the aesthetic intention
of the writing. At twenty-one in a letter Kafka prophesied the kind of work he
would create: “We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us
deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being
banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe
for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” The forest is from fairy tale,
banishment is from his love of Russian literature.
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born in Prague into a German-speaking family.
He celebrated his bar mitzvah and reluctantly attended synagogue four times a
year with his father, a Jew more by identity than by faith, though later the Yid-
dish theater exercised a cultural claim on him. His father was severe, vain, and
ready to misunderstand the excessively lean and unconventional boy. At eigh-

teen Martin Amis took the father’s side: “Kafka is a fucking fool.”
Kafka wrote in German though he spoke and read Czech and conducted his
romance with Milena Jesenská in that language, and he acquired French and a
passion for French literature, Flaubert in particular. At university in Prague he
began as a chemist but became a law student, which proved useful to his fic-
tion. He worked for two insurance companies and saw numerous small claims
cases, and then in management of an asbestos factory. For five years, from 1912,
when he contracted tuberculosis, he had a relationship and correspondence
with Felice Bauer, his equivalent (though not in sensual terms) to Flaubert’s
Louise Colet. Elias Canetti suggests that “in the course of seven months he got
used to this correspondence, and one has the feeling he didn’t particularly want
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PA R I A H S
to see her.” His intense romance with Dora Diamant was different in kind. It
thrived on presence and took him to Berlin, where they were lovers. But illness
took him back to Prague, then to a sanatorium near Vienna. His throat was so
painful that in the end he died of starvation. He left his few published and all
his unpublished works to his friend Max Brod—according to Brod himself—to
destroy. Brod disregarded his instructions, hence the survival of the writer.
(Some twenty notebooks remained in Dora Diamant’s possession, but in 1933
they were confiscated from her apartment by the Nazis and disappeared.)
Kafka was a scrupulous editor of the work he saw into print. But publication
of the three novels was posthumous: Der Prozess (The Trial) appeared in 1925,
followed by Das Schloss (The Castle) in 1926 and Amerika or Der Verschollene
(1927). The books have been translated and retranslated, each version different
because Kafka never produced a defi nitive text for any of them, and a kind of
indefi nition at once constrains and licenses the German editor and the trans-
lator. It is as though Kafka had provided templates; translators make choices
and confi ne the sense to their understanding.
In his copy of Edwin and Willa Muir’s translation of the novella The Metamor-
phosis, or more accurately The Transformation, Nabokov impatiently retranslated
much of the work between the lines. Gregor wakes up transmorphed into
“einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer.” This is rendered variously as “a gigantic insect,”
“an enormous bug,” and “a monstrous vermin.” Whatever term we choose, here
and elsewhere in Kafka metaphor is entertained as fact; metaphor, the “incom-
mensurable” itself, “irrupts” into the real world and is accommodated by its logic.
The language is matter-of-fact, flat, which makes it believable. In his lecture notes
Nabokov the entomologist draws the transformed Gregor Samsa from the details
Kafka provides: the creature combines so many elements, and is so large in scale,
as to be fantastic, yet he is planted in the midst of a drab, daily world. Kafka elicits
from each reader a different metamorphosis, based on our deepest aversions.

There are hundreds of “interpretations” of The Metamorphosis. Readers tire of
theoretical approaches. Biography can “explain” the relations in the story between
father, mother, sister, and the transformed son. But Gustav Janouch reports him
saying, “Samsa is not merely Kafka and nothing else. Metamorphosis is not a con-
fession, although it is—in a certain sense—an indiscretion.” He warns us off and
draws us in. Indiscretion as against confession: we may find the contrasted pair-
ing useful in reading not only Kafka but those who have learned from him, even
those who least seem to resemble him. He says of Strindberg: “We are his con-
temporaries and successors; one has only to close one’s eyes and one’s own blood
delivers lectures on Strindberg.” One might say that of Kafka himself and note
the importance of drama to Kafka’s work: economy, precision, succinct setting,
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disregard of inessential context, speech. In reading Herzen’s memoirs Kafka

