I like Philip Roth. I mean, not personally, although I don’t really know if he’s as big an asshole as he makes himself out to be. But I tell you, he’s funny. As I’ve surely mentioned here, I love The Great American Novel, and I liked Goodbye, Columbus and The Breast and Sabbath’s Theater a lot, too. These books are funny, wild and biting. The Plot Against America is not.
Gentle Readers of these Book Reports know that I am always hocking about what happens when speculative fiction novels come from outside the expected channels, either because they are not marketed as speculative or because they are by writers not associated with the field, or (more usually) both. This looked to be particularly interesting: an alternate history book by a Literary Giant™ dealing with fascism and anti-Semitism in America. Sadly, Mr. Roth’s relentlessly somber book is not actually very interesting. No, I tell a lie. It’s interesting. It’s just not very good. So instead of complaining about why o why wasn’t this book discussed in the community and nominated for all the awards, I complain about the book inexplicably not only winning the Sidewise Award for 2004 but evidently being the only nominated novel. What, did you think I would be unable to find something to complain about?
Part of that is that Mr. Roth doesn’t (according to popular rumour, easily believed) read alternate history, so he is unfamiliar with the conventions of the sub-genre. When, at the end, we are treated to the Moment when his history branches from the one we know, it is (a) too late, and (2) lame. People who like alternate-history (like myself) generally want to know what that Moment was, and want it to be good. I’m not saying that there is no good alternate history without a good Moment, revealed nice and early, but the lack of same is a pretty big hurdle to get over. There are other things that struck me as clumsy. The ending, which nobody really seems to have liked, which not only reveals the Moment but also brings the divergent timeline back to our own, is rushed and unrewarding. The characters, particularly of the Actual Historical Figures™, are not interesting or stirring. And the prevalence of page-long paragraphs (at one point I counted seven paragraphs comprising five full pages) makes for tough slogging.
It does, as it is meant to, give people an awful lot to chew on, and discuss afterward. The problem is that it does so with a book that is clumsy and dull, and not much fun to read. So Your Humble Blogger is stuck saying “Read this, you probably won’t enjoy it, but I want to discuss it with you.” Not so effective. So I’ll try without the book, at least mentioning the two main things that I would want to talk about, if I forced a book club to read the thing. If I were in a book club.
First is the way in which Mr. Roth makes a very good and sympathetic apology for the pre-War isolationists. That is, when he presents their arguments, he largely does so effectively, and when he presents their worldview, he largely does so sympathetically. Oh, there are vicious anti-Semites in the book, sure. But when Rabbi Bengelsdorf (one of the few really interesting and memorable characters in the book, unfortunately not brought through to any real conclusion) says that if the US goes to war in Europe, it will mean the death and dismemberment of boys just like Philip, it’s, you know, true. And when Philip’s cousin Alvin runs away to join the Canadian military and fight Hitler, he is not a glorious but a pathetic and nasty fighter, and when he comes back missing a leg, he’s not a noble martyr to the cause but a bitter self-pitying lout. He becomes a small-time criminal and layabout, and generally fails to fit in either with the nice little Jewish community of Newark or with the great big Gentile world.
Those two make up the other really interesting thing in the book. When President Lindbergh decides to break up the Jewish neighborhoods by leaning on companies to transfer individual employees to town in the Midwest, it’s viewed, rightly, as an attempt to destroy Jewish character and identity. But that’s Jewish character and identity as something distinct from American-ism. There Jews who feel that the insistence of Jews on living with other Jews in enclaves of Jewish-America is part of the problem of Anti-Semitism. You can only rise so far within the old neighborhood, and rising out of the neighborhood is problematic, both for the fellow who rises and for the neighborhood he leaves behind. This bit seems to me to be addressed at our problem with African-Americans, and the way we’ve fucked up integration in this country, but its argument is very troubling. The integrationist Jews are, after all, dupes of the Anti-Semites. In the end, it’s the neighborhood that provides safety; the Jews who leave are killed or imprisoned. Well, not all of them, but pretty nearly all the ones who are characters we know. And that’s in addition to the comforts of the urban shtetl, the butchers who have kosher meat, the grocer who has the special Passover goods, the neighbors who speak the mama loshen. The neighborhood is comforting and restricting, isolating and protecting. If, in part, the neighborhood itself is what makes it unsafe to go outside the neighborhood, that does not protect anybody who leaves.
