MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Man Booker International Prize We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 THE COUNTERLIFE by Philip Roth /2011/the-counterlife-by-philip-roth/ /2011/the-counterlife-by-philip-roth/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:36:13 +0000 /?p=15227 Book Quote:

“Zionism, as I understand it, originated not only in the deep Jewish dream of escaping the danger of insularity and the cruelties of social injustice and persecution but out of a highly conscious desire to be divested of virtually everything that had come to seem, to the Zionists as much as the Christian Europeans, distinctively Jewish behavior — to reverse the very form of Jewish existence. The construction of a counterlife that is one’s own antimyth was at its very core. It was a species of fabulous utopianism, a manifesto for human transformation as extreme — and, at the outset, as implausible — as any ever conceived. A Jew could be a new person if he wanted to. In the early days of the state the idea appealed to almost everyone except the Arabs. All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once universally so popular — no more Jewy Jews, great!”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 07, 2011)

Long though it is, this quotation sums up just about everything about Roth’s magnificent novel of 1976: its strange title, its grand theme, its somewhat simplistic view of history, and its humor that jumps cheerfully into offensive self-mockery. A long section of the novel takes place in Israel shortly after the Yom Kippur War, when the stereotypes were indeed being turned on their heads, and conversely significant criticism of the state was beginning to be heard from the West. But Roth’s principal subject is not the engaged Jews who assert their selfhood either through Zionism or religion, but the countless secular Jews like himself, living securely in a distant country; how do they establish their identity, especially in mid-life when the question of “Is this really all I am?” typically arises. And of course, being Roth, he handles this quest for the total makeover — the counterlife — also at a much baser level, in terms of the male need for female conquest as the final proof of potency.

I am writing this review also as a follow-up to my recent piece on Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, the most recent Man Booker winner. By coincidence, a friend gave me her copy of the Roth on the same day that I bought the Jacobson; neither of us connected the two. But now, having enjoyed both books immensely, I am amazed at how closely Roth anticipates Jacobson 34 years earlier. Both authors treat the same subjects (male libido and Jewish identity), in the same context (Roth’s book is set partly in England, Jacobson’s entirely so), and with the same sardonic humor (except that Jacobson would spell it “humour”). As far as contemporary events go, the three-and-a-half-decade time gap seems as nothing: Roth alludes to Western condemnation of Israel’s actions in the Yom Kippur War; Jacobson’s characters agonize similarly over Gaza. Both writers invade the no-man’s land between antisemitism and paranoia; Roth is the more neurotic of the two, but he has more bite to his satire, and is to my mind the greater author.

Roth has had two abiding subjects in his oeuvre: Judaism and sex. The Counterlife explores both, though from an oblique perspective, in that his principal characters are neither committed Jews nor always sexually potent. The book opens with Henry Zuckerman, a successful Newark dentist, not yet forty, suffering from impotence caused as the side-effect of his heart medication; sex is what he used to enjoy (with both a mistress and a wife) but can now no longer have. He takes the extreme step of having a risky bypass operation, in order to make a radical change in his life. In the next section, Roth offers a different outcome to Henry’s story, in which he abandons his comfortable American secularism and moves to Israel as a fervent Zionist, living in a militant West Bank settlement and studying Hebrew and Torah. In each of these scenarios, Henry is visited by his elder brother, the successful novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several other Roth novels and is clearly the author’s alter ego. Roth (or Nathan) has several other variants in store, but each involves an attempt at radical life change, moving into the heart of an issue from its fringes — the Counterlife of the title.

Writing through an alter ego who is one of the characters in the book enables the author to play narrative tricks that used to be called Pirandellian but are now labeled post-modern. One, as I mentioned, is the ability to change the story at will. The five sections of the book — labeled respectively Basel, Judea, Aloft, Gloucestershire, and Christendom, although these are not in every case their settings — contradict one another in several significant ways, as though emphasizing the author’s ability to manipulate a story at will. The Gloucestershire section (a skeleton key to the whole) even changes tack three times in eighty pages; it begins with the author describing his own funeral and ends with a preview of the final Christendom section, discussed by two of the characters who are to appear in it! While more literal readers may find this confusing, I found it remarkably easy to buy into the parameters of each section, as the only realities at the time. These switches not only added intellectual excitement, they also deepened the perspective and the seriousness of the issues being addressed, albeit in Roth’s characteristically flippant voice.

While Judaism and sex continue to battle for the spotlight, the sexual aspects will in the end be secondary. The answer to the question “Is this really all I am?” may be sought in adultery or divorce, but conversely by the former playboy settling down and starting a family; both are found in this novel. What makes the book so much more than soap opera is that Roth also poses the who-am-I question as a matter of ethnic and religious identity: What does it mean to be a secular Jew in a largely assimilated society? Is it the role of Israel to serve as what he calls the American-Jewish Australia, taking misfits attempting to find themselves as a people? His Judea section is brilliant in its portrayal of many different views of that extraordinary society, many of them extreme, few of them compatible, but all in essence true. He has one striking passage (a single sentence) describing a Sabbath meal in the settlement that, though probably intended with slight condescension, also brings a light to Zuckerman’s eyes: “Singing in the Sabbath, Ronit looked as contented with her lot as any woman could be, her eyes shining with love for a life free of Jewish cringing, deference, diplomacy, apprehension, alienation, self-pity, self-satire, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness, nervousness, inwardness, hypercriticalness, hypertouchiness, social anxiety, social assimilation — a way of life absolved, in short, of all the Jewish “abnormalities,” those peculiarities of self-division whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.”