says, “the whole of the unconscious man emerges, purposeful, self-tormenting,
having himself fi rmly in hand and then going to pieces again.”
The Italian fiction writer Primo Levi is an heir to Kafka. The Holocaust
changed and confirmed Kafka’s vision. “With The Trial,” Levi said, “Kafka pre-
dicted the time when it was a crime simply to be a Jew. I was in fact commis-
sioned by Einaudi to translate the book into Italian. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t:
the undertaking disturbed me badly. I went into a deep, deep depression . . . And
so I haven’t read any Kafka since: he involves me too much.” The life with its
three broken engagements, the tedium of what his father called “bread jobs,” the
asphyxiating relationship with his family, his insomnia, his tuberculosis: he was a
catalog of insoluble problems, and as against his father’s vanity he suffered a
chronic self-disgust. He dies, as K. dies in The Trial, painfully, pointlessly. All this
intolerable circumstance makes for the clean thrift of his style, the toneless report
on incomprehensible experience. Flaubert mattered so to him because of his
single-mindedness, his ambition to write with and of as little as he humanly
could. “There is infinite hope,” he said elsewhere, “but not for us.”
Whitman was for Kafka a supreme formal innovator, an elixir he could not
quite take. Kafka’s Amerika, with San Francisco on the East Coast and a bridge
joining Boston and New York, was an illusory solace, a contrary illusion to the
nightmare of The Castle. Canetti describes the difference Kafka makes, his “al-
most Chinese way of reacting to the world as a whole. I don’t believe it’s the
usual European way, which we know from the course of European philosophy,
of seeing a separate, ruling, divine, transcendent power behind everything.”
For him, “things are still one. He doesn’t separate concepts from concrete or
sensuous details.” He kept his distance from the -isms of the day, expressionism
(which might have been a natural destination) above all. “Though when he was
not writing Kafka felt that the only salvation for him was to write,” says Gabriel
Josipovici, “once he was writing he felt that what he was doing was meaning-
less, without relation to the world or the truth, worse even than meaningless,
the perpetuation of a downright lie. His writing is the description of the failure
of writing; were his writing to succeed, he would have failed; failing, he per-
haps succeeded.” It is a philosophically sterile, creatively fruitful paradox.
R
Those North American novelists who intend to throw off Europe never alto-
gether manage it. They hold onto a thread or two, not Anatole France but
Proust, not Thomas Mann but Kaf ka and the haunting, vanished culture of
Mitteleuropa, its extinguished multilingual multiculturalism. Americans who
respond most readily to Kafka are, like him, secular Jews or half-Jews, acciden-
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PA R I A H S
tal heirs to the Old Testament, to the eastern heart of Europe that produced so
much, including the Holocaust. They are singled out by history and race, and
then by choice. Some want to find a way back, but the highway is blocked by
rubble and the desuetude of spent traditions. Saul Bellow notes, ruefully, Kafka’s
dislike of Balzac: too many characters, when what really interests him are sym-
bols. And this is Bellow’s own legacy from Kafka. The Philip Roth who wrote in
The Counterlife (1986), “I’ve got Jew on the Brain. Jews are my Tahiti, my Giverny,
my Dada, my String Theory, my Lost Horizon,” is equally Kafka’s heir.
After the Second World War, Middle Europe survives in Canada and the United
States, in the immigration and its first and second generations of offspring—in
Saul (born Solomon) Bellow (1915–2005), for example. It provides a living, alter-
native, polyglot modernism to the cultural hunger Pound and Eliot fed with a
deliberated amalgam constructed out of safely dead cultures. In Paris, Bellow,
who was impatient with modernism, called on the last of the great modernists,
Samuel Beckett. The meeting was brief and uneventful.
Speaking at the 1986 memorial ser vice for the novelist and storywriter Ber-
nard Malamud (1914–1986), Bellow said, “We were cats of the same breed. The
sons of Eastern European immigrant Jews, we had gone early into the streets of
our respective cities,” Malamud’s being Brooklyn, Bellow’s not the Lachine of
his birth but the Chicago of his formative years; both “were Americanized by
schools, newspapers, subways, streetcars, sandlots. Melting Pot children, we had
assumed the American program to be the real thing: no barriers to the freest
and fullest American choices.” They found or made their own barriers in due
course. They came to terms with other thing they were, Jews, displaced Europe-
ans, tangential to the intellectual establishment and yet, or therefore, necessary
interpreters. Malamud at times, as in his apocalyptic final novel God’s Grace (1982)
with its articulate chimps and God’s Voice, is a fabulist; in The Fixer (1966) he
includes all the elements of a nineteenth-century Russian novel; the book has a
translated feel. Both are works of flawless construction and do not invite reread-
ing. The Assistant (1957), his second novel, is his most natural, set in a modern
New York ghetto where a goy beats up a grocer, experiences remorse, and be-
comes an orthodox Jew. It is an unexpected turn of plot, yet convincing in the
world of Malamudic transformations and supernatural interventions.
To Cynthia Ozick, Bellow wrote about the “unspeakable evasion” of the
Holocaust in his own work. It was a palpable chasm, existing beyond the imag-
inable, yet real. Writers mature, he told an interviewer, as they force themselves
to confront hard experiences. They must identify them first—for James Bald-
win, sexuality and race; for Virginia Woolf, gender and a complex erotic; for
Solomon Bellow, Jewishness, the Holocaust, Europe’s and America’s relations to
facts that, while peculiarly and profoundly his, are also universal. Real also were
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his Yiddish roots: in 1952 he translated Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”
for the Partisan Review, the first time Singer was published in English.
Americans too meekly adopted the standards of British English, the “correct”
New Yorker style. In commending Malamud for a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bel-
low stressed, “It is upon writers like Mr. Malamud that the future of literature in
America depends, writers who have not sought to protect themselves by joining
schools or by identification with prevailing tastes and tendencies. The greatest
threat to writing today is the threat of conformism.” He grew impatient with
Malamud, though his public endorsements and tributes continued. He is grate-
ful for the injection of radicalism he had received from Malamud in his twenties.
It had purged him (though not so decisively as he thought) of illusion and senti-
mentality. At the time he was, mercilessly, writing Herzog. He is merciless about
the culture he has chosen, almost against its will. “It was made clear to me when
I studied literature in the university that as a Jew and the son of Russian Jews I
would probably never have the right feeling for Anglo-Saxon traditions, for En-
glish words.” He had to fight free of such projected constraints and prejudices.
His response to Henry James is like Achebe’s to Conrad when it came to racial
stereotyping. James’s presentation of Jewish and black characters in, for exam-
ple, What Maisie Knew, is disgustingly forthright.
From experiences of teachers and of the canon they taught he developed an
aversion to the academic world and the way it ingested literature, how “the edu-
cated people of modern countries” make it their vocation to “reduce masterpieces
to discourse.” This derived from modernism itself, which was “dominated by a
tone of elegy from the twenties to the fifties, the atmosphere of Eliot in The Waste
Land and that of Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Their tone became
second nature. “Sensibility absorbed this sadness, this view of the artist as the
only contemporary link with an age of gold, forced to watch the sewage flowing
in the Thames, every aspect of modern civilization doing violence to his (artist-
patrician) feelings. This went much farther than it should have been allowed to
go.” By the time he wrote his third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), it
had become his vocation to redirect the current.
The concise but very slow-to-read journal-form novel Dangling Man (1944)
and the American-Dostoyevskian The Victim (1947) are formative work: Bel-
low’s themes are there, but language has not found voice. In Dangling Man the
protagonist expects to be drafted for military ser vice. He quits his job but does
not enlist; he waits to be called up. He spends a listless, frustrated year dan-
gling, dependent on his wife, meditating in a self-induced and then enforced
passivity. At last he stops waiting and, in desperation, enlists. He cannot fi nd a
way to make use of his freedom and so it is not freedom, and he surrenders.
Philosophical questions are posed at every turn, but they are not embodied in
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PA R I A H S
plot and character. Argument runs alongside action, or inaction, in a not quite
harmonious counterpoint. Bellow accuses a critic of too close a reading of Dan-
gling Man, of being so interested in meaning, in symbol rather than detail, in
intention rather than enactment, that she loses a sense of its literary quality. But
the novelist too is in the wrong: “I think this is a fault of all American books,
including my own. They pant so after meaning . . . A work of art should rest on
perception.”
The Victim, drawing on Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband, deals with more
than anti-Semitism: the balance between the Jew-hating loafer, Kirby Allbee,
and the considerate and intelligent Jew, Leventhal, is subtle, their interdepen-
dence symbiotic. “Oh, I think that realistic literature from the first has been a
victim literature,” Bellow remarked, a literature of “ordinary individuals” up
against “the external world” that “will conquer them.” The Victim is realistic
only in its trappings. In fact it is schematic like a parable, like Kafka’s The Trial,
and as harsh as the Parable of the Talents. Coetzee says it is “within inches of
joining Billy Budd in the fi rst rank of American novellas,” failing because Leven-
thal is in some way held back by the author, so the intolerable situation can be
developed.
A complete revolution in his writing occurs with The Adventures of Augie
March. When he found the style, “I was turned on like a hydrant in summer,”
he was writing “in a jail-breaking spirit.” It was not unlike sexual excitement.
Roth noted that the style “combines literary complexity with conversational
ease, joins the idiom of the academy with the idiom of the streets (not all streets—
certain streets); the style is special, private, energetic, and though it can at times
be unwieldy, it generally serves Bellow brilliantly.” It is in similar terms that
Roth described his own objectives—that his language might have “the turns,
vibrations, intonations, and cadences, the spontaneity and ease, of spoken lan-
guage” but at the same time be anchored to the page by “irony, precision, and
ambiguity.”
Looking back on it in 1995, in a letter to Martin Amis, Bellow flinched when he
reread the book: “It seems to me now one of those stormy, formless Ameri-
can phenomena—like Action Painting.” By then he had progressed to what Amis
calls the “sparer utterance” of his later style and looked askance at his real, messy
coming into being. Part of the miracle is how fully he incorporated his own expe-
riences without committing autobiography: this is a version of Kafka’s “indiscre-
tion,” the use of individual experience to create a universal template comparable
to Dickens’s in David Copperfield.
He began the book in Paris on a Guggenheim grant. “You leave the U.S.A.
and from abroad you think of nothing else,” he said later. “What I found was
the relief of turning away from mandarin English and putting my own accents
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into the language. My earlier books had been straight and respectable . . . But
in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something
like a fusion between colloquialism and elegance.” This mixed register breaks
with the discriminated dictions of British fiction and the decorums of the New
Yorker: “I was driven by a passion to invent.” J. M. Coetzee notes, “Not since Mark
Twain had an American writer handled the demotic with such verve.” Bellow
describes the book as “a widening spiral that begins in the parish, ghetto, slum
and spreads into the greater world, and there Augie comes to the fore because of
the multiplication of people around him and the greater difficulty of experi-
ence.” Augie begins as an observer, developing toward engagement. Bellow de-
fends the “low seriousness” of Augie: it goes with the mixed register, the rich
geographical and cultural panorama, the humor and, most of all, the character.
One is put in mind of Dreiser, who went a long way down this path, in a style
that can verge on camp, given the inventiveness of his metaphors and the unset-
tling force of his ironies. Bellow worried about the density of his writing, the
hyperabundance of detail and observation, yet his antagonism to his British edi-
tor John Lehmann strengthened his resolve. Lehmann was not enthusiastic
enough, and he was homosexual. Bellow was not keen on English homosexuals,
who seemed to him affected and pathologically ironic. Though Augie washed
up nicely, for much of the novel he is battered, fi lthy, and bleary.
Augie March has abundant “literary qualities,” but as Amis insists, it needs to
be read for its plenitude: to isolate elements, to foreground themes, to system-
atize the picaresque flow, is to kill it. It is alive, a process, the writer shrugging
off the rigidity of his earlier work, fi nding voices and a voice, not his, not unlike
his, to make the narrative. It also attempts to encompass a series of adjacent
worlds; variety of incident and geography give it epic qualities, more Fielding
or Smollett than classic Dickens (the Dickens it does resemble is his last pica-
resque effort, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit). Augie is so acted
upon that we focus on what is doing the actions. For much of the novel he is a
punching bag, though he speaks and he takes solid shape, having started a dozen
careers, warmed a dozen susceptible hearts, and eluded capture even when he
wants to be captured. He’s the sort of fellow who always lavishly disappoints,
even himself. Amis notes that here for the first time in Bellow, style and content
are inseparable. “And style is morality. Style judges. No other writer and no other
novel”—how categorical Amis is when he has the bit between his teeth—“makes
you feel surer about this.”
Coetzee begs to differ, not about the literary qualities but about the success
of the novel. “Once it becomes clear that the hero is to lead a charmed life, Augie
March begins to pay for its lack of dramatic structure and indeed of intellectual
organi zation. The book becomes steadily less engaging as it proceeds.” He sees
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PA R I A H S
