Weak Men, Furious Women

...It sounds altogether too much like what it actually is—a replay of the worn phrases heard again and again on the mass media...

...Well, let's go...

...Well, it's not mine...

...Roth's sympathy for her is purely imaginative...

...The counterpoint is a subtler matter, occasionally almost inaudible—and some of this is Roth's fault, his faltering at the job—but it is there and makes the novel, for most of its breathless length, an astonishing feat...

...But you're just another one of those typical American girls who thinks it's obscene...

...The ironic counterpoint is so faint, the reproduction of the speech is so slick and flawless, that it nearly defeats Roth's intention...

...Now that sounds just like the television show from which Roy borrowed his rhetoric...

...she is the nexus of a relationship, the horrifying product of an all-too-common American situation which Roth has had the perspicacity to single out for our interest and thought...

...Without raising his voice, Roth tells us about the real conditions under which sexual relations in America come to disaster...

...His sympathy for his characters is total, so intense and wholly committed that he feels he cannot stand outside them, or deliver any verdict on them...

...Her rage at her father's fecklessness and blundering stupidity drive her into Catholicism, but she is too hard-headed and too practical to accept its other-worldliness, its floating spirituality...

...But I do not want to close this review on a negative note...

...The violence of longing in Lucy is intense, pathetic and undirected, a reflection of the muted violence all around her...

...Today, however, one must take into account the shambles produced in so many minds by the flood of didactic gibberish that passes for modernist criticism...

...Without the sort of compulsive piling up of detail and dialogue that characterized his other novel, Letting Go, Roth has written an admirably restrained and moving, if not perfect, book about the tragic heartland of American emotion—that heartland which is either ignored by our novelists or transformed into some distended, extravagant mirror-image of their own ideas or psyche...

...The men are charming and weak...

...His young heroine, Lucy, whose father is a drunkard and a weakling, and whose husband, Roy, seems to be repeating the paternal pattern, is a strange figure...

...Lucy represents herself to us as stone-hard, yet everything she does, everything she tries to do, is undermined by the crazy softness at the center of her character...

...I have qualified my praise of Roth's novel because some of its discordant elements—the weaknesses of style, the blur of intention at the start, the relative slowness of its initial momentum compared with its brilliance and speed at the end—lead me to think he started writing one kind of novel, changed his gait along about page 50, and hit his true stride around the middle of the book...

...Is that your idea of a man-woman relationship...

...The difficulty of writing such level, low-keyed, realistic fiction is enormous...

...It is even too modern, in the sense that the author has refused to comment in any overt fashion on either the story he tells or the characters he presents...

...Humility is the novelist's true uniform, and Roth has certainly donned it...

...Married to some other girl, or perhaps not married at all (which would have been the best solution), Roy would have dawdled along in his fumbling, good-natured way...

...and also the fact that our novelists, no matter how talented and intelligent, have been affected by this guff...

...Once he made her stand in front of a white cement wall by the high school, in the full noon light, so that her bangs looked like white straw, and her blue eyes like the eyes in a statue, and the bones of her square serious face appeared to be stone beneath her skin...

...Here, for example, is Roy trying to get Lucy to sleep with him: "I can't take any more of this, really...

...This, of course, is the great tradition which started with Flaubert, attained a poignant intensity with Giovanni Verga, and achieved its finest esthetic and experimental successes with Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce and Henry Green...

...And he succeeds time and again by employing the low-keyed, barely discernible satiric tone that underscores even the most innocuous-seeming string of sentences: "He [Roy, her young boy friend] took hundreds of pictures of her...

...In its peculiar fashion, his book is perhaps more of a Pop novel than is apparent from its smooth surface...

...For Roth actually does say something about the most explosive of American problems—the lamentable relations between men and women in so many of our families...

...On the contrary...

...T may not believe what you say,' said Daddy Will through the door, 'but I will fight for your right to say it.' " While he certainly could have said something similar, after the tenth or fifteenth such commonplace one wishes that Roth had not said it in just that featureless jargon...

...Again, when Lucy is fighting with her grandfather, Daddy Will, the prose runs too smoothly: "Their house was not a dictatorship, it was a democracy, in which every person had his ideas—and was respected for them too...

