The irreconcilable conflicts within

Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). 193 pages.

In late May or early June of 1952, Robert Lowell wrote to Flannery O’Connor after reading her story “Enoch and the Gorilla” in New World Writing (it was later revised for a chapter of Wise Blood):

[Y]ou’re as good as ever, only really and enviably professional. Ford used to say that you could tell if a writer was any good from the first sentence. . . . Your first two sentences show you know your craft, and the end of the first and the word “downpour” in the second do even more. When I was through reading I could have hugged the gorilla. The whole incident is rather epically dismal. . . . I’m delighted to see that your novel is about to be published; I think it will be something absolute of its kind and want to hail it and promise that we will keep a copy under our pillows so that we can always say “Isn’t it wonderful that life is so awful, and that man’s misery is without grandeur.”[1]They had met three years earlier when both were at Yaddo. Lowell intervened in O’Connor’s literary life, introducing his eight-years-younger friend to Robert Giroux, who was to remain her editor to the end. O’Connor intervened in Lowell’s religious life, serving as a witness to his “reconversion” to Roman Catholicism. In March 1949, on “the day of Flannery O’Connor, whose patron saint is St. Therese of Lisieux,” Lowell baptized himself in a cold bath in his New York apartment, praying “in gasps.” Years later O’Connor tried to “stash & obliterate” the “revolting story” that Lowell believed her to be a saint (he was “about three steps from the asylum” and was “canonizing everybody that had anything to do with his situation then”).[2] Who knows but that her later anger was rooted in her deep humility? Many of Flannery O’Connor’s readers have come to a conclusion not much different from Lowell’s.

Out of these materials, Carlene Bauer has constructed a first novel that is remarkable for its ambition (in such a short novel) and for the sureness of its historical grasp (in a novelist so young). Born nine years after the death of O’Connor and four years before the death of Lowell, Bauer comes out of a strikingly different milieu, as she made clear in Not That Kind of Girl, the coming-of-age memoir that was her first book. The daughter of a born-again evangelical Christian mother and a lapsed Catholic father, she was harried by rock music as much as questions of faith, and she had nothing like Lowell’s family tradition nor O’Connor’s Christ-haunted South (and the theological conception of man that came with it) to give her a place to start. She grew up in cul-de-sac suburban New Jersey.

In Frances and Bernard, Bauer imagines literary life and religious life under different circumstances. Frances Reardon is a Philadelphia-born fiction writer who has “just escaped from the workshop at Iowa.” (Her first novel, about a nun who receives stigmata, sounds suspiciously like Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy.) Bernard Eliot is a Harvard-educated poet with Puritan ancestors and sounds of John Donne “prowling around in the boiler room” of his poems. In the summer of 1957 they meet while in residence at “the colony” (it’s never called anything more than that). Both are Catholics. Frances is a cradle Catholic, and “a little Mother Superiorish,” according to Bernard. He is a convert. As a senior at Harvard, he met a theologian who urged him to read Jacques Maritain. (Reading Maritain became a convention of American literary intellectuals’ postwar Catholic conversion narratives, although by now Maritain is more a name to be mentioned than a text to be quoted.) After reading Maritain, Bernard decided to become a Catholic. He glimpsed in Catholicism “a way to make a sustained and coherent statement about what I believed.” Although Frances worries that it “could be a sign of delusions of grandeur, when a Puritan turns to Rome,” within a month of leaving the colony they commence an eleven-year correspondence.

Frances and Bernard is a return to the English-language novel’s oldest kind. It is an episolary novel. And it puts out for the taking all the pleasures of the best epistolary novels—the shifts in point of view, the divergent accounts of the same event, the necessary inferences, the coy white spaces between the letters, the mysterious silences. Bauer has fun with the genre without making genre-fun the point of her novel. “To accept the fact that [other people] are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God,” Bernard significantly quotes Simone Weil at one point. “I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.” The back-and-forth of letters between them demonstrates the truth of both these propositions—perhaps no other form of fiction is so effective at preserving the intransmutable otherness of fictional characters. As Patrick Kurp said in his recent review of Anthony Hecht’s letters, “Perhaps the most important ingredient [in a good letter] is revelation of character, the writer’s willingness to reveal, inadvertently or otherwise, some truth about himself.” And if the writer is not aware of the full truth about himself, so much the better!

Because they are rambles, because they have no other form than the movement of the writer’s mind, letters also permit the unsystematic discussion of pressing ideas. Bauer takes full advantage of letters’ capacity to include thought, which would otherwise have to be disguised as monologue. Bernard begins their correspondence by asking Frances, “Who is the Holy Spirit to you?” The resulting dialectic is promising. “I believe he is grace and wisdom,” Frances replies. To which Bernard says:I don’t know what the Holy Spirit is or does. I think this is because I came to Catholicism late and have felt hesitant to penetrate this mystery. Protestants shove the Holy Spirit to the side—too mystical, too much distraction from the Father and Son. They regard the Holy Spirit with the same suspicion, I think, as they do the saints—it’s a form of idolatry to shift the focus to a third party, whether it be the Holy Spirit or Saint Francis. To appeal to the third party is pagan. Is he grace and wisdom? How do you know?Over the course of the novel, they say other equally interesting things to each other. They quote Augustine and Kierkegaard and William James; they discuss prayer and the liturgy and the “craving for God’s mercy.” But the Holy Spirit is never spoken of again. They quietly drop the subject. Within a few pages, Frances is assuring him that she has “always voted for Democrats,” while Bernard is bragging about the demonstrations he has led, including one “to protest [Harvard]’s hiring of a right-wing ideologue whose work was a tract against welfare.” Thank goodness they’ve established their political fides, even if they must sound like they are writing in 1968 and not 1958.

The sad fact is that, with all its squibs and chatter about Catholicism and the thirst for God, Frances and Bernard advances religion as merely a complex series of steps in the dance of courtship. Bauer’s novel is not a religious novel at all; it is a love story—a marriage plot, as we’ve been taught to say—dressed up to look like something else.

Bernard first raises the question of love eight months into their correspondence—in his eleventh letter—at which point they begin to discuss their friends’ marriages. Frances takes a job in New York and a room at the Barbizon. Two months later Bernard comes to town for a visit. Thus ends the first chapter of their courtship.

“I did not come to New York intending to kiss you,” Bernard writes to close the second chapter and open the third. (I am supplying the old-fashioned numbers Bauer withholds.) What he describes as a kiss, however, Frances describes as a “manic episode,” an outbreak of the mental illness that has been “lying in wait for him.” He surprises her by showing up unannounced at church. “It’s your birthday,” he begins to rave, “your feast day, and this is why I have come. Today is the day of Frances Reardon . . . patron saint of frigid knees. Of unmet wishes, of idées fixes, of withering eyes, of docile guise.” He gets up and starts walking up and down the central aisle, shouting, “This place is a place where the people come to drink. . . . They drink to forget, to die to what is real, they slump over in prayer, drinking and drinking in remembrance of me.” He begins throwing missals. An ambulance arrives, and it takes four attendants to wrestle him down and bear him away. Bernard is committed to a mental hospital outside Boston. The whole experience has turned her “into a crazy person too,” as Frances writes to her friend Claire (an old married friend who is to her as Sally Fitzgerald was to Flannery O’Connor)—she has entered “into the realm of what if and who’s there?”

Bernard loses his faith, and Frances tries to comfort him as best she can. After six months, he moves to New York and the fourth chapter of their romance begins. “See,” he says, “We can keep up a conversation without God at the center. . . .” Living in the same city, though, they do not write to each other—their conversations are kept up with others, to whom they confide the romantic details. Bernard kisses her again; her friend Claire reassures Frances that Bernard is in love with her; his friend Ted writes to reassure her that she is not just another of the “many infatuations” Bernard has had “when he is not in his right mind.” Frances takes him home to meet the family, who demonstratively approve. “I bet you keep each other good company,” her father says.

Then a fight—and Frances and Bernard become unreliable narrators, offering irreconcilable versions of what happened in letters to friends. By this point in the novel, fifty pages from the end, you are more likely to credit Frances. She has become a fascinating woman by this point, worrying that she has “vinegar where [her] blood should be.” “No man should give himself the way [Bernard] does to me,” she complains to Claire, “and receive mere acquiescence in return.” The conflicts within her are irreconcilable too. She is not sure that she can be a mother and also the writer she has set herself to be. (Bernard agrees: “[A]ll the women writers I know are libertines,” he says.) She dismisses herself as “lukewarm,” but the truth is otherwise. “[T]he more consciously spiritual a person appears to be,” she writes to Bernard in an early letter, “the less truly spiritual that person is.” The truth is that Frances is afraid, really, of only one thing—that she will be accused of exhibitionism, the pride of self-display, in either religion or romance. But the truth is also that, for all her complaints about the Church, she is a Christian—she is sane—and Bernard is neither.

Thus the inevitable breakup. Bauer’s resolution is disappointing—Frances marries a French professor, Bernard marries the girl who interviewed him for the Paris Review—but the disappointment of the ending is as nothing compared to what Bauer leaves unfinished and unexplored. In what might have been the novel’s climax, Frances bares her soul on a dark night in a letter to a nun she has befriended. She ends up not sending the letter (a nice touch), but only perhaps because her quarrel with God, as she herself says, is adolescent:Some of us have a talent for suffering—but I guess I don’t. What is the point of God if he cannot soothe us? What is the point of believing in something all-powerful if he cannot give you the strength to go on at this very moment? What is the point of other people if you cannot keep your hands on them?It is difficult to imagine that Flannery O’Connor would have much patience for all this. In The Habit of Being, which Bauer lists among her favorite books, O’Connor says that “modern liberal Protestantism” encourages us “to turn religion into poetry and therapy,” and if we aren’t getting what we want (“security and emotional release and sense of purpose” and what all) then we might as well reject it:Of course, I am a Catholic and I believe the opposite of all this. I believe what the Church teaches—that God has given us reason to use and that it can lead us toward a knowledge of him, through analogy; that he has revealed himself in history and continues to do so through the Church, and that he is present (not just symbolically) in the Eucharist on our altars. To believe all this I don’t take any leap into the absurd. I find it reasonable to believe, even though these beliefs are beyond reason.[3]But then the religiosity of Bauer’s Frances, with her mistrust of “severity” and priests (“I have never gone to a priest about anything in my life”) and parishioners (“Parishioners are not Christians,” she writes. “They are parishioners”), may owe more to modern liberal Protestantism than to Rome.