the book progressing by a series of brilliantly executed set pieces, these tours de
force coming to seem mechanical in construction and in the ways in which they
comment on one another. He singles out for particular criticism the scenes in
Mexico where Augie, with one of his most emotionally brutal lovers, tries to
train a cowardly eagle to hunt iguanas. Here in ovo is Cormac McCarthy, his
tremendous geographies, his weirdly misshapen characters, and the places ren-
dered with an accuracy closer and more luminous than Lowry’s in the same
general area at roughly the same period. In the end Coetzee’s objections are
moral, a morality that for him is inseparable from the aesthetic qualities of the
book. If this is the story of “the coming to maturity of Bellow’s generation,”
“how good a representative of that generation is Augie?” Was this in fact Bel-
low’s intention? Was he here, or anywhere, saying “a great Yes! to America?”
Neither Seize the Day (1956) nor Henderson the Rain King (1959), with its “trucu-
lent and unsqueamish honesty” (the phrase is Nadine Gordimer’s), for all their
invention, risks the scope or achieves the narrative authority of Augie March. Bel-
low had to dig into himself, and again into the incidents of his own life, in this
case his emotionally and fi nancially costly second divorce, for his second great
novel, Herzog (1964). He was writing, again, against the grain of experience, dis-
covering how radical, when his personal anger and outrage were at their most
intense, is the power of moderation, of the measured tone. He speaks of it as a
kind of musical form, an unachievable desire within the character. Moses Her-
zog (the name borrowed from the Jewish funeral in Joyce’s Ulysses, “M. Shulo-
mowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg . . .”) “wants very
much to have effective virtues. But that’s a source of comedy in the book.” To
Bellow, one of the themes is “the imprisonment of the individual in a shameful
and impotent privacy.” It is shameful because it entails his intellectual and sexual
prowess, and impotent because no matter how hard he tries, how many letters he
writes and to whom among the living and the dead, it is irreversible. Here his
protagonist, mired in old habits of mind, clichéd expectations of self, experiences
the collapse not only of his life but of the emotional, moral, and intellectual foun-
dations upon which it depended. One by one his garments of self-respect and
self-belief are removed. And he remains responsible for his own decline. Bellow
portrays the forces ranged against him, yet Herzog, though he can be reduced
and reduced, exiled and re-exiled, cannot be extinguished. He gathers himself
together and overcomes his obsession with letter writing. He decides to put his
house in order, literally and metaphorically. The book is not without self-pity,
but so caustic that self-pity itself is comical.
Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Bellow says, “isn’t even a novel. It’s a dramatic
essay of some sort, wrung from me by the crazy sixties.” Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
is also a dramatic essay, but a novel, too, the third of his major ones, for which
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he received a Pulitzer Prize and which propelled him toward the Nobel Prize
in Literature he was awarded the following year. It began as a short story rooted
in his difficult relationship with the poet Delmore Schwartz. Power, material
values, and art are brought into a telling collision in the reported unraveling of
the older, visionary, and alcoholic protagonist Von Humboldt Fleisher, who has
died impecunious, and Charlie Citrine (the name adapted from J. Citron in the
list of Jews in Ulysses also), the first-person narrator, another “indiscretion” of the
novelist. Against the backdrop of Humboldt’s dogged self-destructive version of
integrity, Citrine’s Hollywood success thanks to Humboldt’s gift of a copyright
is vast and ironic. It is a voluble novel, the central relationships painfully lived,
its garrulity that of a speaking voice with the natural, almost erotic, charm of
Augie March. Chicago is nowhere more real in Bellow, and its petty criminal
world represented by the minor crook Rinaldo Cantabile, seemingly fresh from
The Sopranos, is sinisterly funny. The theme of expensive divorce is never far
away in Bellow’s novels of this period. Citrine is alive and successful. Humboldt
in death lives on, like Finnegan in Finnegans Wake, controlling the moral action.
In The Dean’s December (1982) Bellow’s impatience with the modern world
and what he came to see as its absurdities began to alter his fiction. Modern in-
tellectual revolutions had “rearranged our souls”; there was no way back, elegy
and satire were the only resources left to “us,” that “us” itself becoming less in-
clusive than it had seemed before. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet he suggests that the
horror of the Holocaust, poverty, and the intellectual tyrannies, political and
otherwise, that constrain individuals were endemic in the twentieth century as
never before. “This is Lenin’s age of wars and revolutions. The idea has gotten
around by now.” He distinguishes between “cleans” and “dirties” in American
fiction. Much contemporary radicalism is without content: “A genuine radical-
ism, which truly challenges authority, we need desperately. But a radicalism of
posture is easy and banal. Radical criticism requires knowledge, not posture,
not slogans, not rant.” The dirties are the inadequate radicals. The cleans, by
contrast, are drab and dated. Yet, “There may be truths on the side of life.” As
against all those writers who nihilistically see the world as hostile, he suggests
that truth is not invariably “so punitive.”
After More Die of Heartbreak (1987) a stylistic change begins, the language
sheds its excess, plot comes to the fore in A Theft (1989). Bellow was feeling his
age, writing had become effortful and his sense of readership tenuous, as
though, for all his celebrity, he had passed, still living, into the category of “lit-
erature.” Ravelstein (2000), his last novel, published five years before his death,
builds upon a story he had written and draws in earlier work. Amis declares it
“a masterpiece with no analogues. The world has never heard this prose be-
fore” (indeed, it had never heard the prose of Augie March before either), “prose
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PA R I A H S
of such tremulous and crystallized beauty.” In It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past
to the Uncertain Future, Bellow wrote, “Disappointment with its human material
is built into the contemporary novel. It is assumed that society cannot give the
novelist ‘suitable’ themes and characters. Therefore the important humanity of
the novel must be the writer’s own.”
Anthony Burgess compares Bellow to another Canadian Jew, Mordecai
Richler (1931–2001). Though his maternal grandfather was a rabbi, Richler was
born in a poor neighborhood of Montreal, son of a scrap yard dealer. He claims
to be the child of a double ghetto, Jewish and Canadian. His community fueled
his discontent and provided key material for his fiction. “He didn’t write about
‘Canada’—whatever that is— only the particular and isolated corner of the Jew-
ish quarter of Anglo Montreal in francophone Quebec in the Canadian section
of North America; a ghetto in a ghetto in a ghetto in a ghetto,” Burgess said.
Unlike the Bellows’, the Richlers’ emigration stopped in Canada. At nineteen,
resolved to be a writer, Mordecai made his way to Paris, hoping to fi nd the lost
generation. He came home disappointed. He made his way to London. Again
he came home with a different disappointment, and married.
He could never keep his counsel on Canadian politics, especially on issues of
language and independence in his native province of Quebec. Skeptical of the
large claims made in Canada for Canadian literature, he made fun of writers
who were “world famous in Canada.” Like Bellow he rejected political correct-
ness, and in Italy, where his books were acclaimed, the adjective “Richleriano”
was devised to mean “politically incorrect.” He despised “identity politics,” the
proscribed types and stereotypes that could not be uttered for fear of giving of-
fense, and the consequent weakening of the satirical impulse. He offended Jews,
English-Canadian nationalists, and the Quebecois.
In his fourth novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), Richler “found
a voice.” Into a hitherto stable world of Canadian fiction comes Duddy as a Huck
Finn figure, or a minor-key Augie March from Montreal backstreets like the
ones in which Richler grew up, who develops material ambitions, romances,
and in his attempts to get rich reveals the dark, hard, human, and absurd charac-
ter of his society. Burgess was drawn to his sixth novel, Cocksure (1968), set in a
1960s London variously “swinging.” The unlikely protagonist is a Canadian
publisher, a veteran of World War II. In a corrupt age he is the gullible victim of
various venalities. Overemphatic satire produces, Burgess says, not humor and a
desire for moral resolution but rather sourness of spirit: the believable, not un-
sympathetic protagonist is a vulnerable outsider in a world of caricatures. Two
imaginations, one realist, one satirical, are unreconciled.
Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) was “the first South American North American
novel,” devising a Magical Realism rooted less in Márquez than in Chagall. For
| 1089 |
this he received the 1990 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The wandering Jew
starts circulating in a new picaresque, and stereotypes of Canadian character
and writing drop away. This magic is leavened with jokes. It also recycles para-
graphs from Richler’s journalism. This ecology of self says something about the
open texture of the fiction.
In Barney’s Vision (1997), the autobiography of Barney Panofsky, the protago-
nist suffers (we learn toward the end) from advancing Alzheimer’s. This accounts
for the narrative and memory gaps and the strange pace and order of the mate-
rial. A mystery underpins the story, told from a variety of points of view. Here for
the last time Duddy Kravitz appears. He manages to inveigle himself into several
Richler novels.
R
Now, an adjustment in scale. From the voluminous writing and public face of
Bellow and (on a smaller scale) of Richler, attention turns to what at first looks
like a pale square in an album from which the photograph has been removed.
Twice in Franny and Zooey (1961) J. D. ( Jerome David) Salinger (1919–2010) in-
vokes the spirit of Kafka. Salinger’s reputation rests primarily on a single novel,
The Catcher in the Rye (1951), buttressed by a book of nine stories and two skinny
books about the Glass family. Updike regretted the narrowing they represented.
“Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detri-
ment of artistic moderation.” Nadine Gordimer described his prose as “a very
clean window-pane, yet to get into the room beyond needs quite a sustained ef-
fort to suspend one’s consciousness of all terms of reference other than those
that direct the life of the Glasses.” The door into their world was not locked but
stiff on its hinges.
His “spurning of the world” (Roth’s phrase: he compares Salinger’s with Mal-
amud’s more calculating withdrawal) adds a frisson to the mention of his name.
He was a powerful magnet for author molesters, journalists, and would-be bi-
ographers. Obituary headlines played to the recluse more than the writer,
the New York Times dubbing him “the Garbo of letters.”
In the Glass family stories and in Catcher, Salinger presents his natural-seeming
but existentially challenged protagonists in a “real” world that regards them with
unease. As in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the world is real, characters are real, but
they step out of a different kind of reality, their being in the fiction incongruous
and illuminating. In Franny and Zooey, the Kafka quotations are in sharp contrast
to one another. “ ‘Don’t you want to join us?’ I was recently asked by an acquain-
tance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was al-
ready almost deserted. ‘No, I don’t,’ I said.” This Kafka is afraid of being alone.
| 1090 |
PA R I A H S
Then, fraught with ambiguity: “The happiness of being with people.” In Kafka
Gregor Samsa is physically transformed; Salinger’s misfits seem to fit, are normal-
looking, even beautiful, but out of place.
Salinger’s troubled teenager Holden Caulfield, the progenitor of Roth’s Alex-
ander Portnoy, Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood, Martin Amis’s Charles High-
way, David Malouf ’s Dante, William Gaddis’s J R, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Oskar
Schell, and other unsettled young protagonists and narrators, is as famous as
Huckleberry Finn. Like Twain’s, Salinger’s readership has become younger with
the passage of time. Catcher is now assigned to children rounding the corner into
their teens, a curriculum decision that strikes some parents as ill judged. The
book opens with a sentence that pays tribute to the opening of Twain’s greater
book and defines the voice and character of Holden. He refuses to give us “all
that David Copperfield kind of crap” about himself. The “goddam” world he’s
experienced is “phony.” He is a boy who knows a bit about Dickens and has a
smart, world-weary swagger borrowed from boys older than himself. Like Huck
he’s a truant, in Lodge’s words “a youthful runaway from a world of adult hy-
pocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favorite words, phoniness.”
When Nine Stories appeared in 1953, it was part of the education of Philip
Roth, John Updike, and Harold Brodkey. Updike liked the way “they don’t snap
shut” but remain open and continue developing in the reader’s head. Salinger’s
dialogue is perfectly gauged. Lodge defi nes “skaz” through looking at Huck’s
and then at Holden’s dialogue: “In longer sentences, clauses are strung together
as they seem to occur to the speaker, rather than being subordinated to each
other in complex structures.” This democratic syntax, this phrase-equalizing
parataxis, imitates the ways in which actual speech makes its way to the ear. It
is crucial to the liberation of American dialogue from the hypotactic patterns of
English fiction. Salinger modeled his writing on Fitzgerald’s, Gatsby being his
favorite modern novel, an enthusiasm he shares with Holden, who says, “I was
crazy about The Great Gatsby,” adding fondly, “Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed
me.” Salinger corresponded with and even met Hemingway, who made a mark,
but not so deep or intimate as Fitzgerald.
Salinger was immediately received as the most talented of his contempo-
raries. He resisted the personalization of his work, demanding that his Cary
Grantish face be removed from dust jackets, rejecting fan mail, and retiring to
New Hampshire. His last publication, in the New Yorker in 1965, was a long story
or novella entitled “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a further installment in the Glass series.
A poor fi lm was made of one of his stories and he never licensed another for big
or little screen. Forty-five years of vigorously protected privacy and silence,
with the occasional treacherous breach, ended with in 2010 with his death and
| 1091 |
a flood of rumors about a stockpile of unpublished writings. As rumor gradu-

