In the last three years, Philip Roth has published three novels which, according to his publisher, form a "trilogy of postwar American lives." In so far as they deal with three important postwar episodes and their fallouts, this seems a fair description. But can we really equate Vietnam (American Pastoral) and McCarthyism (I Married a Communist), with the inability of Clinton's trousers to stay zipped (The Human Stain)? Should we even try?
Roth seems in no doubt. But then doubt has never been a Roth characteristic; he has always been enraged by stupidity, by dullness, by the foolishness which can create chaos. Up to now that rage has always been focused, and thus useful. American Pastoral is the story of the Swede, a good man whose life is destroyed by his daughter Merry, who joins an underground group and blows up a post office, killing a family doctor who is posting a letter. At this stage, three years ago, Roth was fairly calm (for him). Evil, he notes, is "ineradicable from human dealings"; his novel is an exploration of why and how it can climb out of its box.
In I Married a Communist Roth's rage becomes all-encompassing. Ira, the protagonist, is a loud-mouthed bully of a socialist (and not so secretly, a communist). His wife, like him a radio actor, denounces him in a kiss-and-tell memoir which brings about his downfall. What she doesn't know, and we find out only towards the end, is that as a young man Ira had killed a fellow-worker. He had found in communism a redemption, a way to control his anger and its subsequent violence.
Ira's rage may be temporarily under control, but Roth's is slipping loose from its moorings. The narrator suggests that "to me it seems likely that more acts of personal betrayal were tellingly perpetrated in America in the decade after the war... than in any other period in our history." Tellingly, that decade is when Roth was an adolescent, when ideals are highest and most intensely felt, and the disillusionment the world brings seems to be aimed specifically at oneself.
In The Human Stain anger has become a whirlwind which cannot be contained, destroying everything in its path-including the novel itself. Now it is not so much the protagonist who is angry, although the narrative certainly begins that way. Coleman Silk is a professor at a New England college who has been driven out of his job on a trumped-up charge of racism. But quite early in the novel he calms down-and then the narrator loses control.
Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator, and Philip Roth, the author, have always been imperfectly separated. Events in Roth's life turn up regularly in Nathan's narratives, and are always-just as regularly-the weakest parts of Roth's books. As far back as The Anatomy Lesson, Irving Howe, editor of Dissent, was savaged for publishing his reservations about Portnoy's Complaint.
From The Facts (1988) onwards we have kept company, whether we liked it or not, with Claire Bloom, Roth's real-life companion. In I Married a Communist the bile spews forth-Bloom presented her side of a marriage-gone-wrong in the same sort of kiss-and-tell memoir written by Ira's wife, Eve, to save her reputation. I faintly remember news reports of Roth's acrimonious divorce, but Roth's pounding on and on about it in I Married a Communist and in The Human Stain leaves no room for anything else. It is boring, and it turns him into a bad writer. Roth has always been a stylised writer; his rhetorical ferocity has never reproduced the sounds and rhythms of everyday speech. Until now Roth has given us a kind of Ur-dialogue: the speech we would speak if only we could speak as well as Roth can write. And he has given us real people. But in these last two books they become caricatures, pasteboard targets pinned up only so that they can be shot down.
Ira's wife, Eve, and her daughter, Sylphid, are by their very names created as symbols. Eve is the universal female. A Sylphid is not only a young wood nymph, but from the early 19th century it was used to describe a slender, graceful girl. (No doubt we are supposed to enjoy an extra snicker here because Sylphid is actually fat-embodying in one package two of Roth's horrors: women and flesh.) Neither Eve nor Sylphid ever becomes any more real than the name. Each is a collection of characteristics and tics, produced to show what appalling people they are.
In The Human Stain, all characters except Coleman Silk and Nathan Zuckerman are puppets. Roth does not even contrive more or less natural ways of getting them on and off stage as they perform their parts: when they have finished he drops the strings, like a child moving on to another toy. If motivations are mentioned, they are childish-or, worse, male fantasies of a sophomoric level. (Delphine Roux, apparently, hates Cole because she really has a passion for him. Even Playboy has given up that idea.)
Schematisation of the plots doesn't stop here. In each of the three novels we are given, early on, a synopsis of a book: The Kid from Tomkinsville in American Pastoral; Citizen Tom Paine in I Married a Communist; and the Iliad in The Human Stain. The theme of each of these books is tidily laid out for us-in case we're a little slow-so that we can re-apply them to the novel we are reading. The Kid from Tomkinsville, a children's baseball novel, is "the boys' Book of Job, a book about a sweet star savagely and unjustly punished"; Citizen Tom Paine traces "the contradictions of an unsavoury man with a smouldering intellect and the purest of social ideas"; the Iliad is about the ravening spirit of man. And it goes on, and on.
Apart from making a serious and thoughtful author seem shallow and foolish, the real sadness is how hopelessly these books are weakened by Roth's inability to make the opposition as formidable as the defence. The Swede in American Pastoral is decent, brave, caring. His daughter is a lunatic. She is given no space to be a real person: she is "miserable, self-righteous-a little shit." In I Married a Communist Eve is a dim hysteric, apt to latch on to whomever seems most powerful at any given moment. Her daughter is someone from whom "an ordinary man would run screaming." She and her mother are also (of course) anti-Semites. In The Human Stain no one who persecutes Silk is kindly, or thoughtful, or even mildly intelligent-no one has any human emotions at all, which seems unlikely in even a moderate-sized institution.
I am enraged by the badness of this new book because it betrays talent. Bad books are everywhere; great books, and writers, almost impossible to find. Roth is one of the great writers of our times. The Counterlife is his best work: a fast, furious book, by an author who can keep a galaxy of balls in the air, whizzing around faster than the reader can think. In his book before this trilogy, Sabbath's Theater, Roth creates a distillation of rage so deadly that it destroys any illusions, any hopes we may have ever had. When Roth tempers rage with craft, he connects Celine-like nihilism with a lyricism which carries all before it.
In The Human Stain craft has been abandoned in favour of unmediated emotion. A freshman essay which contained-on page two-the following two sentences back-to-back would be returned: "Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism-which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security-was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten 21 year old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony." Then: "In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne (who, in the 1860s, lived not many miles from my door) identified in the incipient country of long ago as 'the persecuting spirit'; all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cosy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman's ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again." No, you don't have to go back and check: it really is only two sentences (and aren't you glad you now know where Hawthorne lived in the 1860s?).
If Roth can't see why he should not write "It was a summer when the president's penis was on everyone's mind," surely someone at his publisher's could have told him that, although an anatomically interesting idea, he might like to think again. (The president's penis was on everyone's lips, maybe?) This brings us back to where we started-is Clinton's penis worthy of the rage and despair which Roth invests in attacking the president's enemies? Did Clinton and Monica Lewinsky destroy lives and tear apart families (other than their own), as McCarthy did, or the Vietnam war? At the end of the day, at the end of the book, surely the sane response should be: hey, Phil, it was only a blow-job. Get over it.
"The Human Stain" (Jonathan Cape, rrp?16.99) can be bought through Prospect Bookstore at ?14.99 plus 99p p&p. Call 020 8324 5649