At a time when the novel of belief is said to have disappeared, it is gratifying to see a young writer of Carlene Bauer’s seriousness and talent equip her characters with religious experience and a religious vocabulary, even if she falls victim in the end to what Denis de Rougemont calls the universal propaganda on behalf of romantic passion. It’s also gratifying to see such a gifted first novelist return to the riches of the novel’s tradition, although you turn the last page and turn from Bernard’s plea to be kept in Frances’s prayers to Bauer’s own acknowledgments of her own friends and mentors—in the same typeface but a different tone of voice, as if these acknowledgments were not another document to be included in this epistolary novel. For next time, a word of advice. Send a letter.
____________________

[1] Robert Lowell, No. 211 (To Flannery O’Connor), The Letters, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), pp. 187–88.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, To “A” [Betty Hester], May 14, 1960, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), p. 395.

[3] O’Connor, To Alfred Corn, June 16, 1962, The Habit of Being, p. 479.

A farewell to Roth (for now)

It may be time for me to shut the hell up about Philip Roth. On Sunday afternoon, at the local Jewish Community Center’s “Day of Jewish Learning,” I offered a session called “Roth Roth Roth Roth Roth Roth Roth”—a private joke, a twist on Daniel Hoffman’s 1973 book Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Hoffman took his title from a line in Poe’s story “Berenice,” in which the narrator longs to “dream away whole days” by (among other methods) repeating, “monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatsoever to the mind. . . .” Mimicking the narrator, Hoffman found himself repeating Poe’s name to himself until it became “not a name at all but now a note, a tone struck upon some inward anvil of my being, one syllable in a chord I strained to hear, an ineffable harmony plucked from some sphere beyond the meshes of our common feelings” (Hoffman was also a poet).

That’s a pretty good description, at all events, of the sense Roth’s name has come to have for me. I talk about Roth so often—I have become identified with Roth so closely, by those who know me and those who don’t—that my unwearied Roth-flogging has become a cliché, if not a joke. On Saturday night my wife and I went out with friends to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth installment in the Die Hard series. (Give me John McClane, shaved head, two-day stubble, old tee-shirt, over James Bond’s oversexed elegance any day.) My friend Benjy asked whether I would be teaching at the Day of Jewish Learning the next day. When I admitted I was, he said, “On Roth, right?”

When it came time for the class, exactly five students showed up. Including one man, a little younger than I, who demanded, as he was sitting down, “Just who is Roth?” Damned good question. In The Ghost Writer, an older Nathan Zuckerman explains why, at twenty-three, he had made a literary pilgrimmage to E. I. Lonoff, what Lonoff meant to him:

[His] fiction seemed to me a response to the same burden of exclusion and confinement that still weighed upon the lives of those who had raised me, and that had informed our relentless househould obsession with the status of the Jews. The pride inspired in my parents by the establishment in 1948 of a homeland in Palestine that would gather in the unmurdered remnant of European Jewry was, in fact, not so unlike what well up in me when I first came upon Lonoff’s thwarted, secretive, imprisoned souls, and realized that out of everything humbling from which my own striving, troubled father had labored to elevate us all, a literature of such dour wit and poignancy could be shamelessly conceived.Roth, in short, is someone the Jews might be proud of—a kosher end for this most treyfe of Jewish writers, about whom Marie Syrkin complained, in a 1973 letter to Commentary, that his portraits of the Jews are “straight out of the Goebbels-Streicher script.”

A large part of Roth’s genius is to have taken his critics seriously, even the most pious and disdainful among them. “Opposition determines your direction,” Maria tells Zuckerman in The Counterlife. “You would probably never have written those books about Jews if Jews hadn’t insisted on telling you not to.” Roth’s novels are (to use another phrase from The Counterlife) “conversational duels” between the spokesmen for different Jewish ways of life. Roth did not set out to take revenge on his critics; he admitted them into his fiction, where he could debate them (but only if he allowed them their say). And as the great Ruth Wisse says of much Jewish fiction, the drama is in the debate.

Of all Jewish writers, then, Roth is the one whom Jews, especially secularized American Jews, have a moral obligation to read. At least that’s what I claimed at the “Day of Jewish Learning.” (Fat lot of good it did Roth. Even if I convinced my listeners, I won him only an additional five readers.) If you aren’t going to go to shul and pray three times a day, if you aren’t going to emigrate to Israel and raise children to speak in Hebrew, then you can be a Jew, you can establish and explore your Jewish identity, by reading the fiction of Philip Roth.

None of the five “learners” laughed. Who deserves the credit for that? Maybe they were unsure whether to make me seriously. I meant every word, though. Postwar Jewish fiction, especially Roth’s fiction (but not only his), could be a source of pride to the Jews almost as gratifying as their chest-swelling Zionism. And why? Because it is very nearly as great a triumph as the establishment of the state of Israel. Heretical, I know—but only, perhaps, because the critics have been too nervous and indecisive to say so. (Hello, outrage!) And even if not quite as remarkable an achievement as the creation of a Jewish state, postwar Jewish fiction was nevetheless an indispensable means and an important symbol of the Jews’ advancement into the social and cultural mainstream. Consider the record. Saul Bellow, Vasili Grossman, Bernard Malamud, Amos Oz, Yehuda Amichai, Chaim Grade, Albert Cohen, Henryk Grynberg, Cynthia Ozick, Shulamith Hareven, Mordecai Richler, Aharon Appelfeld, A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Francine Prose, Leon de Winter, Howard Jacobson, Steve Stern, Michael Chabon—and those are just the biggest names! No matter how you slice it, postwar Jewish fiction is a monument to Jewish imagination and persistence. And Roth might just be the best writer of it.

He was certainly the one who made an issue of it. The Jews’ obsession with Jewish status, and the effect of that obsession on the Jewish writer who tried to write about it, was his overriding subject. After four decades of writing my own things about Roth, however—I wrote my first essay on him, “Philip Roth and the Toilet Bowl of American Fiction,” for my high-school literary magazine, although the faculty adviser spiked it—I am finding my own arguments less and less compelling. Perhaps because the Jews’ obsession with Jewish status belonged to a specific historical moment, which has now passed. The debates over Jewish identity in Roth’s fiction have begun to read like historical transcripts, and reading them has begun to seem like reading about the debates that determined and swirled around the Oxford Movement—fascinating but also foreign, fusty, and even a little amusing. It’s sometimes hard to believe that anyone got so worked up about such issues as the status of the Irish church and William Palmer’s “Branch Theory.” Or about the deracination of Jews in the suburbs. Or about fears of American antisemitism.

“What, another book on Poe!” Hoffman begins his own book. “Who needs it?” I suspect that’s what editors have said to themselves when I have pitched to them my plan for a comprehensive study of Roth, an intellectual biography from “The first time I saw Brenda” to “he seemed to us invincible.” No one seems to want any such book. Farewell, then, O friend of my youth and middle age! Farewell—until I can find a more compelling argument for your indispensability, a wider context for your peculiar genius.

A critic’s jealousy

In a Salon essay that is attracting a fair amount of attention, the critic Alexander Nazaryan has confessed that at least some of his book reviews will have to be tossed out now; they carry the “stench of bitterness.” He “trashed” the first novels by young men his own age (“young men whose profiles were similar to [his],” whatever that means away from Facebook), because he was “set aflame by jealousy.” They had done, you see, what he had not. They had finished a novel! They had gotten it published! His essay at Salon is Nazaryan’s apology to them.

Let me hurry to confess that I am jealous of Nazaryan, because he has a staff position at the New York Daily News, editing the paper’s Page Views book blog, and I do not. (By the way, does it qualify as Schadenfreude to observe that Commentary has not published a word of literary criticism since firing me in November?) I am not jealous of Nazaryan’s confession, though. Don’t misunderstand me. I am as beset by small-mindedness as any other critic. But I have never written a review out of jealousy, and cannot really understand what it would mean to do so. I have abused my share of bad books—Richard Ohmann’s Politics of Letters, Rafael Yglesias’s A Happy Marriage, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Nicole Krauss’s Great House, Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet—but never out of the fear that their authors’ success magnified my own failure. For one thing, I did not consider the authors to be successes (even if I acknowledge that I am a failure). For another, I do not think literary success is a zero-sum game. Nor (although Nazaryan holds that only “hopeless naïfs” fail to do so) do I equate literary success with “fame, greatness and immortality, preferably in that order.”

My own small-mindedness, when I am overcome by it, reveals itself as self-righteousness, as if the Holy One, Blessed Be He, had called to me from a burning bush to act as the defender of literary tradition. I am not bitter that some writers have succeeded where I have failed; I am angry that they have settled for such a measly simulacrum of success. Consider Nazaryan’s own literary ambitions:

Allow me to be immodest: I would like to write the best thing about Brooklyn since William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and a campus novel to rival Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.William Styron and Donna Tartt? Really? That’s your idea of literary greatness, is it? Now imagine a young actor’s announcing his “immodest” ambition to do community theater.