ally turns to fact, his could prove to be a long and sensational posthumous liter-
ary career, but in his case the death of the author has not been exaggerated.
From what is known of his boyhood, it is possible to say that Holden’s and his
life coincided in several respects. Son of an assimilated, prosperous European
Jewish merchant and an Irish mother, Salinger failed out of one school; his par-
ents sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, the model for
Pencey Prep. He rather enjoyed it. He was a lackluster university student. More
successful was the evening class he took at Columbia where he wrote a story that
got published. By 1941 he was contributing to the New Yorker. The first story,
“Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” was a sketch for a scene in Catcher, which itself
has the loose structural feel of a series of connected stories rather than a flow of
chapters. The New Yorker took six years to print it.
Drafted, he served in counterintelligence and lived in Devon, England. In
1944 he was with the landing at Utah Beach and saw action in the Battle of the
Bulge (where Kurt Vonnegut was taken prisoner). The fighting he survived was
gruesome. At the war’s end, exhausted, he was hospitalized with something like
a breakdown, writing to Hemingway that he was “in an almost constant state of
despondency.” He stayed in Europe long enough to marry a German doctor. It
did not last. He returned to his parents’ Manhattan home and continued writ-
ing, getting to know the great William Shawn, “my editor, mentor and (heaven
help him) closest friend,” with whom he shared his famous neuroses. Burgess
suggested that in Catcher Salinger had “learned something from the Beats.” If so,
it was a proleptic learning: the Beats were forming but had yet to emerge in solid
print, something that occurred around 1956–1958. Learning may have been the
other way around.
Faulkner, not an avid reader of new fiction, spoke of Catcher as “the best one”
of the new books he had read. There were vocal detractors. Franny and Zooey
(1961), says Mary McCarthy, “suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sen-
timentality and it’s so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calcu-
lated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egoism.”
The New Yorker turned down Catcher, having published six of Salinger’s stories.
Holden’s precocity was not credible; the writing too showy. But the book is not
“about” adolescent disquiet; it is not “about” in that sense at all. It creates a
character trying to come to terms with the death of his little brother. He is as
specific in culture and nature as Alexander Portnoy or Oskar Schelling, and to
make of his a universal experience is to use the work in ways that betray it. It is
“about” the 1940s, about a world going wrong, witnessed by a boy whose life
has taken an incomprehensible turn. Holden, capable of sarcasm and anger, is
| 1092 |
PA R I A H S
still developing a protective knack of irony. Here is an infant Gatsby, before