But Ronit is a minor character; all the principal women in the novel are Gentile. Roth’s men need non-Jewish wives for camouflage and, as it becomes clear, as opposites against whom to define themselves. Nathan returns from Israel to the suave dining-rooms of Mayfair and meadows of Gloucestershire. In turning these also into ethnic battlegrounds, he exaggerates hugely (though with a germ of truth). Yet he speaks strongly to the need of so many of us, Gentile as well as Jewish, to validate ourselves in opposition to the world around us, rather than settling for the quiet beauty of the ordinary.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 25 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage (August 6, 1996)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: The Philip Roth Society

Wikipedia page on Philip Roth
EXTRAS: The New York Times review of The Counterlife (1987)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Nemesis

The Plot Against America

Indignation

Exit Ghost

Everyman

Bibliography:

** Philip Roth appears in novel

Zuckerman Novels:

David Kapesh Novels:

Nonfiction:

E-Book Study Guide:

Movies from books:

]]> /2011/the-counterlife-by-philip-roth/feed/ 0 NEMESIS by Philip Roth /2010/nemesis-by-philip-roth/ /2010/nemesis-by-philip-roth/#comments Sat, 16 Oct 2010 15:19:11 +0000 /?p=12952 Book Quote:

” …there’s nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy.”

Book Review:

Review by Helen Ditouras  (OCT 15, 2010)

“Tender” and “noble” are two words I have never used to describe a Roth character. In fact, Roth’s usual suspects are razor sharp with a mean streak of self-loathing to befit the most unlikable anti-heroes of the American literary canon. Not to mention, most of his characters are so self-obsessed and entrenched in complicated sexual proclivities that they seldom do the right thing. And much to the chagrin of my feminist friends, I’m amused, if not seduced, by these delinquent male protagonists, and look forward to their self-deprecating demise each and every time I encounter them.

Which is precisely why my love for Eugene “Bucky” Cantor bemuses me in a way I can’t describe. Cantor, the leading man in Roth’s latest novel Nemesis, is so decent, so likable in a non-Rothian way, that if you’re a stalwart fan of Alexander Portnoy or David Kepesh, two of the most deliciously depraved characters to ever grace Roth’s fiction, then Bucky Cantor materializes like Mother Theresa. And yet never before have I ached for such a character – identified with such a man whose nobility and innocence would have previously escaped me.

Is it the setting of this novel, 1944 wartime Newark, that makes the emergence of a character like Cantor so salient, if not, believable? Or, is it the raging outbreak of polio in Jewish Weequahic that brings all of these elements together? A child orphaned by the death of his mother upon giving birth, abandoned by his charlatan of a father, Bucky Cantor is saved by his wholesome grandparents who raise him with dignity and unmitigated devotion. Schooled by his grandfather – a kind, but indubitably, man’s man, Cantor appears in the first chapter of Roth’s novel as a hero of sorts. Especially to the children of Chancellor Avenue School, who worship Bucky as their beloved playground director during the summer of the polio outbreak. Unhinged by his inability to serve in the army due to his compromised eyesight, Cantor allots his time and affection to the Jewish children of Weequahic who compete for his love and approval. From standing up to a group of anti-Semitic Italian hooligans on the playground, to modeling his outstanding athletic prowess, Bucky Cantor is more than the local victor of summertime Newark – he becomes the center of these children’s lives. So when polio hits the Chancellor playground and ruthlessly stakes out the fates of these children, so begins the slow and agonizing decline of Roth’s most affable frontrunner.

What strikes me as sheer genius on the part of Roth, is the allegorical references to Europe’s Shoah that line the pages of this heartfelt narrative. Even while Roth makes references to Nazi-occupied Europe and the ongoing war, he is quick to evade any talk of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Instead, he redirects the readers to Pearl Harbor, or the calamity of polio, which like the Holocaust, swiftly and mercilessly wipes out the Jews of Newark. That Cantor is overwhelmingly haunted, page after page, with crippling doses of survivor’s guilt, only makes this metaphorical imagery more deliberate and nuanced. Like many survivors, Cantor rails against the wrath of God, who does little to stop the slaughter of Newark’s children. And his disbelief of God, which appears early on in the novel, intensifies as the narrative progresses, leaving Bucky more desolate, more pathetic, than possibly imaginable.

So, who was Bucky Cantor’s nemesis? Was it the rampant Anti-Semitism of the 1940s – so disproportionate in its ugliness – that forced Cantor to always “stand up for himself as a man and to stand up for himself as a Jew?” Or was Cantor’s unconditional allegiance to patriarchy the Achilles’ heel that forced him to view his own weakness as feminized and unacceptable. I would suggest, his penultimate nemesis was the polio outbreak of the 40s.