Like Nazaryan, I too wanted to be a novelist once upon a time. (Till I admitted to myself that I lacked the talent.) My thwarted ambition to write fiction did not leave me jealous of published novelists, though. It gave me a specialized knowledge, an insider’s vantage—the same way an amateur tennis player can see things at the U.S. Open that escape those who have never tried to master the difficult game. But an amateur who is jealous of Roger Federer isn’t particularly interested in tennis; he is engaging in a narcissistic fantasy.

Nazaryan is quick to say that his confession of jealousy has not tainted all of his reviews, and I hope he is right. (I am personally grateful to him for his report on my firing.) I worry, though, that he may be wrong. He is like a crime lab that admits it fudged the results to get a conviction, but just in this one case—all its other results are accurate! A critic asks his readers to trust that his judgments are motivated by a disinterested passion for good books. And once that trust is lost. . . .

“The rest is marketing”

After listening to an eight-minute interview on NPR with a novelist who has a new book out (“She gamely answered the interviewer’s questions”), Patrick Kurp found that he was left with a “mild aftertaste of disgust,” even though his personal impression of the novelist was favorable. He could imagine himself enjoying a conversation with her. Why the disgust, then? As is his literary policy, Kurp turned to another writer to tease out an answer, to elaborate the thought. In this case the writer was L. E. Sissman, who said in his “Innocent Bystander” column in the Atlantic (a precursor of the book blog) that the “serious writer must take serious vows if he is to concentrate on his chief aim.” And among these is a “vow of silence, except through his work.”

“The rest is marketing,” Kurp concluded. Here he was alluding to the famous scene in the Bavli (Shabbat 31a) in which a derisive skeptic approaches Rabbi Hillel and asks him to explain the entire Torah while standing on one foot. “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor,” he replied; “that is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary.” Likewise, Sissman was summing up the literary life while standing on one foot. Apart from the years of practice, the hard work, the sacrifice, the solitude, and the subordination of “the self as personality” to the “self as writer,” there is much else that may seem as if it were literature, but it isn’t; it is extraliterary; it is supplemental; it is mere commentary on the literary life.

From an early age I wanted nothing else than to be a writer. I didn’t know how to go about it, aside from reading my eyes out and writing so much I raised a thick horny callus on my middle finger, but from the beginning I knew exactly how not to go about it. I can remember the ads for Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writers School, which promised to teach me “to write successfully at home.” They made me vaguely suspicious, although I couldn’t say why. Believing that he was encouraging my ambitions, my grandfather, alav hashalom, bought me a subscription to the Writer magazine. I hated it, couldn’t finish the first issue, begged Grandpa not to renew the subscription. Advice for getting published, eight ways to make your manuscript stand out, how to find an agent, establishing an author platform, nine tips for marketing your first book—these hold out as much appeal for me as the book How to Seduce a Woman and Get Her Sexually Addicted to You in 5 Steps. The strategizing may even work, but what does the lucky winner end up with? A man who hopes to marry a woman is not thinking about seducing her.

In The Elephants Teach, I pointed out that the first practical how-to guides to writing were primarily by women. (A couple of them, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer and Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, both dating from the ’thirties, are still in print.) The relentlessly practical tone of these books identify them for what they are—self-help books. Not all of them are like Esther L. Schwartz’s So You Want to Write! (1936), which treats literature as a commodity that might contribute hard cash to the household income. But they are unanimous in rejecting what Schwartz calls “quality” and “artiness”; they laugh off the view that writing is, as Brande taunts it, a “holy mystery”; they urge young would-be writers to avoid what Margaret Widdemer in Do You Want to Write? (1937) calls “the highbrows.” Their attitude is easy to understand. Since women’s writing was not taken very seriously by male critics in the ’thirties, those critics’ claims for highbrow literature—the demands for quality and artiness, the hush surrounding literature’s holy mystery—must have seemed like rules for excluding women. Practical advice was women writers’ revenge on the men’s club.

Times have changed. In the 21st century, Sissman’s “serious writer” is as likely to be a woman as a man. Take one of my favorites. Marly Youmans is, as John Wilson of Books and Culture describes her, an “invisible novelist.” Although four of her novels were published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, she had to settle for Mercer University Press—not even a major university press—to publish her remarkable Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, a deeply Christian novel in an age that has been said to have abandoned the novel of belief. Her most recent book is a blank-verse epic. A writer who has more resolutely stood her ground against the tide of literary fashion would be difficult to name. And yet Youmans insists that it is “impossible” to “say ‘no’ to marketing.” To do so, she says, is to yearn for a “fairy tale world where no such work is needed.” As Ellen Olenska says to Newland Archer, “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?”

I think Youmans may have misunderstood Kurp. I don’t think the literary life—the life of serious writing—is a “fairy tale” any more than I think (or than she thinks, I’d wager) that some writing, the writing also known as literature, has been called “serious” only for the sake of keeping women out. There is literature and there is marketing. A writer may or may not have to market her own book, but if she does so, she is no longer writing; she is marketing. For a serious writer, there is something vaguely distasteful about the need to market one’s books. Perhaps the source lies in class feeling, an ill-defined condescension to the life of commerce. Or perhaps the source lies in an impatience to get back to writing, the querulous feeling that one is wasting unrecoverable time in the pursuit of something other than literature. Whatever its source, the distaste is real and not to be denied. And when those of us who are serious about writing hear someone publicly talking about her books—hawking her wares instead of letting her prose do all the talking—we realize that we are not hearing about literature at all, but about the acceptable substitutes which are offered to a world not much interested in literature. We experience the same involuntary unease. It is impossible to live wholly for literature, but it is disgusting that we cannot.

Portnoy’s complaining voice

The most striking thing about Portnoy’s Complaint is its voice. Time has not softened its jolt:

What is he doing to himself, this fool! this idiot! this furtive boy! This sex maniac! He simply cannot—will not—control the fires in his putz, the fevers in his brain, the desire continually burning within for the new, the wild, the unthought-of and, if you can imagine such a thing, the undreamt-of. Where cunt is concerned he lives in a condition that has neither diminished nor in any significant way been refined from what it was when he was fifteen years old and could not get up from his seat in the classroom without hiding a hard-on beneath his three-ring notebook. Every girl he sees turns out (hold your hats) to be carrying around between her legs—a real cunt. Amazing! Astonishing! Still can’t get over the fantastic idea that when you are looking at a girl, you are looking at somebody who is guaranteed to have on her—a cunt! They all have cunts! Right under their dresses! Cunts—for fucking![1]Portnoy was not the first in American fiction to use such language. Three-and-a-half decades earlier, Henry Miller had permitted Carl, a friend of the narrator, to go on like this:You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn’t have to have any brains. They’re better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she’s brilliant, even if she’s the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn’t put meat on their arms or juice between the legs.[2]The difference in tone is immediately apparent—Portnoy is feverish with astonishment, while Carl’s is the tired voice of habitual promiscuity—but not even Miller tried to write an entire book in such language. Portnoy’s voice, by contrast, is largely what Roth’s novel is for. It was an overt break, an intentional break, with what had come before—not only with Miller’s relative lack of daring, but also with what Roth would later call his own “literary conscience.” The young American Jewish writer Ilan Mochari, whose first novel Zinsky the Obscure owes an unrepayable debt to Roth’s fourth book, locates the break within Roth’s own career. He asks:Did the traditional, Jamesian traits of Letting Go and its follow-up, When She Was Good (1967), make it easier for critics to acclaim the raucous boundary-smashing of Portnoy? Which is to say: Did critics further appreciate Portnoy’s lack of old-school structure as a conscientious artistic choice because Roth had already proven he could write the formal stuff?Or did Roth, in writing his first three books, find that the refined voice of American literary realism, owing as much to Howells and even Sinclair Lewis as to James, was fundamentally incompatible with very coarseness of life, which the realists sought to admit into literature? The answers to these questions are likely to remain mysteries, even to Roth’s authorized biographer. What can be said with a little greater certainty is that no one like Alexander Portnoy had ever been heard before in American prose fiction. Portnoy’s Complaint represented a break, with literary tradition and conscience, in how it sounded.

The critics have never succeeded in describing the sound. Ross Posnock showers it with adjectives: “exorbitant, raw, regressive,” “Huck Finnish” (twice), “shrill,” “flamboyant,” “manically shameless,” “Dionysian (and literary),” “outrageous,” but “curiously inhibited” when compared to the later Sabbath’s Theater—oh, and don’t forget “immature.”[3] Bernard Avishai had the advantage of consulting Roth’s notes. “The background I was overthrowing was literary,” Roth scribbled: Portnoy does not give voice to “the dignified unacceptable thoughts” but to the “stinky unacceptable thoughts,” because he has a “grotesque conception of life.” Avishai, however, is unwilling to take Roth at his word:[Readers] could not assume Portnoy’s story was simply grotesque. They could not assume Portnoy’s voice was, first and foremost, self-satirizing. Portnoy remained adorable somehow, the consummate stand-up comic, his parents and lovers the justified targets of his petulance, the character through which Roth liberated his voice and spirit. It has been hard to see Roth’s protagonist as a mere literary device.[4]Love that mere. For a political economist and business professor, there is always something more important than literature. Perhaps not for a writer, though—especially for one like Roth, who devoted an entire life, solitary and childless, to the struggle with writing. What outsiders to literature do not seem to comprehend is that writing is a struggle, not just with sentences and paragraphs, but with other writers, other styles and voices and strategies for getting things said. Literature is a ceaseless conversation and sometimes even a debate with one’s predecessors and contemporaries and even with one’s younger writing self. To see Portnoy as a literary device is to see him as he draws himself up to full height.