It’s troubling to me. I’m a Jew married to a Christian. I’ve lived, briefly, in areas with substantial Jewish populations and in areas with miniscule Jewish populations. I prefer to be able to buy hamentaschen at the store. Even if I prefer to eat the home-made ones, I prefer to be able to buy them at the store. It makes a difference.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Yeah, re:
It’s curious how Policies for Good can be warped and tainted by Evil to turn out to have been Misguided and Bad Ideas. Alternately, Policies for Evil, which are usually even prima facie Evil, because most people Anymore These Days are too jaded and complacent to object, are very difficult to warp and cleanse into Policies for Good. I think this is one problem that the Democratic party is up against in the last decade or so: that the Republicans have ceased trying to pretend not to be Evil, since it works so well to say “Yeah, I’m Evil. So what, you goody-goody two-shoes, neenerneenerneener! At least I’ve got a prom date!”
In other news, as a WASP born and raised, but having rejected the values of my culture as, well, “stupid,” I’ve had to create my own subcultures and tribes, rather than have them inherent as a birth-right. There’s a certain loose-moorings kind of feeling to this position, and only by creating a Tribe of One kind of thing have I been able to return to a sense of belonging. The good news is that I can walk into a Jewish deli, head held high, and buy some hamentaschen, because you know what? I like the flavor, and screw the cultural implications.
The bad news is that, free of any cultural implications as I am, I have no idea what the hell hamentaschen are. I probably just said the cultural equivalent of “I can buy pinecones ’cause I like munching on them as a snack!” Who knows?
TRIBE OF ONE, BABY!!
peace
Matt
Oh, goody. They look yummy!
peace
Matt
Matt: Hamentaschen are awesome. You should definitely keep an eye out for them once they are seasonal, which the internet tells me is about a week and a half from now. However, if you are tempted to bake your own, be warned that they are secretly a Baked Good, and that, therefore, if your skillset does not extend to Baking, you should proceed with caution. (That said, mangled hamentaschen still taste pretty good — they just don’t have three corners, which might cause some to object.)
Yeah, I took a little turn through wikipedia to find out what they were. They vaguely resemble these baked pastry things we made for an SCA event, which weren’t triangular, and I can well imagine that making them triangular would be tricky. Even getting the things to the state we got them was a chore, and then we couldn’t get the oil hot enough to cook them, and it was a debacle.
But in terms of ingredients and suchlike, hamentaschen sound very like the dessert-style pastry things (which probably have a name that I forget) that we made.
peace
Matt
Matt wrote:
I’ve had a journal entry stewing about this for a while now, which probably means that it will surface sometime in the next six-to-eight months. The short version is: I can quickly identify my parents’ culture and the key components that make it not my culture. I don’t really feel tribally identified with any of the Tribes of various sizes (even Of One) and dominances I could plausibly claim, but to say that one has no culture is stupid on the face of it. Hence.
This is a digression, I know. Back on topic: Phillip Roth? Really? The only connotation I draw on him is a “see also: misogyny.” Not true?
Dan, did you just call me cultured? Or stupid? I’m not sure.
Either way, I’m touched.
Seriously, though, it is true that there is a huge shared culture from which we all draw to inform our own experience, and that the culture of my parents has had a large contribution in informing the creation of the tribe of one that I claimed to inhabit. Admittedly, that was mostly rhetorical. I have been associated with a number of subcultures over the eons, mostly hippie-like.
My feeling, however, and this is what I was trying to convey, is that they were cultures joined, rather than cultures born-into. I am generically a southern city-boy, or at least suburb-boy, and I have retained many of the trappings of that culture. Notably I have an arsenal of comparative expressions quainter than an old lady at a quilting bee, as we used to say.
Also, I have a grasp of the geographical value of a “piece,” and I can quantify the difference between “down the road a piece” and “a fur piece on down that-a-ways.” I know the difference between a crawdad, a crawfish, and a crayfish*. That kind of thing.
But that’s an American kind of belonging, a very at-arm’s-reach-friendly kind of belonging, and there’s no cultural structure there for me to latch onto that isn’t offensive to reason. Like, I could be passionate about the Confederacy, legitimately, given my heritage. I could be passionate about NASCAR or rifle-bores. I could be born-again. But none of that feels “home” to me.
And failing participation in those ready-made tribes, I’ve got the loose moorings syndrome. The tribes I do participate in tend to be very transitory, by-association type things, and their trappings are often quite preposterous, even to me (the SCA for example).
My real point is that being American gives one the kind of freedom to adopt any culture you run across, at least temporarily. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, and I think that kind of lability gets us derided sometimes by cultures with actual, you know, traditions and stuff.
But it’s not necessarily a bad thing either, and it lets me if I so choose take the best parts from any culture I encounter and add them to the best parts of other cultures, and that’s I think what is meant by referring to America as a “melting-pot.” So, maybe, rather than a Tribe of One, I’m more a Fondue Pot of One.
peace
Matt