Daisy, without the illusions that will lure him into life’s deep end.
“Mailerism” is one pole, “Salingerism” the other, says Philip (Milton) Roth
(b. 1933). The one, dramatizing the writer, continually plays with and defies
“fame,” construed as media attention, critical engagement, and controversy; the
other plays against “fame” and acquires it by that means, growing larger the less
it publishes. Roth, a Mailerist in output and thematic risk, if not personal projec-
tion, dedicated Reading Myself and Others (1976) to Saul Bellow, “the ‘other’ I have
read from the beginning with the deepest pleasure and admiration.” Bellow
reads Roth with almost the same expectations and disappointments with which
he reads himself, remarking in a letter on “that ingenuous, possibly childish love
of literature you and I have.” The childishness has to do with taking literature
directly to heart. In 1998 Bellow, having read I Married a Communist in type-
script, thought he might be just in time to make a difference. “I was particularly
aware of the absence of distance,” he said, hence the failure of irony, and hence
the failure of a humorous grasp on the material. The main fault is the character
of Ira: “this cast-iron klutz,” he calls him. And he cautions against a fiction that
emerges out of ideas rather than characters and situations. “I have a thing about
Ideas in stories. Camus’s The Plague was an IDEA. Good or bad? Not so hot, in my
opinion.” Such candor between writers is not to be presumed.
Roth reflects on “the relationship between the written and the unwritten
world,” a coupling he prefers to “imagination and reality, or art and life.” The
suggestion is that the written can be true. That truth will depend on style, and
he is concerned with language as having “the turns, vibrations, intonations, and
cadences, the spontaneity and ease, of spoken language” but at the same time a
print quality, a page-ness, anchored by “irony, precision, and ambiguity.” He has
a habit of falling into italics for the clinching phrase. There are books in which
style weighs more than content. Self-regard is in play. My Life as a Man (1974) is
about the thrills, vertigo, and final satisfaction of writing from and of the self.
Though the self is fictionalized, the fiction is thin, like the convenient shadow-
fancies that facilitate onanism. Style over content, a solipsistic spider, decidedly
male, stirs its guts and lets out a shimmering thread.
Though his protagonists in their circumstances and concerns can resemble
him, he will not have it that his work is autobiography or confession, even in
those instances where a character is called Philip Roth, because the effect would
violate the fact of fiction, “not only to falsify their suppositional nature but . . .
to slight whatever artfulness leads some readers to think that they must be
autobiographical.” Amis notes “the longing to escape inherited identities” but
at the same time to honor them, as a history, a faith, a root that goes deep in
| 1093 |
time, language, and space. It is an attempt through fiction to square the actual
“me” with the world. He understands his characters’ circumstances. He has
been there.
Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, and spent his childhood there, the
son of fi rst-generation Galician Jews. He studied English at Bucknell University,
then went to the University of Chicago for graduate work. There he got to
know Bellow. He taught writing briefly, then at Iowa and Princeton, becoming
a long-term academic at the University of Pennsylvania and retiring in 1991. He
is aware how much of his fiction stems from the geography and social struc-
tures of his childhood. He recalls too the intense male friendships of his adoles-
cence, “the opportunity they provided for uncensored talk” on every subject,
especially sex, and full of joking. It was here that the gendered social tones of
his narrators have their origin. He also experienced what he saw as the warfare
between parents and children, a painful theme in many of his books. In Ameri-
can Pastoral he describes “the daughter who transports him out of the longed-
for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy,
into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counter-pastoral—into
the indigenous American berserk.” American Pastoral is his most powerful and
painful book, invested with his geographies, his history, a helpless elegy for a
place, a family, a culture, a country. In its elaborate and sometimes implausible
contrivance it brings to a climax the parent-child theme: we corrupt our chil-
dren even when, especially when, with the greatest care and affection, we be-
lieve we are protecting and preparing them for life.
His first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), consisted of the title novella and five
stories. It is set in New Jersey, claiming the landscape of much of his fiction and
marking out his themes. Here he evokes the values and expectations of middle-
class American Jews and sends them up. The novella is about assimilation (“Jew-
ish men and their Gentile women”) and, crucially, about a man and a woman
fi nding they are not in love. It was published on the brink of the 1960s, what
Roth called “the demythologizing decade,” and contains some of his most pro-
vocative, if not his most controversial, writing.
Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was also a literary scandal, on two grounds. Mas-
turbation is a subject “so difficult to talk about and yet so near at hand,” Roth
remarked. After his earlier work, Martin Amis sat back “asking for more, and he
gave us less.” The style is brilliant and mature, full of surprise, but the themes
are narrow. Alex Portnoy, a Jewish boy, lives in New Jersey. He masturbates a lot
because of his mother. This commonplace predicament generates the comedy.
Burgess draws attention to the second controversial element. Roth embeds his
sexual theme firmly in the Jewish community and comments on Jewish mothers
in a less than affirmative spirit.
| 1094 |
PA R I A H S
Portnoy Roth describes as “a novel cast in the form of an analytic monologue