Roth was pretty clear what he was up to. Portnoy’s Complaint, he said, is a novel in the form of a confession, not a confession in the form of a novel. It is not the thinly fictionalized revelation of personal and embarrassing facts about the author. “Novel writing is for the novelist a game of let’s pretend,” he said in his open letter to Wikipedia. The novel pretends to be one thing (in this case, a long-winded “talking cure” addressed to a psychoanalyst, Doctor Spielvogel, who is referred to now and again), but in reality it is an elaborate mechanism and disguise for making meanings that can be made in no other way. Let Portnoy explain:All I do is complain, the repugnance seems bottomless, and I’m beginning to wonder if maybe enough isn’t enough. I hear myself indulging in the kind of ritualized bellyaching that is just what gives psychoanalytic patients such a bad name with the general public. . . . Is this truth I’m delivering up, or is it just plain kvetching? Or is kvetching for people like me a form of truth? (p. 94)Portnoy never clarifies what sort of people are people like him. Jews who were born in 1933, raised in Newark, attended a good college (Antioch, say, or Bucknell), hold the correct liberal opinions? The phrase seems a throwaway until you begin to suspect that, on the lower frequencies, he speaks for you. Portnoy’s kvetch is a form of truth for people like him—that is, like all of us moderns and postmoderns—who are suspended between two worlds, one that claims us, the other that beguiles us, neither of which we can acknowledge without resort to irony or derision.

Here is a good example of the bilateral condition I am trying to describe. “The Jews I despise,” Portnoy says,for their narrow-mindedness, their self-righteousness, the incredibly bizarre sense that these cave men who are my parents and relatives have somehow gotten of their superiority—but when it comes to tawdriness and cheapness, to beliefs that would shame even a gorilla, you simply cannot top the goyim. (p. 168)To hell with the Jews and their airs of superiority! I’m better than that. I’m certainly better than the goyim! Portnoy’s voice is only intermittently “self-satirizing” (as Avishai calls it) or self-abusive (to mint an appropriate pun). Yes, Portnoy degrades himself. “Whom am I harming with my lusts?” he demands (p. 103). The answer is not “No one.” As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, he degrades Mary Jane Reed, his lover, whom he calls the Monkey (the very nickname is degrading). Portnoy’s is the psychological strategy of sado-masochism, which the Anglo-Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson suggests as the basis of most humor, especially Jewish humor (“I’m living in the middle of a Jewish joke!” Portnoy complains [p. 36]). “How to separate,” Jacobson asks, “damaging another from damaging oneself? Wherein lies the satisfaction for the fool—being seen to win a domestic argument or being seen to submit to pain?” Self-satire becomes satire of others. Or in Jacobson’s words: “The pratfall as a means to make a prat of someone else.”[5]

Anything to avoid the obvious. Namely: Portnoy is a literary device, a comic device, even to himself. All the self-satire and self-laceration and self-abuse are antics to pretend that there really is a self behind them, that these are not only satire and laceration and abuse. Portnoy is a refugee from any world to which he might belong and find acceptance, equally contemptuous of Jews and goyim. He dreams of “sitting at home listening to Jack Benny with my kids! Raising intelligent, loving, sturdy children! Protecting some good woman!” (p. 248). But he also hates the bourgeois conventions (his emphasis)—the “respectable conventions,” “those fucking conventions”—which are required to make his dream a reality (p. 124). Portnoy does not contradict himself, because he has no self to contradict.

As is his custom, he himself supplies the terms of the analysis. He tells Doctor Spielvogel that, in search of “the sentence, the phrase, the word that will liberate [him],” he has been reading Freud’s 1912 essay “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” which includesthat phrase, “currents of feeling.” For “a fully normal attitude in love” (deserving of semantic scrutiny, that “fully normal,” but to go on—) for a fully normal attitude in love, says he, it is necessary that two currents of feeling be united: the tender, affectionate feelings, and the sensuous feeling. And in many instances this just doesn’t happen, sad to say. “Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love.” (pp. 185–86)Portnoy’s Complaint is the effusive testimony of a thirty-year failure to unite any two currents of feeling in one healthy and normally functioning self. Suspended between two worlds—Jewish and non-Jewish (or “human,” as the unhappy Jew always likes to say), bourgeois and Bohemian, domestic and sexual, brilliant and bad—he dangles over a void. Portnoy’s voice is the voluble concealment of that fact, talking non-stop against the day on which he must finally admit his inner emptiness, his lack of belief in anything. Because when he finally admits it, all he will be able to do is scream inarticulately:

       Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!! (p. 274)

Only then he may perhaps to begin the reintegration of self.
____________________

[1] Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 101–02. Subsequent references will be inserted between parentheses.

[2] Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 114. Originally published in Paris in 1934.

[3] Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 166–168 and passim.

[4] Bernard Avishai, Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 8, 10–11, 13. Italics in the original.

[5] Howard Jacobson, Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (New York: Viking, 1997), pp. 143, 146.

Their naked villainy

Plenty of video gamers and moviegoers have come up with lists of the ten most villainous villains (see here, for example, or here or here), but readers of literature do not seem to think in such terms any more. In a rare exception, the author of the Bite Me blog, in an illustrated list which leans precariously toward the movies, creditably includes Milton’s Satan and Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein’s monster among his 10 Freaking Awesome Villains and Antagonists! My only complaint is that Milton’s Satan (“by merit rais’d To that bad eminence”) isn’t his #1!

Perhaps villainy has gone the way of heroism: the purveyors of modern literature are far too sophisticated to believe wholeheartedly in either. There are villains galore in the nineteenth-century novel: Ahab (of course), Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter, John Barton in the novel that bears his daughter’s name, Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend, Henleigh Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda, Gilbert Osmond in Portrait of a Lady, anyone with a Colonel before his name in Huckleberry Finn.

Ever since Conrad closed out the century with a long story about the villainous Mr. Kurtz in Blackwood’s Magazine, his disciples and successors have been few and far between in English-language fiction. When a villain does appear—think of Henry Wilcox in Howards End, for example—he is offered a measure of redemption by the end of the novel. Coming up with a list of the ten most hauntingly horrible of the horrible characters in fiction since then (the phrase is Kingsley Amis’s) is no easy task:

(10.) Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925). Former college football player; breaks his adulterous lover’s nose with a short punch; earnestly talks her husband into murdering Gatsby. Fitzgerald attributes his behavior to a “vast carelessness.”

( 9.) Hollis Lomax in Stoner (1965). Chairman of the English department in which William Stoner teaches; a hunchback, barely five feet tall, he tries to destroy Stoner’s career to avenge a protégé whom Stoner had flunked; unable to get Stoner fired, he refuses to promote him and for twenty years assigns him nothing but sections of English composition five days a week at all hours of the day; when Stoner finds a little happiness with a young instructor in the department, Lomax fires her. A memorable portrait of the academic hack for whom bureaucratic power compensates for a lack of scholarship.

( 8.) O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Agent of the Thought Police; pretends to belong to the resistance movement, dupes Winston Smith into revealing himself as a thought-criminal; tortures Winston until he breaks, but not before defining the essence of totalitarianism for him: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” (For some reason, NPR lists Big Brother as the fifty-ninth best character in literature since 1900, even though Big Brother is not a character at all but the public face of the Party—a face on posters. Might as well call the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg a character in The Great Gatsby.)

( 7.) Clare Quilty in Lolita (1955). Humbert Humbert’s “shadow,” even more monstrous and perverted than the self-confessed pervert and monster; abducts Lolita and spirits her away to Duk Duk Ranch (“an obscene Oriental word for copulation”—Alfred Appel), where he presses her into orgies with young boys while he watches; antisemite, pornographer, mediocre playwright.

( 6.) The two nameless mountain men in James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970). So famous they have entered into American myth, the popular image of menacing rural Southerners. Their anal rape of Bobby Trippe is one of the cruelest scenes in American fiction. (Their even more famous line, “Squeal like a pig,” from John Boorman’s film, is not to be found in the novel.) The suburb-dwellers canoeing down the Cahulawassee River have never encountered “such brutality,” “such disregard for another person’s body.”

( 5.) Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940). The first mass murderer in American fiction who was not a Gothic exaggeration. Richard Wright cannot decide whether he is responsible for the deaths of Mary Dalton and his “girl” Bessie or whether the “whole sick social organism” of racist America is to blame—the indecision, strangely enough, is one source of the novel’s greatness—but no reader can forget Bigger’s chopping off the head of Mary’s corpse to fit it into the furnace nor the way he beats Bessie with a brick again and again until “he seemed to be striking a wet wad of cotton. . . .”

( 4.) Popeye in Sanctuary (1931). As a child he sliced up small animals; as an adult, he murders two men and a dog; impotent and syphilitic, he rapes Temple Drake with a corncob; he “smells like that black stuff that ran out of Bovary’s mouth and down her bridal veil when they raised her head.”

( 3.) Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985). The murderous pedophile who leads the scalp-hunting Glanton gang and acts as its spokesman, delivering a philosophical defense of its butchery by calling it the “dance of war” (“Only that man who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war, who has been offered up himself entire to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance”). His thinking is more frightening than his violent actions.

( 2.) Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1962). The teenaged sociopath, a rapist and murderer and apostle of “ultraviolence,” who narrates Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel. The American Film Institute ranked Alex the twelfth greatest movie villain and the highest-ranked literary character, unless you count Nurse Ratched from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which I don’t. As Burgess said of him later, “He rejoices in articulate language and even invents a new form of it”—the vocal charm is more blood-curdling than any dark philosophy.