Making his indomitable nemesis, of course, God.

In all of this uncertainty lies the unadulterated beauty of Roth’s new novel – the resounding message that despite life’s malevolent blows, goodness does abound. And in the face of mankind’s cynicism, once in a great while, we are blessed to make the acquaintance of people like Bucky Cantor.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 61 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER: Helen Ditouras
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: The Philip Roth SocietyWikipedia page on Philip Roth
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

** Philip Roth appears in novel

Zuckerman Novels:

David Kapesh Novels:

Nonfiction:

E-Book Study Guide:

Movies from books:

]]> /2010/nemesis-by-philip-roth/feed/ 0 TOO MUCH HAPPINESS by Alice Munro /2009/too-much-happiness-by-alice-munro/ /2009/too-much-happiness-by-alice-munro/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:12:58 +0000 /?p=6389 Book Quote:

“But think. Aren’t I just as cut off by what happened as he is? Nobody who knew about it would want me around. All I can do is remind people of what nobody can stand to be reminded of.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (NOV 19, 2009)

It is an honor to review Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro, who I consider the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language. Ms. Munro is Canadian and lives in Clinton, Ontario. During her writing career she has garnered many awards including the Lannan Literary Award, the United States National Book Critics Circle Award, and the most recent 2009 Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, as well as many other literary publications. I consider her an icon.

With each book of hers that I have read (and I have read them all!) I think that she has reached her zenith. Yet, with each new publication, I find her newest work better than her previous publications. Her work is glorious. At the rate she’s going now, her zenith may be light years away.

I find the metaphor of looking into a tide pool an apt one for describing the stories of Ms. Munro. A tide pool is a microcosm of the ocean, yet it has a certain stasis and life of its own. It is a living organism, relating to the macrocosm of life in many ways. The tide pool contains living species of fish, reptiles and crustaceans, all delineated by their own life cycle which can change with the tides or with the events of weather. Ms. Munro’s stories are like this. She will take a small microcosm of life and show how it has enduring and lifelong effects – effects which may be immediately observable or which may not be obvious for decades.

Too Much Happiness is a collection of ten short stories, each wonderful in their own right and each as rich and nuanced as a novel. Many of them deal with similar themes – paradox, movement through time, repercussions of impulse, regret, acts of horror and relationships.

“Dimensions,” the first story in the collection is about a damaged woman. She goes through life feeling empty through she talks to a social worker regularly. She is driven to visit and re-visit her ex-husband in psychiatric facility. At one point he writes her a diatribe about his revelations that their children are now in another dimension. On her way to visit him one evening on the bus, she witnesses a car accident and attempts CPR on the victim. Through the CPR, she can feel life return to the young man who is near death’s door.

By the third story in this collection, “Wenlock Edge,” specific themes begin to emerge – Who are we? Do we change in relationships? Of what are we capable under certain situations? Do these situations have particular reasons or are they random events related to our current environments.

The story begins with a young woman who has regular visits from her aunt and bachelor uncle when she is a child. Her aunt dies. The young woman continues school in the city and has a weekly ritual dinner with her uncle. She also has a small circle of acquaintances. Solely by chance, she ends up with a part-time roommate with a “history.” This roommate is always getting herself into situations that don’t work out and that compromise her virtue. She is also a prolific liar and likes to be in one-up situations with others. Both young women find themselves “on their way to deeds they didn’t know they had in them.”

“Deep-Hole”s begins with a family outing to celebrate the father’s publication of a paper on geology. During the course of the picnic, one of the sons, Kent, falls into a crater and breaks both of his legs. He has to remain out of school for six months. During that time, Kent and his mother share stories about distant isles and lands that are remote or unknown to mankind. One of the children becomes an attorney, the other a physician. Kent drops out of college and is heard from rarely and erratically. He lives on the fringes of society and the question arises, “What is society?” The story reminded me of a novel by Carol Shields, a Canadian author, now deceased. I wondered if this story might be an homage to Ms. Shield’s novel.

“The Face” is a wonderful story about a boy born with a port wine stain on half of his face. His father abhors him for his looks and calls him “liver face.” The father is rude, crude, awful. The mother is sanctimonious, martyr-like and loving her son in a standoffish way. The father avoids the son in every manner possible – he doesn’t eat with him, talk to him or spend time with him. Ms. Munro brings up a lot of questions about this boy’s life and the metaphor of paradox is paramount. “You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.”

“Child’s Play” is a story that is idyllic on the surface and horrific in the interior. Two young girls attend a summer camp and during the course of this camp they do something that is never spoken about again until decades later. Even then the extent of what happened when they were children is not fully absorbed.

Each of these stories is masterful and wonderful in the telling. I’ve read the book twice and appreciate it more with each reading. There is no one living to compare Ms. Munro with. The only writer I can think of whose short stories I love as much as hers is Eudora Welty. What a group of two!!

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 47 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (November 17, 2009)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Alice Munro
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: I’m ashamed to say that this is our first Alice Munro book we’ve reviewed.However… here are some more great short story collections:

Bibliography:

Related:

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