by a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor”—the analyst eliciting
the narrative. The book is “farcical,” assembling “blocks of consciousness” or
“chunks of material of varying shapes and sizes piled atop one another and held
together by association rather than chronology”—a modernism that wants to
seem open, even accidental, but with design and intent, the sequence clear.
Asked if he was influenced by stand-up comics, he declared the principal influ-
ence was a “sit-down comic named Franz Kafka,” The Metamorphosis in particu-
lar. Not that the novel is “Kafkaesque,” but Kafka was a yeast, he “giggled to
himself while he worked. Of course! It was all so funny, this morbid preoccupa-
tion with punishment and guilt.”
More directly indebted to Kafka, too indebted perhaps, is The Breast (1972),
the fi rst of Roth’s three Kepesh novels. David Alan Kepesh, a.k.a. The Professor
of Desire (1977) and fi nally The Dying Animal (2001), irrepressible seducer of stu-
dents and self-serving libertine, wakes up one morning after an “endocrino-
pathic catastrophe” to discover that he has been transformed into an enormous
breast. Everything else is the same, real, but feels different to this dilated, hy-
persensitive erogenous zone with a five-inch nipple and a troubled conscious-
ness. John Gardner gives this book the thumbs-up. The allegory pleases him
because it is contained and sufficiently comical not to threaten our morality
with its evocation of (Kepesh’s phrase in a solipsistic monologue in a later book)
“the delightful imbecility of lust.”
Eight years after Kepesh was created, Roth’s great alter ego, Nathan Zucker-
man, narrator of nine (roughly one-third) of Roth’s novels, including the great-
est ones, was born. His first foray into the world was in The Ghost Writer (1979).
Here young Zuckerman is a writer inflamed with early success, setting off with
arrogant trepidation to visit the remote house of the writer E. I. Lonoff (based
perhaps on Malamud) to meet him for the first time. A snowstorm detains him
and he spends the night. Nathan’s backstory is close to Roth’s own. He is a
graduate of the University of Chicago, he has published some stories, he wants a
writer-guru. The book is a first-person meditation on the vocation of writing,
Jewishness, isolation, sex, and fathers. His own father objects to some of his sto-
ries, which, he fears, might feed anti-Semitic feeling. The case against Portnoy is
not far away. Zuckerman had hoped to find Lonoff admirable. He is in fact hu-
man, with more failings than most, licensed and forgiven by art. For Lonoff,
writing stands in for the complexities of living. Roth’s themes are in this book as
in a well-organized primer, an excellent way in to Roth and Zuckerman, like
and unlike as they insist on being.
The exhaustive, hilarious, and penetrating exploration of Oedipal themes
becomes, in the later novels, an exploration of Laius’s and Jocasta’s anxieties: for
| 1095 |
the older man, the offspring (son or daughter) becomes a promise, a challenge,
and a threat. Swede Levov in American Pastoral (1997) and Coleman Silk in
The Human Stain (2000) are confronted by their offspring, who, culturally, rep-
resent a whole generation, sons and daughters, students, employees, who feel
deceived, suckered by their predecessors. The protagonists are hyperliterary,
their vulnerable self-scrutiny the product of irreducible, frustrated egotism.
There is a Bellovian fullness to these narratives, a nineteenth-century ampli-
tude at once realistic and nostalgic. Milan Kundera noted that in Roth’s later
work this nostalgia for the simpler, more wholesome-seeming world of the
author’s parents and grandparents—when the struggle to survive and prosper
was ennobling (at least for those who survived and prospered)—fuels a fiction
formally and thematically conservative. From that earlier world Roth has
drawn “an entire novelistic background,” then moved it into the foreground.
The three great Zuckerman novels are preceded by Sabbath’s Theater (1995), a
book of Shakespearean dimensions. Roth set himself to write “a realistic novel
about imagined events.” Amis describes it as “an upheaval novel, a crisis novel, a
howl novel.” It is all those things, but it is also a kind of overture in which the
themes of the later books are introduced by the orchestra.
Both American Pastoral and The Human Stain question the nostrums of Amer-
ican liberal and progressive thought. Multiculturalism has led to cultural Bal-
kanization, exacerbating confl icts between groups and individual alienation.
As J. M. Coetzee notes, Faulkner is not far from the style and the themes of The
Human Stain, in which Coleman Silk shares a fateful genetic heritage with Joe
Christmas, only more so because he also contains American Indian and other
bloods: a melting pot in himself, which adds to the irony of his fate. More than
Joe Christmas, in his refusal to use the first line of defense, he resembles the
resolutely taciturn Lucas Beauchamp in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust.
Time has not dealt kindly with the Zuckerman of The Ghost Writer. Now he is
alone in a place worse than Lonoff ever reached. He’s in the Berkshires, where,
ironically, he had gone to visit Lonoff. He has lost his prostate, his bladder con-
trol, his sexual potency. He has no human or animal companion. Silk seeks him
out as—a ghost writer for his tragic story. Ironically, this is what Zuckerman
(again, we are tempted to say) becomes, a witness of others’ lives, a sleuth into
mysteries that exclude him. But his style gets close in to its subjects: the diction is
varied in response to the different characters’ language. There are so many vari-
eties of colloquial English in America, and Roth masters them. It seems effortless,
at once learned and street-savvy, multicultural in another, older sense. As he dis-
covers, again, “there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us
is endless. As are the lies.” The novelist can imagine ends, uncover lies, touch
bottom momentarily with an unblinkered narrative. His approach is straight-
| 1096 |
PA R I A H S
forward: he introduces the cast of characters, misreads them, and one by one
goes into their lives, so that in the end we understand where everyone is coming
from—bigots, bullies, victims. The procedure becomes predictable. Longueurs
occur when we embark on another of those “chunks of material of varying
shapes and sizes,” each one a novella in itself. Boxing, crows, cancer, common-
room politics, Vietnam veteran events—they grow together, intersect, and a
complex, comprehensible world emerges that cannot be reduced to a pattern or
judged with clarity. Its existence in time is what Roth sets out to achieve. Past
and present are entailed, everything from the world of Doctorow’s Ragtime to
the Vietnam War and the wild Continental radicalisms of 1968. If the novel suc-
ceeds, it will continue to resonate, it will have a future, like those big novels of
the nineteenth century that we read even after school is out.
There is also the Roth of Our Gang (1971), a novel that expresses his hostility
to Nixon. Our Gang belongs in the line of Nasby and Ward, and of Mencken, who
hated President Harding with equal vehemence. And there are the short novels.
Everyman (2006) Nadine Gordimer singles out as evidence that Roth belongs to a
triumvirate—including the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Colombian Gabriel
García Márquez— of old men in whom “the violent upsurge of sexual desire in
the face of old age is the opposition of man to his own creation, death.” There is
nothing sudden in the upsurge of sexual desire in Everyman: it has marked every
book Roth has written.
Of the short later novels, Indignation (2008) summarizes Roth’s recurrent
anxieties. A campus novel set in the early 1950s, it centers on a young male stu-
dent of intelligence and principle who does not want to go to the Korean War. It
is hilarious, and tragic, not only in its conclusion but incident by incident, the
sequence of misunderstandings that condemn a character whose omniscience
has a metaphysical dimension. The title is taken from the Chinese National An-
them. Here most purely we experience Roth’s “daily awareness of government