( 1.) James Todd in A Handful of Dust (1934). Tony Last escapes the savages of the South American jungle only to fall captive to the most savage human being ever drawn up by an English-language writer: an illiterate recluse who obliges him to read Dickens aloud—the entire Dickens corpus, over and over and over again—for the remainder of his days. No worse torture can be imagined.

World after world unseen

Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle is science fiction that “deals with alternate present,” as a character in the book phrases it. Since Capitulation Day in 1947, the Imperial Japanese and the German Nazis have divided the United States between them. Behind a “puppet white government at Sacramento,” the Japanese rule the Pacific States of America, where most of the novel’s action takes place. They may not have “killed Jews, in the war or after,” they may not have “built ovens,” but they “have the skin thing there, too.” Blacks are slaves, who perform the chores not even whites will perform, for fear they “would never have place of any sort again.” The Chinese, one small social notch above the slaves, are chinks who operate “pedecabs,” enabling whites “to have, if even for a moment, higher place.” But there is an ethnic slur for whites as well: they are yanks.

The plot is difficult to summarize, because Dick pieces his novel together from five subplots involving five main characters. Robert Childan is the owner of American Artistic Handcrafts, a retail outlet for artifacts from the American past; Nobusuke Tagomi heads the Japanese trade mission in San Francisco; Frank Frink (né Fink) is a Jew passing as white, who quits his job with a company that fabricates Americana (for retailers like Childan) to create his own original jewelry; Juliana is his ex-wife, a judo instructor living in the unaligned and nominally independent Rocky Mountain States; and Baynes is a German intelligence officer posing as a Swedish businessman on a sales trip (in reality, a secret mission) to the Pacific coast.

The characters go about their daily lives, but at their backs is the constant threat of the Nazis. Martin Bormann, who had succeeded a syphilitic Hitler as Reichskanzler, dies unexpectedly. Summoned to the Japanese embassy for a briefing on the “contending factions in German political life,” Tagomi fears he will go mad. He scrambles to his feet and flees in panic. Meditating upon the “order of the world,” the “finite, finite world,” does not calm him. “There is evil!” he thinks:It’s actual like cement. . . . It’s an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.The reality of evil disrupts the order of the world, because it is infinite in its varieties. Each of Dick’s characters will have to confront evil in his or her own way, and as much as anything, it is these confrontations with evil, decision after decision to confront it, which organize the narrative.

What really holds The Man in the High Castle together, though, is not its narrative, but the books that the characters carry around with them—the books within the book. The characters are connected to one another by the I Ching, the ancient Taoist divination text which they anxiously consult as an oracle, and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an underground novel banned by the Nazis but passed eagerly from hand to hand. Even Nazi officials can’t put it down. An alternate history which is the photographic negative of Dick’s novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is the story of how the Axis powers lost the Second World War. Dick’s own title gives it pride of place: the man in the high castle turns out to be the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. It also gives Dick the chance to spell out his argument. On a sales visit to the apartment of Japanese customers, Childan notices a copy of the book. “I hear it on many lips,” he says, asking if it is a mystery:       “Not a mystery,” [the Japanese husband] said. “On contrary, interesting form of fiction possibly within genre of science fiction.”
       “Oh no,” [his wife] disagreed. “No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise.
       “But,” [the husband] said, “it deals with alternate present. Many well-known science fiction novels of that sort.”This passage is Dick’s apology for alternate history, his claim for it as a distinct and recognizable kind of science fiction. Although there were precursors—he liked to cite Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953), a novel that resorts to time travel to “correct” history—Dick formally invented the fictional kind with The Man in the High Castle. Not only did his novel influence other major novelists, including Nabokov and Kingsley Amis, but it was the first self-reflexive work of alternate history, the first to be fully aware of what it was doing and to sort out its logic.

It was, for Dick, the fundamental logic of science fiction:Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive.Baynes, the German intelligence officer, reflects to himself in these terms as he returns to Berlin after warning the Japanese of the Nazis’ plan to launch “an enormous nuclear attack on the Home Islands, without advance warning of any kind.” Even if the Japanese fail to heed his warning, even if the Germans succeed in bringing about “a final holocaust for everyone,” Baynes consoles himself with the possibility of “world after world unseen.”

In Dick’s novel, these worlds are represented by the I Ching and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Each book tells of an “alternate present.” What is an oracle, after all, but a report of might be? Telling of a different world is the beginning of its realization. When Frank Frink receives the message that the “hour of doom is at hand,” for example, he worries that he has set in motion, simply by throwing the I Ching, a sequence of events that will lead to World War III, “[h]ydrogen bombs falling like hail,” two billion killed, the end of human civilization.

That’s not quite what happens, but what does happen is influenced by the I Ching. Attracted to an Italian truck driver, Frank’s ex-wife Juliana heads north to Cheyenne to meet Hawthorne Absendsen, the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Stopping over in Denver, she learns the Italian truck driver is actually a German Sicherheitsdienst operative, sent by the Nazis to murder Abendsen, the chronicler of their defeat. Juliana attacks the SD man with a razor and gets away. Afraid that he will come after her, she consults the I Ching:One must resolutely make the matter known
At the court of the king.
It must be announced truthfully. Danger.
It is necessary to notify one’s own city.
It does not further to resort to arms.
It furthers one to undertake something.Juliana hurries to Cheyenne to warn Abendsen. When she arrives, she finds that he is not living in his “high castle,” the fortified compound described on the dust jacket of his novel, but in an ordinary single-story stucco house with a child’s tricycle in the drive. The high castle is a ruse to fool would-be assassins into thinking that great precautions have been taken against them. In reality, there is no reason to take precautions. Juliana is puzzled by his fatalism and resignation until she is suddenly struck: “The oracle [the I Ching] wrote your book. Didn’t it?” she asks Absendsen.

When he admits the truth, Juliana wonders why the I Ching would write a novel. And an alternate history at that! “What is there it can’t tell us directly,” she cries, “like it always has before?” But none of the oracle’s messages has been direct; everything told by it requires interpretation, a further undertaking to realize its truth. It is, in short, a fictional text, for which truths are conditional. Naturally, then, Juliana asks the I Ching why it wrote The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. “What are we supposed to learn?” she demands, and tosses coins six times to determine which of the book’s sixty-four hexagrams is the answer to her question. “Do you know what hexagram that is?” she asks Absendsen when she finds it:       “It’s Chung Fu,” Juliana said. “Inner Truth. . . . And I know what it means. . . .”
       “It means, does it, that my book is true?”
       “Yes,” she said.
       With anger he said, “Germany and Japan lost the war.”
       “Yes.”The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is not alternate history, after all. It is the true history no one is willing to face. The United States won the war, and yet capitulated to the Axis, acquiesced to partition and foreign occupation, nevertheless.

Dick’s political message has become something of a thematic commonplace in alternate history: even if the events had been different, the outcome would have been the same. War may decide the occupier, but not the sequel of occupation. If the U.S. had not developed the atomic bomb, another country would have—and would still have threatened Japan with it!

Less tiresome is the moral vision which informs Dick’s conception of fiction. The German intelligence officer who warns Japan of the Nazis’ exterminationist ambition—his real name is Wegener, although he travels under the alias of Baynes—returns to Nazi Germany, to the heart of evil, when his mission is complete. “Whatever happens,” he reflects, “it is evil beyond compare.” If the outcome is the same no matter what we do to alter the course of events, why choose to act at all?       On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
       We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effect because he can detect the obvious.Perhaps what one can do, then, is to devise those other worlds, where possibility is different—and if for no other reason than to show that none is ideal, that moral admixtures are the rule everywhere, that the oracle speaks directly nowhere. Although a man might fly from world to world unseen, he will only find the same moral problem of “making a choice at each step.” The only real alternative is not to choose at all, but if not choosing is a real possibility then it too creates a possible world, where too the ideal world can only be dreamed of. An alternate history within an alternate history within an alternate history, The Man in the High Castle retreats farther and farther from the ultimate ideal of easy morality. The only impossible world is a world without moral ambiguity.

The essential racket

Another bad report from my oncologist, another “last resort” drug kicked. Whether the tumor has spread, or has simply increased its metabolic activity, only time and further scans—PET, bone, CT—will tell. I now live in intervals of three months; that’s about as long as it takes for the latest drug to sputter out into ineffectiveness. Thankfully there are still more drugs to go. (How many last resorts can you use up before they stop being last resorts?) The hope, at this stage, is that pharmacological discoveries will come along faster than my cancer. “The longer you go,” my oncologist says with logic that’s hard to deny, “the longer you go.”

I am caught in a dizzying loop: three months of hope collide with dread when the cancer overpowers the drug I am on, but just as I resign myself to the beginning of the end, a new drug pulls the cancer down—for how long? I find that I am not afraid of death, but of end-stage cancer’s incapacity. I am haunted by dream visions of myself, foul-smelling and delirious, my children reluctant to approach the stranger in my bed. Why do I feel no desperation to read those big fat classics I have shamefully neglected till now?—Gargantua and Pantagruel, Les Misérables, War and Peace, The Feminine Mystique. How stupid of me to waste my remaining months on contemporary fiction: right? To read it at such an unhurried pace! And to write about it in this blog, which very few people will ever read! What about fame? What about influence? I’d rather watch the NFL playoffs this Sunday.

It’s true that cancer concentrates the mind wonderfully, but it’s also wonderful just what the mind prefers to concentrate upon. While the inessential is stripped away, it turns out that what’s essential is not the same as what’s important. The essential is what makes soul clap hands and sing, and no counsel to get serious in the face of death stands much chance of being heard over the essential racket.

A decalogue for writing well

My seminar on evil in the American novel (from Philip K. Dick to Philip Roth) is also an “advanced writing course.” I am required to assign a composition text, perhaps the least interesting kind of book ever invented (I assigned Gerald Graff’s They Say/I Say as perhaps the least least interesting of the genre). The real textbook, though, is my instruction. So today I spoke these aseret devarim for writing well:

( 1.) Thou shalt have no other goals or purposes before this: to make thyself clear, to thyself perhaps most of all.

( 2.) Thou shalt not whore after any literary technique—any of the “tools long associated only with fiction, such as elaborate structures, characterization, and even symbolism”—nor suspense nor metaphor nor any fancy shmancy thing, but shalt faithfully serve the clarity that bringest thee out of confusion.

( 3.) Thou shalt remember thy conclusion, and begin there.

( 4.) Thou shalt be scrupulous to connect thy thoughts one to the other.

( 5.) Thou shalt obey the distinction between evidence and authority.

( 6.) Thou shalt write with abiding love toward thy evidence, quoting it in a white terror of getting it wrong, and hatred in thy heart toward authorities, quoting them only to refute them.

( 7.) Thou shalt not pretend to expertise nor reach for language that lies beyond thee.

( 8.) Thou shalt write in thine own name, and fear not to say “I.”

( 9.) Thou shalt not assume thou hast made thyself clear, but must be willing always to repeat thyself where necessary—to dwell upon an argument, to occupy a point—for the sake of making thy meaning manifest.

(10.) Thou must forget everything thou hast ever been taught about writing, including these commandments which I command thee this day.

“We shall do and we shall hear,” my students did not reply.

Evan S. Connell, 1924–2013

One by one, the writers who came of literary age between the Second World War and the Sexual Revolution—the Glossy Age of American fiction, as I have called it elsewhere—are dying off. Evan S. Connell Jr. was found dead in Santa Fe last Thursday, January 10. He was 88.

Nearly every obituary led off the requisite survey of his career with Mrs. Bridge (1959), a close-up study of the pointless existence led by a rich and successful lawyer’s wife in Connell’s native Kansas City (“she wondered if she was about to lose control of herself. Where are we going? she thought. Why are we here?”). The quiet desperation of life in the suburbs was a tiresome little theme of postwar fiction, even though Connell’s novel was set before the war. He may have been among the first to fasten onto the subject, but his book was distinguished, not by its insight into American social mores, but by its form: 117 short chapters, some fewer than a hundred words, which carried Mrs. Bridge from marriage to widowhood.

Mr. Bridge, his first novel’s “twin,” as the obituaries misleadingly called it, was published exactly ten years later. Connell perfected a flat objective tone, flawless in delivery, unblemished by sympathy or satire, which was ill-suited to his narrative strategy. The casual bigotry displayed by the Bridges and their neighbors, the hyperconsciousness of good manners and good shoes, the adroit avoidance of “threatening subjects,” including intellectual curiosity in any shape, the regular evocation of “nameless panic” and “wild, wild desire” (never acted upon) as a counterpoint to the “white, sweetly scented anonymity” into which they sink—a counterpoint that eventually becomes as uneventful as their lives: the Bridges are steadily reduced to cultural clichés.

Connell’s message is that superficial lives are superficial not by accident but by intention, by the firm and consistent application of the principle that every depth must be left unexplored (“if super-celestial ideas were accompanied by subterranean behavior,” Mrs. Bridge reflects, “it might be better to forego them both”). But because he has confined himself to the undisturbed surfaces, where his characters choose to dwell, he is at a loss how to suggest what lies beneath. He must resort to tricks. Mrs. Bridge’s reflection on high ideas and low behavior, for example, is provoked by “a line from Montaigne,” which comes to her out of nowhere, exactly and inexplicably quoted. The distinction between ideas and behavior is located in the realm of ideas, to which Mrs. Bridge has recourse in order to forego ideas. Connell is able to establish the superficiality of upper-class WASP lives only by admitting the depths that explode the superficiality.

Connell also became famous for Son of the Morning Star (1985), his exciting account of Little Big Horn. It success gave him some economic freedom at last, in his sixties. He was rare in his generation—the first generation of writers to take refuge in American universities—by declining to teach. “A teacher has to do an horrendous amount of talking,” his friend George P. Elliott explained; “a writer who (like Evan Connell) does not talk a lot should not teach (as Connell does not).” He never married, had no children. His life was devoted to writing.

Connell published nineteen books during his lifetime, but for my money his best are The Connoisseur (1974) and Double Honeymoon (1976), the last two novels he wrote before largely abandoning fiction for historical essays (he wrote a few more short stories). Both of these novels are about Karl Muhlbach, “the most respectable of men,” who had made his first appearance in three stories in At the Crossroads (1965). “I have violated nothing,” Muhlbach declares. “All my life I have represented civilization, now I am threatened.” An insurance executive, he too is a well-to-do WASP. The tone is the same, but the difference is that Muhlbach, unlike the Bridges, is vulnerable to the unexpected.

In The Connoisseur, Muhlbach is astonished when he happens upon a terra cota figurine from the Mayan period—a squat magistrate with his arms folded—in a curio shop in Taos. “I want this arrogant little personage, he thinks with sudden passion,” although he cannot say why. His life is transformed; he becomes a collector, “obsessed by pre-Columbian thoughts.” Connell takes his motto from Aquinas: id quod visum placet. Muhlbach is not an intellectual, although he becomes an expert in Mayan art. His is not the realm of ideas, but of beauty. He is changed because he allows himself the pleasure of looking.

Double Honeymoon is the expansion of a story written a decade earlier and published originally in At the Crossroads. Its events occur before Muhlbach’s conversion by beauty, and serve as a ten-years-earlier “prequel.” At a Christmas party, the 45-year-old Muhlbach meets a lovely 20-year-old with ambitions to become a “high fashion model.” She is much too beautiful “for her own good.” Her name is Lambeth Brent. She is the kind of girl he would have lost when he himself was 20—she would have found him dull, “dull and a trifle cold, [his] spine too rigid when [they] went dancing, [his] interests too academic.” Older now, a widower, Muhlbach pursues Lambeth. She is “buggy,” as he puts it later—erratic, unreliable, emotionally unavailable, a liar and a thief, perhaps bisexual (perhaps not), lousy at everything she has ever tried, a lost and troubled soul. Muhlbach does not learn any of this until much later, after he is already hooked on her. He wants to marry her and have children with her, even though Lambeth says that she wants children like she wants leprosy. He believes (against all evidence) that he can bring her “around to some kind of normalcy, enough so that she could keep going.” He tries vainly to get her to take some responsibility for her own life:Nothing marvelous and unexpected is about to happen. The telegram saying you won the sweepstakes will never arrive. And the reason it won’t is because I’ve never gotten it and I don’t know anybody else who has.Lambeth refuses to believe him. She is not interested in taking lessons in domesticity and respectability. Muhlbach chugs ahead:All I meant to say, Lambeth, was that I’ve been toting the barge and lifting the bale or whatever it is long enough to realize that my life will never change. I’ll do what I do as long as I live. I’ll never touch the rainbow. And I don’t think you will either. I’d love to, and I hope you do. I doubt if we will. This isn’t good news, I admit. I’d rearrange the situation if I could, nearer to the heart’s desire. In fact, as somebody said, though I can’t remember who: “Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.”It was Gauguin who said that. Muhlbach’s own experience proves him wrong. Almost the exact opposite is Connell’s vision of human life: being what it is, one dreams of the rainbow. Whether very many people have the courage to “rearrange the situation” is a different question. “We live in the final tepid rays of the Christian era,” Connell wrote in his long philosophical prose poem, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (1963). Transcendence has just about flickered out, and literature (as Connell’s generation discovered to its dismay) cannot fully replace it. But there are glimpses, here and there, of what it might mean to live with what pleases merely by being seen—and some of those glimpses can be found in the fiction of the late Evan Connell.

Every Jew in his (or her) humor

Francesca Segal, The Innocents (New York: Hyperion Voice, 2012). 288 pages.

No good word exists for what Francesca Segal accomplishes in The Innocents, which was bedecked last week with the Costa First Novel Award. Adaptation, reworking, imitation, borrowing, appropriation, plagiarism—whatever it might be called, it sounds bad. The Innocents is a 21st-century version of Edith Wharton’s classic Age of Innocence in which the convention-bound gentility of “old New York” become the convention-bound youth of Jewish London. The reviewers have gone out of their way to emphasize that, as Lucy Scholes wrote in the Guardian, “Segal makes the story her own.” The novel is “compelling,” Kate Sullivan reassured the readers of the New York Daily News, “despite its antiquated ties to Wharton’s story.” But such praise misses the mark. Although The Innocents can be enjoyed by those who have never had the pleasure of Wharton’s book, the enjoyment—and the insight—are magnified a hundredfold when the novels are placed side by side.

From the opening pages, Segal acknowledges her debt to Wharton, but also demonstrates just how she will repay it. Adam Newman is engaged to Rachel Gilbert; now twenty-eight, they have “been together” since they were sixteen. They are in synagogue for Kol Nidre when Rachel’s cousin Ellie Schneider, a model from New York who is rumored to have made a porn film, takes her seat in the women’s section. A “half-naked model in shul,” Adam’s best friend stage-whispers. Knowledge of Wharton adds both humor and heft to the scene. The Age of Innocence begins on opening night at the New York opera, where the “world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter,” when a family cousin, newly returned from Europe and disgraced by divorce, shows up unexpectedly. Al tikrei, as the rabbis say: do not read the “world of fashion,” but rather the Jews of North West London; for opening night at the opera—an occasion to display oneself in public—read High Holy Day services in shul. And for the scandal of divorce, substitute porn and a revealing dress. I promise to stop tabulating the themes and variations now. Throughout the novel, though, they add complexity and depth to Segal’s observations. You’ll notice, for instance, that the cousin’s flight in Wharton, from Europe to New York, is reversed by Segal. The plot of The Innocents is not merely an overlay on Wharton’s plot, but a west-to-east reorientation of The Age of Innocence.