as a coercive force.” Hence, the question that recurs in his consideration of family,
business, love, and other relationships: “Who or what shall have influence and
jurisdiction over one’s own life has been a concern in much of my work.”
For Jonathan Franzen in his apprentice years Roth was a bitter enemy. Over
time he has come to value him. “I still campaign against American Pastoral, but
when I finally got around to reading Sabbath’s Theater its fearlessness and ferocity
became an inspiration. It had been a long time since I’d felt as grateful to a
writer as I did when reading the bit where Mickey Sabbath’s best friend catches
him in the bathtub holding a picture of the friend’s adolescent daughter and a
pair of her underpants, or the scene in which Sabbath fi nds a paper coffee cup
in the pocket of his army jacket and decides to abase himself by begging for
money in the subway.” He sees Roth almost as a charm, “a correction and
| 1097 |
reproach to the sentimentality of certain young American writers and not-so-

young critics who seem to believe, in defiance of Kafka, that literature is about
being nice.”
He may have in mind the work of his friend Jeff rey (Kent) Eugenides (b. 1960),
whose novels, on a substantial scale and full of dramatic promise, resolve in
pools of sweetness. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his second novel,
Middlesex (2002), the title referring not to the English shire but to the sexual
peculiarity of Calliope Stephanides, a boy by nature, a girl by nurture. S/he is
also Greek-American, a further destabilizing situation for the narrative to play
with. His fi rst novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), and The Marriage Plot (2011) at-
tracted considerable attention. He is a crowned prince of the “abundant realist”
school of long novels packed with detail and slow-motion reflection on short-
and long-term issues affecting the lives of characters, some of whom are inter-
esting. An account of his own life opens a number of biographical windows in
his novels. He was born and reared in suburban Detroit, a city he loves and
whose decline he laments, though he has not yet begun to paint it in the ways
that Roth anatomized the decline of Newark in American Pastoral and else-
where. The Virgin Suicides is informed by its culture. He studied at Brown Uni-
versity. In a gap year he went to Europe and volunteered in Calcutta with Mother
Teresa’s hospice movement. Scenes from The Marriage Plot and the earlier nov-
els are memory vignettes given a new context. He moved to Manhattan, be-
friended a number of his contemporaries, notably Jonathan Franzen, then on to
Berlin where he lived for five years on a grant, returning to a professorship in
the creative writing program at Princeton.
What mars his fiction, often compelling in narrative, is the self-satisfaction
of some of his protagonists and by extension of the narrator, so mired in his
culture and its attitudes that the surrounding realities, domestic and foreign,
are real only “in relation.” The characters are sincere and self-aware; it is the
larger supporting fictional frame, those parts of it that have to do less with de-
tail and more with the kinds of construction that move a novel beyond the au-
thor’s controlling reach, that have yet to be acknowledged and mastered. In
particular The Marriage Plot, which visits the fictional territory of Bellow and
Roth, of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, is technically resourceful but cloying.
Only one, solipsistic zone of experience is real to each point of view. In Puritan
writing with overbearing hubris the subject sees himself as the focus of severe
divine attention (“I am the greatest sinner”): everything relates to his own
agon. Eugenides’s moral worlds are culture- and class-bound. His fiction is real
for the credulous elect. It is not proof against a reader’s own irony or foreign-
ness, which can in certain circumstances, as in a literature narrowly partisan,
amount to the same thing.
| 1098 |
PA R I A H S
Like Philip Roth, Paul (Benjamin) Auster (b. 1947) was born in Newark, New
Jersey. It is hard not to think of Roth when we read Auster, who tries to play some
of the same games. One of his stronger creations is Nathan Glass, the protagonist
of The Brooklyn Follies (2005), who calls to mind Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman. Glass
proclaims, “All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce
from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.” His nephew con-
cludes, “When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story . . . the pains of this
world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.” This is
the principle of Auster’s fiction: the sufficiency, for its duration, of a narrated real-
ity. “The closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am
to say anything. I want to postpone the moment of ending, and in this way de-
lude myself into thinking that I have only just begun, that the better part of my
story still lies ahead.”
Roth’s writer-characters write well, like Roth himself; Auster’s writer-
characters write like Auster, and this is a different kind of blessing for the reader.
“One reads Auster’s novels very fast,” writes James Wood, “because they are
lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most
familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the
plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the
Times once called ‘all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller.’ There are no
semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges.” Often he is writ-
ing in a version or parody of detective and crime fiction: one might say the lan-
guage is fit for that purpose, though taken over the extent of his fictional produc-
tion, including eighteen novels, more variation might have been hoped for. One
quality the writing has: translatability. Auster’s fame in Europe and elsewhere
has much to do with this. His work is also eminently malleable and responsive to
modern literary theory, a serviceable pretext.
I interviewed Auster when the New York Trilogy (1987), consisting of three
short novels—City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986)—
was published in Britain. He seemed to write without style. There were clichés
in plotting and in language, and they reached us with the highest critical acco-
lades. The incursion in the novels of characters from Melville and Hawthorne
puzzled: Were they doing anything beyond tying him into an American tradi-
tion? It was not an enjoyable encounter: the interviewer could not mask his
incredulity. “Where do we look for the depths? On the surface,” Hugo von
Hofmannsthal said. The surface is all we have as readers. Here were surfaces
covered in intended depths, turned-out pockets, the loam of excavations, but
was there depth in all the deliberate effort at depth? Year after year big and little
novels pile up, the accolades continue. In The Music of Chance (1990) the narrator
tautologizes, “It was one of those random, accidental encounters that seem to
| 1099 |
materialize out of thin air.” Hemingway would have said it once, Roth at most
twice. Auster says it three times, the third time with a cliché so it is sure to sink in.
The narrator of Leviathan (1992) is an American novelist called Peter Aaron.
The initials are no accident. Russian dolls: a writer is writing about a writer writ-
ing about a writer, the last of these being Benjamin Sachs. With so many writers
around, one waits in vain for the writing to reach a certain expressive level.
Efficiently, briskly, with a string of cliché firecrackers, it does the business. The
Book of Illusions (2002) almost convinces as a novel. There is literature professor
David Zimmer, deep in mourning for his wife and sons who have died in a plane
crash. He pulls away from grief by working on a book about a silent fi lm actor,
Hector Mann, whose fi lm consoled him. Auster does some research and starts to
make Mann’s fi lm world real, but he is not Doctorow and his book is not about
Mann. It is about aftermaths and false starts. Professor Zimmer’s book gets pub-
lished; then Mann’s widow writes to summon the writer to the bedside of the
moribund actor in New Mexico. He does not go voluntarily: a woman takes him
at gunpoint, all the way from Maine. The extended but fast-moving denoue-
ment, with mystery, murder, mayhem, and escape, itself has a denouement: we
discover that the story was probably the sorrowing professor’s escapist fantasy.
He felt better after: Do we? This is not the first, second, or third time Auster has
destabilized a fast, improbable narrative compounded of conventional elements
and acknowledged that it is made up by a character. We are in an unsubtle, even
a banal, version of the postmodern world.
R
When Martin (Louis) Amis (b. 1949) more or less emigrated to the United States,
it marked the symbolic final removal of the center of Anglophone fiction to the
New World. It also brought his strong, acid elixir to bear in a place that has need
of it. New York has long been the capital of the fiction industry de facto, and
from 1891, when the United States ceased to sanction piracy of non-American
works, British and other Anglophone writers collected their fattest fees and roy-
alty checks in dollars. But the departure of England’s (not to mince words) out-
standing contemporary novelist will be as decisive in its way for fiction as W. H.
Auden’s departure on the brink of the Second World War was for poetry. Amis’s
imagination already has dual nationality; his politics might currently seem more
at home in Manhattan than Hampstead. To receive money from abroad is one
thing, to move there lock, stock, and barrel something else, not a sell-out but a
buy-out. There are overriding reasons. Frederic Raphael, reviewing Amis’s 2000
memoir in which he comes to terms with his father, Kingsley, writes, “Experi-
ence is at once artful and artless: Holden Caulfield meets Herzog, and it is good.
| 1100 |
PA R I A H S
Saul Bellow has anointed Martin a goyish Jew (and, since Kingsley’s demise,
taken him on as his adopted son).”
Despite his recurrent theme—Britain in irreversible decline as represented
by modern London, and west London in particular—Martin Amis as a writer
belongs less with his British contemporaries and friends, the group with which
he emerged in the 1970s as his father had in the Movement of the 1950s, than
with his revered Bellow and with Roth. He belongs with the great muralists of
modern fiction, male, generically promiscuous, all reluctant modernists, care-
less of political correctness, assertive, making novels some of which resemble
those of the nineteenth century in that they successfully create large, coherent,
fully inhabited worlds.
And in his fascinated love of language and his avid response to the abstract
challenges of form he belongs with Nabokov, the exception to every rule. In
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov (1993) Amis writes the touching, diffident title essay, as
though he were writing of the mother he somehow missed; her death, her air-
blue gown, the memory of her courtesy and her real curiosity, reveal an aspect
of Amis that is unexpected because exposed. I found my way into Amis, whose
fiction I resisted for years, through his essays and reviews. He is less a critic
than a reader, remaining close to the page, engaging words and the different
ways writers use them, what they can and cannot do, and how their works con-
nect with one another. Thomas Harris of the Hannibal books “has become a
serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose,” he
says, indignant when a writer lets him- or herself down; he is forgiving as soon
as they get it right. Wide awake, he makes new connections and generally hopes
for, even if he is not expecting, the best.
Faulkner does not feature much in Amis’s world; Beckett is dealt with reduc-
tively, Kafka is more an idea, a paradigm, than a writer. These are not limita-
tions but indications of a range. Most of his essays are about male writers, Iris
Murdoch being a key exception. The early essays have an anti-American bias
one is tempted to say he inherits from his father, a junior triumphalism of which
the fact of American literature would cure him. Anthony Burgess, he notes in
1980, writes “short novels that go on for a long time,” a phenomenon he lays at
the American door. In America “writers routinely devastate acres of wood-
land for their spy thrillers, space operas, family sagas, and so on.” And John
Fowles’s success in, “giving people the impression that culture is what they
are getting.”
Reviewing Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool, Amis praises the lack of pretension,
as though this were a serious virtue in a writer. Certainly among his English
contemporaries it seems to be a meager “touchstone,” like praising a chef ’s food
| 1101 |
for being “not too tasty.” Here he began, in attitudes, sometimes bumptiously
expressed, agreeable to his seniors: “A novelist needs to be unsophisticated,
childish, even rather obtuse and naïve.” We may agree, and reflect that Martin
Amis’s struggle to remain a novelist is an attempt to keep that freshness. He is
capable of unexpected enthusiasm, as we have seen. He is ready to be surprised
by what he reads, and ready to be surprised also by what he writes.
His novels can be as specific and cruel as anything by Bret Easton Ellis, more
affecting in the sense that his characters are three-dimensional, their world
also. The laughter they occasion comes from an existential source; underlying
the caricatures and hyperboles of his narrators’ language are characters as solid
and nuanced as Ford Madox Ford’s or Saul Bellow’s, with inferable motives for
action. Incidents are generally not gratuitous and at the same time not predict-
able. He avoids clichés of plot as of language. A narrator who believes he is in
control can turn out to be a victim, as in Money, or fi nd the plot for which he
thought he was responsible wrested from him, as in London Fields. “You can’t
stop people, once they start. You can’t stop people, once they start creating.”
Readers of Amis’s generation know how precisely he captures aspects of
their world, how he belongs to its advancing present tense and registers it in the
changing pulses of the prose, starting with that period after the political dreams
of the 1960s soured and he and his close contemporaries came alarmingly awake.
The contemporary who meant most to him as a friend, confidant, and sem-