Even if you have never read Wharton—or have never seen Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation—you can guess what is coming. Adam is a respectable young member of the Jewish community, “a moral pillar of the shtetl,” as a friend teases him. He enjoys his social position: “There was no life event,” he reflects—“marriage, birth, parenthood, or loss—through which one need ever walk alone.” If he is a conformist, there are advantages to such conformity:

It wasn’t obligatory conformity; simply a question of joining the majority, a subscription to desirable traditions that allowed one to remain supported and cushioned in the bosom of North West London.What Adam is blind to is what Segal sees so clearly: social traditions have a different and less satisfying force than religious traditions (also known as commandments). Adam is a social Jew, not a religious one. “I have no idea what I believe in except randomness,” he remarks tellingly to his fiancée’s scandalous cousin. Ellie is not one of the Nice Jewish Girls who populate his world. She brings out his honesty, but also his inner emptiness.

So naturally he falls for her. Ellie resists for a while (“[I]f things were different I would try,” she says—“I would be with you, if I could”), but in the end, as the year swings round to the High Holy Days again and Adam’s desire does not subside, she yields to him. Wharton’s heroine stands firm where Segal’s relents: Ellen Olenska offers to “come to” Newland Archer “once,” but returns to Europe instead; Ellie Schneider sleeps with Adam once, and then goes back to New York. Between the motion and the act, between the desire and the spasm, falls the shadow—of the sexual revolution. That’s the biggest difference between Wharton’s age and Segal’s, and the emotional effect differs too.

Wharton’s subject was the struggle between marriage’s “dull duty” and adultery’s “ugly appetites.” So deeply tragic was her sense of life that Wharton could find in neither a source of happiness. Segal’s vision is essentially comic, perhaps because she is less at home with the language of morality than of psychology (“always doing the right thing and meanwhile raging and resentful that no one saw the magnitude of that sadness”). Or perhaps because she is so much younger—she is just thirty-two, while Wharton was fifty-eight when she wrote The Age of Innocence—Segal is more hopeful about the outcome of moral conflicts, not yet discolored by human society’s iron demands. Or perhaps the reason is that Segal is a Jew, and believes that repentance and atonement are stronger impulses than “the dignity of duty.” As his future father-in-law says, quoting the Yom Kippur liturgy and welcoming Adam back into the fold: “He does not remain angry forever because He desires kindness.” A Jewish sensibility is a fundamentally comic sensibility.

Segal is part of a literary trend toward “rewriting” or “reworking” older classics. In reviewing The Middlesteins for the New Republic, Adam Kirsch remarked upon Jami Attenberg’s obvious debt to Middlemarch. I myself have called A Changed Man Francine Prose’s Middlemarch, and indeed, her masterful plundering of the English literary tradition is among Prose’s best qualities. The genre is not exactly new, however. Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea is an alternate version of Jane Eyre. The temptation is to ascribe the literary practice to intertextuality. As the French novelist Claude Simon remarked in a 1973 interview, though, an “intertextual encyclopedia” (in Umberto Eco’s phrase) is little more than the literary version of a genre in modern art:Picasso invented the genre, and he has been followed by such outstanding figures as Schwitter and Rauschenberg. Lately, literature has also produced collages, or what we call “intertextuality.”A novel like Francesca Segal’s is not a collage, but a new work modelled upon an old—a parody without the burlesque. Thus I propose the name paratext for the subgenre of fiction that is so delightfully represented by The Innocents.

An idiot persists in his error

Am I the only one who commits far more errors when writing on the computer—stupid misspellings, extra words, left-out words, wrong words, inversions of words—than I ever did when writing on the typewriter? In a message that I sent just now, I intended to write “west side” and wrote “wide side” instead (and only noticed after sending the message). I do this all the time. I never used to do it at all.

One cause, I know, is thought outracing fingers. By the time I was about to type out the word west my mind was already on the word side, and so I hamfistedly combined them. But still. I seem to see things differently on a computer screen. The eye scans words on a screen, but focuses upon words on paper. (You too read faster on a computer, I’d bet, but also absorb less of the content.) From a very early age, before I was even out of grammar school, I wrote on a manual typewriter, teaching myself on an old Underwood. The words I would hammer out on it, taking shape letter by letter, were tangible. They left indentations in the paper. The verso felt like braille.

Is the fault my childhood training? That I never became accustomed to anything else? For years and years I stuck with manual typewriters, turning up my nose at the IBM Selectric. Even though I was a fairly early computer user—I got my first Apple IIe in 1983—by then it may have been too late. I was an old dog incapable of learning a new trick.

Is it only us oldtimers who are sloppier on a computer than we ever were on a typewriter? Are younger writers, some of whom may not even have heard of typewriters, blessedly free of such absent-minded errors? One piece of evidence: I rarely garble a sentence when I am copying a passage, looking down on a book at my left hand and not up at the screen. The fault, I am beginning to think, lies not in our age but in our eyes.

Chameleon on rye, please

“It’s All Happening at the Zoo,” my review of Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time, is this morning’s feature at Jewish Ideas Daily. I can’t claim credit for the title. It was the inspired choice of Suzanne Garment, my editor.

Jacobson doesn’t share the attitude expressed by Paul Simon’s lyric; he is not a fan of animal symbolism, even when it’s carefree and unserious. (Especially then.) Not for him a little harmless anthropomorphism. For Jacobson, the morphism works the other way: “[I]t is not the animals who must check their satiric bona fides out with us, but we who must continuously put ourselves to school with them.” His monkeys do not “stand for honesty,” but exactly the reverse: they belong, he says, quoting D. H. Lawrence (a favorite source), “to the ages before brains were invented.” That’s why a comparison of men to monkeys is so apt.

In his twelfth novel, Jacobson’s hero is a Jewish novelist by the name of Guy Ableman, whose literary debut, which made a splash when it was first published thirteen years before, was called Who Gives a Monkey’s? It told the story of an Orthodox Jewish girl who left the fold (“I haven't left the fold,” she protests, “I just want the space to question”), taking a job as a zookeeper. “And nothing calls Judaism into question quite like monkeys,” she says. The novel’s real subject, though, is—not the fine line that divided animals and humans, nothing so trite—but the greater inhumanity and self-disloyalty of humans. Apes knew rage and spite and boredom right enough, but they were not cynical as mankind was. Crazed with undifferentiated lust they might have been, but they were serious in their monkeydom, understood what being of their species entailed, weren’t forever jumping ship and crossing over the way humans did, and cared for one another.This is as good a statement of Jacobson’s fundamental vision of man as you’re likely to get. No wonder human beings are so funny when they act like apes. They are least themselves then. “Hence the persistence of what is animal in what is comic,” Jacobson writes in Seriously Funny, his 1997 study of humor. “[C]omedy scratches and jeers at us from quite some other place and from quite some other time.”

And no wonder Jews are so serious about humor. Not for them what Walker Percy calls angelism, the neurotic condition in which one yearns for deliverance from man’s animal nature. The Jews are forever aware of the fine line which divides them from the creatures that are not Jewish. Nothing calls Jewishness into question quite so much, and is quite so tempting. When a Christian invites a Jew to dinner, he is likely to ask the Jew’s position on pig. Jacobson was hilarious on the question in a speech last year at the Index on Censorship awards ceremony:In fact, the Book of Leviticus comes down as hard against lapwing, chameleon and tortoise as it does against pig, yet no one ever checks to see where I stand on chameleon. Only ever pig. Do people hear my name and automatically conjure up pig? Anybody would think I’m a banker.Eating pork has been done to death. Only a simpleton would think he could break with Judaism by gobbling something as commonplace as a BLT. But chameleon. . . . Now there’s disloyalty to Judaism.

As I say in my Jewish Ideas Daily review, this intimacy with the deepest springs of Jewish feeling—deeper than anything to be found in Philip Roth, with whom he is routinely and doltishly compared—is what makes Howard Jacobson unique. Start with Zoo Time, if only to laugh at those who keep shouting about the death of books, and then double back on his three best novels: The Mighty Walzer, Kalooki Nights, and The Finkler Question. Don’t neglect his debut Coming from Behind, a sort of Jewish Lucky Jim, or my personal favorite The Very Model of a Man, narrated by Adam’s firstborn Cain. Oh, hell. Read anything by Jacobson you can get your hands on. You’ll never laugh the same again.

It’s not my New Year

I make my resolutions in the fall, after reminding God that He will decide, in the words of the Yom Kippur liturgy, “who is to live and who is to die.” (Then, after saying I will leave it up to Him, I resolve not to die.)

But there was the neat coincidence yesterday of Helen Rittelmeyer’s “New Year’s Resolutions for Bloggers” and Andrew Sullivan’s announcement that The Daily Dish, his nine-year old blog, will separate from Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, which has hosted it since 2011, and head off on its own behind a paywall.

Rittelmeyer and Sullivan are two of the best bloggers out there. (This is probably the first time they have ever been linked to each other in any way. My apologies to both of them!) The Amateur Reader, no slouch at blogging himself, said in some awe that Rittelmeyer “writes like a mix of Joseph Epstein and Florence King.” (Like King, she also writes for the National Review, although not nearly often enough for my tastes.)

Whatever else you think of him—it is de rigueur among my allies on the Right to mock him without stint or letup—Andrew Sullivan is a pioneer of blogging, who has influenced the literary form of the blog probably more than any other blogger. (I might also observe, on a personal note, that he has been far more loyal to me and my writing than most of my so-called allies on the Right, for whom I simply dematerialized after being “parted” from Commentary.) Disagree with him all you want. The fact remains that Sullivan is one of the most dynamic and indelicate personalities on the blogscape.

If you’ve already clicked over and read Rittelmeyer’s resolutions, you’ll see that I have intentionally flouted the second of them in my previous sentence. I do so in homage to her unique prose style. (Don’t want her to think I am flattering her most sincerely.) Rittelmeyer’s entire approach is summed up in her last paragraph: “Good writers don’t make allowances for intellectual idiocy.” Her five resolutions are five different ways to avoid making allowances.

What caught my attention was her fourth resolution:

Disregard the haters who denigrate blogging as a medium. Blogging is an amateur’s medium, but there is a lot to be said for amateurs. Bloggers sometimes write about things they know nothing about. Professional journalists often write about things they know nothing about. Academics write about things they know so much about that they no longer have any passion for the subject or any sense of its intrinsic interest, since, for understandable reasons, it is all now very boring to them. So don’t be intimidated by their credentials or put off by your lack of them.Of course I agree with her. I’m on record as saying there is no outside credentialing agency for critics and writers. Perhaps it has ever been so, but especially in the “age of the dying of the word,” as Howard Jacobson refers to our times, anyone who cares for exacting thought in exacting sentences is motivated by the amateur’s love (with the help of a little aggression) and not the professional’s obligations and code of ethics (which are euphemisms, as George Woodberry said a century ago, for money-getting and reputation-sustaining).

Blogging is not merely an amateur’s medium. It is a dissent from the professionalization of literature, where professionalization is represented by English departments and creative writing workshops and print magazines and large publishing houses which are subsidiaries of even larger conglomerates. What Jacques Barzun calls the professional’s fallacy (namely, the superstition that understanding is identical with professional practice) has transformed the institutions of literacy into closed shops. If you’re not employed in the literature racket, you might as well, in literary terms, not exist.

Bloggers shrug, and go on doing what they are doing. Above all else what distinguishes them is their willingness to write for free. Occasionally they may be paid for their efforts, but even if the pay dries up, they will go on blogging. No one is better than Andrew Sullivan at explaining why:       When I first stumbled into blogging over 12 years ago, it was for two reasons: curiosity and freedom. I was curious about the potential for writing in this new medium; and for the first time, I felt total freedom as a writer. On my little blog, I was beholden to no one but my readers. I had no editor to please, no advertiser to woo, no publisher to work for, no colleagues to manage. Perhaps it was working for so long in old media that made me appreciate this breakthrough so much. But it still exhilarates every day.
       For the first time in human history, a writer . . . can instantly reach readers—even hundreds of thousands of readers across the planet—with no intermediary at all.True enough, Sullivan proceeds to raise the livelihood problem (“as the pretense of old media authority ceded to the crowd-sourcing of argument, fact and thought, one thing remained elusive: how to make this work financially”), but this is a subsequent problem, a worry that is different in kind and later. It is never easy to monetize freedom. Sullivan is reluctant to acknowledge the contradiction in his thinking. On the one hand, the breaking up of old media authority; on the other, a nostalgia for the living wage paid by the old media authority.

Freedom’s just another word for no one left to woo. For the writer (whose best readers are among the dead), freedom is an absolute. The man needs to eat and put a roof over his head, but not the writer. For writers, the breaking up of old media authority is the most significant event since the invention of print. For the first time in human history (as Sullivan would put it), a writer’s only compromises are those which are forced upon him by the demands of what he is writing. The only authority is the authority of authorship. The word is dead! Long live the word!

In the coming year, I resolve to enjoy my freedom thoroughly.

Another year in Jewish books

For the third year in a row, I have chronicled the year in Jewish books for Jewish Ideas Daily.

The great biblical scholar Jon D. Levenson wrote the most profound work of Jewish scholarship published during 2012. Inheriting Abraham is a skeptical and contrarian examination of the popular commonplace that the three “Abrahamic religions” have so much in common. Although Levenson has written that Jews are not interested in biblical theology (for reasons I spell out here), and though he does not conceive his project as theological, his books have had a lasting effect on my own thinking about God—and could have much the same effect on more Jews, if only they would read him. Levenson also writes a brilliant scholarly prose, which is extraordinarily accessible despite the difficulty of his argument.

The best Jewish novel of last year was Joshua Henkin’s World Without You, which I reviewed for Commentary over the summer. One of Henkin’s best qualities is that you cannot figure out where he stands on any question from reading his fiction. The World Without You brings together a family of Bush-bashers and Bush voters, of “returnees” to Orthodoxy and religion-despisers; but Henkin never tips his hand. (He himself, as I learned from other sources, was an enthusiastic Obama supporter, but his political enthusiasms belong, for him, to an entirely different universe of discourse.) Unlike most novelists who come at things from the Left, Henkin is bilingual: he has mastered the language of his opponents, perhaps because he was raised in a family who were not strangers to the Jewish religion.

Hillel Halkin’s dreamy Melisande! What Are Dreams? and Howard Jacobson’s comic Zoo Time (review forthcoming) might have challenged Henkin’s novel for the top spot if only I could have claimed, more convincingly than the manifest content of their novels permitted, that they were clear and distinct examples of Jewish fiction.

On the existence of fictional characters

The commonplace is spelled out by William H. Gass: “Great character is the most obvious single mark of great literature,” he says. He means great fiction, since not all literature, great or otherwise—lyric poetry, for example, or an essay—is the representation of human action. Still: “Great literature is great because its characters are great,” Gass says, summing up the general opinion, “and characters are great when they are memorable.”

The demand for memorable characters has caused all sorts of mischief. Readers shut the covers of a novel and find that an image of a character is stuck in their minds. They are left with the strong impression, which gradually settles into conviction, that the character has an independent existence. Like lovers in a medieval tapestry who shake their limbs and step out of the tapestry into unwoven actuality every night when mere mortals are asleep, great characters in fiction are not confined to the pages of their books. As Gass observes, the one thing all theories about them have in common is that “characters are clearly conceived as living outside language.”

But this is a delusion, a fallacy. No matter how much we enjoy imagining how things might turn out for our favorite characters—Emma’s marriage to Mr Knightley, Huck’s adventures in the Indian Territory, Jim Dixon’s new job in London—we have no way of knowing. We are only amusing ourselves. Fictional characters are creatures of words; they are wholly determined by the language in which, like clothes in a washer, they are soaked. To pretend to know something about a character when the novel is silent about it is to reveal something about ourselves, not about the novel.

These reflections are provoked by some questions that Jessa Crispin asked in a recent post at Bookslut. “Where are all the fat characters in literature whose fatness is not the central issue of the novel?” she asked:

It’s like abortion in literature. Where are the abortions in literature that are not the central problem of the book? Can a character just have an abortion and not have it be like the worst thing that has ever happened?There are really two varieties of question here. The first is a historical question: why have novelists, so far in the history of the novel, included fat characters or abortions only when they are “central” to their novels? Have any novels already been written in which they are not central? (“I’m kind of blanking,” Crispin says.)

But there is also a theoretical question, which is the more interesting. If a character in a novel is not described as being fat, is he fat nevertheless? Could he possibly be fat if the novel never says so? Obesity is treated as extraordinary, a distinguishing characteristic, but what if it is not? What if it is as unexceptional, as unworthy of comment, as teeth and nails? Obesity is extraordinary only from a specific point of view, and where it is “central,” then, the novelist is testifying to his ideology.

Hence Crispin’s resort to abortion. Her own ideology is suggested by her complaint that abortion in fiction is invariably treated as if it were “the worst thing that has ever happened.” Why can’t an abortion be an unremarkable portion of a woman’s experience? And why can’t this unremarkable portion be assumed about female characters in fiction, especially now that abortion is the common experience of so many women? Every character in fiction has a childhood, whether or not it is described. If the same could be said of female characters—many of them had abortions that were peripheral to their experience, not significant enough to remark upon—the unspoken assumption would influence the way in which abortion is conceived in the culture.

But could such an assumption ever be warranted? In the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute, twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion, and the odds of a woman’s undergoing an abortion increase as she ages: one in ten women by age 20, one in four by age 30, and three in ten by age 45. If you were to collect every female character 45 years and older from every American novel published since 1973, you might not be wrong to estimate that thirty percent of them underwent an abortion. But how would you be able to determine, unless their novels explicitly say so, which characters belong to the thirty percent?

Abortions are not the same as the other attributes and experiences that distinguish human beings. In every possible world in which human beings reside, they have teeth and nails and a childhood and are capable of speech and laughter—these are necessary attributes and experiences, belonging to human beings in every possible world, including the worlds of their novels.

The same cannot be said of abortion. It is not true that, in every possible world, thirty percent of women 45 or older have abortions. Since an abortion is voluntary (unlike teeth and childhood), there are possible worlds in which no woman undergoes one. And among these might be the world constructed by a novel. There is no logical means of ruling it out.

A female character in fiction has undergone an abortion if and only if the abortion is inscribed in the fiction. Perhaps the mere fact of reporting or describing an abortion makes it seem “central” to a critic for whom abortions should not be so; perhaps a prescriptive criticism will emerge that urges novelists to write about abortion (and also obesity, while they’re at it) more nonchalantly. They must write about it at all, though, to write about it with small concern; and the mere inclusion of it—the plain fact that the novelist decided to speak of it instead of remaining silent—will be significant. What is excluded from fiction signifies nothing, because it might as well not exist. Nothing outside the language of a novel is true about the men and women who are sentenced to live within it and nowhere else.