blable, and who no doubt helped keep him on course when the media were at
their most hostile, was the commentator and journalist Christopher Hitchens
(1949–2011).
Charles Highway with his “big-cocked name” narrates Amis’s first novel,
The Rachel Papers (1973), the prototypical Amis protagonist and not far (he ad-
mits) from the young Amis himself: smart, articulate, deploying wide-ranging,
generally canonical literary allusions, oversexed, keen to pop his cherry before
he reaches twenty. Rachel, the object of his desires, is otherwise engaged. He
schemes to separate her from her American boyfriend. Amis knows from the
start how language registers differentiate characters as eloquently as accents
do, and Highway is eager to mask and then escape the limitations of class, and
of a personality shaped by forces of nurture that override the givens of his na-
ture. He introduces himself: “I wear glasses for a start, have done since I was
nine. And my medium-length, arseless, waistless figure, corrugated ribcage
and bandy legs gang up to dispel any hint of aplomb . . . I remember I used to
have to fold the bands of my trousers almost double, and bulk out the seats with
shirts intended for grown men. I dress more thoughtfully now, though not so
much with taste as with insight.” What really matters is “that I am nineteen
years of age, and twenty tomorrow.” What really really matters is that the novel
| 1102 |
PA R I A H S
is about the novelist. As in London Fields, The Information, and elsewhere, birth-
days play a symbolic role, this time marking an urgent transition (and fictional
time-span) in a kind of bildungsroman. In London Fields the birthday is the antici-
pated day of the climactic “murder,” and in The Information it marks the begin-
ning of middle age, a confrontation with the protagonist’s failure and with his
friend’s unendurable success.
The fi rst three novels—The Rachel Papers, the Murdochian Dead Babies (1975:
issued in paperback as Dark Secrets, 1977), and Success (1978), with its stepbrother
rivalry, its sexual and social satire— center on protagonists distorted by disap-
pointment, disillusion, thwarted vanity, who survive even as “the beautiful and
damned” go under. In Success he introduces his first paired characters, a plot
strategy of complementarities (male/male and male/female) he repeats in later
books. What for Fitzgerald was subject for elegy Amis observes from a point of
view analogous to that of the servant or improbable secondary character in
Victorian fiction, here promoted to a focal role. This formula recurs, there is a
sameness in the kinds of laughter Amis elicits in these and some of the later
books, but the comedy deepens, darkens. Like every disillusioned child of the
false dawn of 1968, Amis is concerned with deception, especially self-deception.
The emptiness of the success of his conventionally agreeable characters, such
as Quentin in Dead Babies, or Gregory in Success, is made clear when they are
hoisted on their own petards, and Amis’s narrators (and Amis) assist where they
can and record the nemesis with gusto. These are not satires as such, to borrow
Keith Talent’s phrase from London Fields. No just order is restored, something is
destroyed, a minor key is sustained.
The early novels are apparently conventional in terms of plot. Amis does not
plug into postcolonialism, neo-modernism, or experimentalism; he does not
introduce new subject matter or disrupt form to draw attention to anything but
the writing, with its startling clarity, sentence by cliché-less sentence, and its
humor. He knows precisely how speech works in dialogue and in the narrative
core, where he manages the first-person narrator not as a surrogate for himself
but as an actual character in relation to the plot. This is true even of The Rachel
Papers. The aesthetic integrity of the novels is admirable, even if, compared
with the later work, a little effortful. As Diana Parry, despairing of Appleseed
Rectory in Dead Babies, remarks, in the form of a question that sets the agenda
for Amis’s sinking England, “Don’t you think we must have made a mistake a
long time ago to end up like this. That something went wrong and that’s why
we’re all so dead now?” The three Americans, Marvell Buzhardt, Skip Marshall,
and Roxeanne Smith, are sinister, not dead themselves but accelerators in the
process of brutalization. “But pity the dead babies. Now, before it starts. They
couldn’t know what was behind them, nor what was to come. The past? They had
| 1103 |
none. Like children after a long day’s journey, their lives arranged themselves in
a patchwork of vanished mornings, lost afternoons and probable yesterdays.”
Amis strikes this heart-stopping note when he registers, as we do along with him,
what is.
Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) is described as a “transitional novel,” which
is to say it is a deliberate attempt, not in itself successful, to change gear. A young
woman emerges from a coma with no memory and no ability to relate. The nar-
rator is not the protagonist but a voice from which the girl (now calling herself
Mary Lamb) flees into the corrupt and corrupting world. She finds her way, rises,
and has her comeuppance, as Amis’s protagonists do. In her case, having in a
sense made herself, the mystery of who she “really is” is resolved. There is smoke
and mirrors of a metafictional kind, which Amis handles uneasily, but he is learn-
ing the skills necessary for London Fields.
The next “phase” is the remarkable flowering in the “London trilogy” consist-
ing of Money: A Suicide Note (1984), London Fields (1989), and The Information (1995),
which together trace a characteristic world that incorporates Amis’s London and
his New York, places his prose redefines. Composition of the suite was inter-
rupted by his experimental masterpiece Time’s Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence
(1991), told “bassackward.” He set himself a challenge that had been attempted by
other writers—Fitzgerald in “The Life of Benjamin Button,” Philip K. Dick in
Blade Runner, C. H. Sisson in Christopher Homm. What is new is the way in which
Amis incorporates the reverse narrative principle into the narrative style itself,
and applies it to the Holocaust. “I saw the old Jew float to the surface of the deep
latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life, and was hoisted out by the jubi-
lant guards, his clothes cleansed by the mire. Then they put his beard back on.”
Dr. Mengele, the narrator’s boss, works miracles of healing in this reverse
world, poignant, agonizingly so, because of the merciless irony of reversal. The
destroyed world is reconstituted in its pulse and color. Out of the death trenches
thousands emerge, as at a day of resurrection. Amis set himself the rule of not
inventing, “you have such a horror of adding to what you are describing.” The
arrow of the title is many things, most memorably the static, painted hands on
the Treblinka tower clock. Amis did the dreadful research, his narrator a kind
of innocent incubus, a “passenger or parasite” living within the head of a doctor
from a Nazi death camp. Our journey traces his life from its sour deathbed in
the United States, where we know “him” as Tod Friendly (the given name is
German for “death”), and he fl ickers on like a faulty neon, to his birth in Ger-
many where he is roughly planted in conception and christened Odilo Unver-
dorben (the surname translates as “Undepraved,” he returns to “innocence”).
The narrator is paradoxically innocent, sentimental; the book builds to the ap-
palling, astonishing reverse reading of Auschwitz. Amis acknowledges a debt
| 1104 |
PA R I A H S
to Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, the stimulus for his novel not only in the
story it tells but in the psychology of Tod Friendly with his detachable incubus,
always moving away from consequences and guilt.
Reflecting on The Information, Margaret Atwood sets Amis alongside David
Foster Wallace: “Why this self-loathing?” she asks. Is that what underpins the
London trilogy? Are the narrators inseparable from the writer’s “self,” and do we
as readers trace John Self, Samson Young (the American writer with a two-decade
writer’s block), and Richard Toll, sour, middle-aged narrators, back to Amis, and
to Amis’s point of view? When “Martin Amis” becomes a consoling, patient
character in Money, trying to buck up the flailing protagonist, does this not let
the author off that facile identity hook? Is the ridiculously successful and always
mysteriously present, though absent, Mark Asprey, one of whose pen names is
Marius Appleby, not a more likely Amis surrogate (the initials, reiterated, are an
obvious clue) than dying Samson Young, who is occupying his flat in London
Fields? Attempts at biographical readings of Amis are limiting, even those that
relate to The Rachel Papers and The Pregnant Widow (2010). The books can be
grouped in tonally related batches, and there is an inevitable Amis inflection,
but each novel untangles different illusions with a different narrative outlook.
The murder mystery of London Fields, in which a victim plans and colludes in
her own murder, is remote from Muriel Spark’s pure, abstract plotting in The
Driver’s Seat, not only in scale (it is Amis’s longest and most formally elaborated
performance) but in techniques of control and projections that, with their bril-
liant handling of chronology, point in the direction of Time’s Arrow.
The world of Money is Rabelaisian in its extremes of debauchery, the writer
going along with each hyperbole and the language it proposes, English and
American, as he shunts back and forth across the Atlantic. The book grows
deeper and stormier with the sexual, psychological, and financial intrigues against
him. Subsequent novels are more controlled and intense. His most Falstaffian vil-
lain is the gross, belching, eloquent, resourceful, low-life darts enthusiast Keith
Talent (Amis’s most complete monster, cheat, porno-addict, rapist, his savory
misnomer) with his long-suffering wife and his sweet, abused, slowly corrupted
daughter, Kim, the Little Nell of London Fields, and his deathless dog, Clive. Nic-
ola Six is a sexy nemesis, Nabokovian, her fictionality established early, who be-
gins to act in ways the narrator cannot anticipate or control. And there are
Guy Clinch, the cheatable innocent, the novel’s paymaster, English in his val-
ues and vulnerabilities, his son Marmaduke, titanic toddler, and his American
wife, Hope, with a mind of her own.
Amis always seems to offend. London Fields failed to make the cut for the
Booker Prize shortlist in 1989 because two of the panel did not like the ways in
which it treated women. That year the prize went to Kazuo Ishiguro for The
| 1105 |
Remains of the Day. The novelist Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, according to the
prize director, Martyn Goff, “simply felt that the author should make it clear he
didn’t favor or bless that sort of treatment. Really, there was only two of them and
they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in agreement.” The
chairman of the judges, David Lodge, regretted caving in. The secret discussions
of a judging panel have seldom been more public. Amis’s Night Train (1997) might
answer his female critics. It is narrated by Mike Hoolihan, an American detective,
a recovering alcoholic, looking into a suicide. Mike is a woman. The language
is—pace Updike, who disparaged it—convincingly American. Having envisaged
an almost apocalyptic United States, one wonders why Amis considered emigrat-
ing; revisiting the London trilogy, the motives grow clearer.
Amis is a great essayist. Since the turn of the millennium his nonfiction has
come into its own. His indignant writing against the trahison des clercs of our
own time has made him few friends. Journalistic hostility to his success in draw-
ing down large publisher’s advances has told against him. He became the media
whipping boy of British fiction, and the reception of Yellow Dog (2003), with its
tabloid hack Clint Smoker, and House of Meetings (2006) was ugly. Amis did not
need to defend them, but he did so anyway. Keeping counsel has never been his
strong suit, and this is one reason for admiring him. The literary challenge of
the style of Yellow Dog, he said, made contemporary readers aware of “how thick
they are,” and they did not much like it. He saw the book’s reception as further
evidence of resentment of “a higher voice” in fiction, by which he meant not a
socially superior voice but one that is able to move in the higher registers. The
Pregnant Widow he revised and added to until it was a definitive return to the
1970s as he experienced them, but the view taken is from “the present,” another
reverse chronology, as it were, a making (tragic) sense of the upheavals of the
last forty years, seen in comic and appalling germination. The book is a compan-
ion piece to Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012), in which the title character wins
£90 million on the lottery. Lionel is extreme, certainly, and entertaining, though
he lacks the solid necessity, the epic girth, of Keith Talent.
One constant in Amis’s prose is its unostentatious allusiveness. Philip Lar-
kin’s poetry, for example, feeds in as phrase and cadence: This is how a reader’s
language is colonized, in a good way, by a memorable writer. The “black sailed
unfamiliar” of “Next Please” is clearly the vehicle Amis has in view much of the
time. And when a narrator suddenly suffers an irruption of Larkin, or Shake-
speare, or Auden, you glimpse the novelist through the fictional voice. In the
end, it is the novels’ intelligence and the integrity of their conception, the com-
pleteness of their fictionality, the necessity of all they tell and do, that sets them
apart as unillusioned takes on a world that spins faster and faster.
| 1106 |
Timeline
Index

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| 45 |

ready to misunderstand the excessively lean and unconventional boy. At eigh-

from each reader a different metamorphosis, based on our deepest aversions.

disregard of inessential context, speech. In reading Herzen’s memoirs Kafka

a flood of rumors about a stockpile of unpublished writings. As rumor gradu-

still developing a protective knack of irony. Here is an infant Gatsby, before

Portnoy Roth describes as “a novel cast in the form of an analytic monologue

them. Here most purely we experience Roth’s “daily awareness of government

reproach to the sentimentality of certain young American writers and not-so-

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