...He is writing from inside the reality, taking the reality at its face value, yet also telling us what he considers corrupt, tragic, pathetic and absurd in that reality...

...And when Roth immediately afterward tells us that Lucy feels Roy is really angry, that she knows his words are sincere, the irony is all too atrocious...

...When She Was Good is perhaps the most unabashedly modern book I have come across in the last year...

...the women are possessed and furious...

...If Roth is saying anything in this novel, and Lucy is unquestionably the crux of it, he is saying that American life makes us soft, both the men and women, but forces us to behave as if we were hard...

...If a novel is written in outwardly ordinary language, has a plot and characters, and deals with recognizable problems that concern all of us, then these academic soothsayers will tell you it is not modern...

...He wanted one with a falling roof and a gloomy air, and all they could find were big red ones freshly painted...

...Roth is merely telling us the story, but here his uncontrollable distaste for religiosity of any kind creeps into the account...

...All I intend to do is lay the facts before you, as directly and precisely as I can...

...It also drives her into the school band and out of it, into a friendship with a rich girl, and then into an afiair with Roy, the boy living next door to the rich girl...

...In an age of untrammeled ideologues this can be very irritating, and I predict that When She Was Good will raise more cain both in the literary establishment and in the hinterland than many novels that are on the surface more flamboyant...

...The rule for this difficult game is simple: The novelist must never intrude as ideologist, he must keep his moral distance, since only this sort of "impersonality" will permit him to write with passion, clarity and detachment about the life lived around him...

...With a simplicity and modesty that are in the end lethal, Roth has written the most violently satiric book about American life since . . . since Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One...

...Through all of this—the raw material of popular fiction, the kind of thing that fills the women's magazines—Roth remains intent on saving for our imagination a reality we all know and suffer from...

...If you want an editorial or an "answer," Roth seems to be saying, apply to one of my more ideological colleagues —William Burroughs, say, or Norman Mailer...

...Philip Roth has gotten a firm hold on this central perception of modernism and with its help has written a novel which, in spite of its flaws, gathers in so much of the raw material of our lives with such intelligence, sensitivity and imaginative tact that I regard it as a notable event in a period of almost uninterrupted fictional drought...

...But he obviously felt that he could not do more than single it out...

...Once they spent a whole afternoon driving around the countryside in search of the right barn for her to stand in front of...

...WRITERS & WRITING Weak Men, Furious Women By Raymond Rosenthal IN His latest novel, When She Was Good (Random House, 306 pp., $5.95), Philip Roth has decided?presumably on the basis of his understanding of a classic tendency in modernism—to let his characters talk and act for themselves...

...And he knows that the sympathetic imagination is worth a carload of "ideas...

...Sex is one of the highest experiences anybody can have, man or woman, physical or mental...

...I mention Waugh to point up a contrast and also to direct attention to Roth's persistent, insidious, cunning use of language as an ironic counterpoint to emotion and evaluation...

...He entitled the photograph 'Angel.' " Roy is a good kid—he might even have some talent as a photographer—but Lucy is possessed and evil in her possession...

...he dislikes her as thoroughly as any of the male slobs whom he portrays with such chilling impartiality...

...Such a presumption would have been absurd and meaningless 20 years ago, when almost any novelist of Roth's gifts and interests would have known what he was doing and why...

...The contrast is clear: Roth is being just as deadly as Waugh, while renouncing all the easy weapons to hand...

...All we do is discuss every move I make, step by step...

...The most amazing thing about Roth is his ability to make all these graduations and nuances strikingly clear, just by a modulation of his novelistic voice...

...Roth has, like the great novelists, forgotten his own psyche to deal with that of others...

...Typical American Girl...

...At its root, as is well known, this is a sexual difficulty, and Roth's novel, In its entirely original way, is about sex from start to finish—much more than those pornographic books currently boring and teasing the populace...

...Lucy is an incarnation of this fury, a suburban Clytemnestra...

...I happen to be a man and I happen to have certain physical needs, as well as emotional needs, you know, and I don't have to take this from any high school kid...

...I'm really a good-natured, easygoing guy, Lucy, so it really takes something to get me in a state like this—but I'm in it, all right, so let's go...

...Is that romantic to you...

...That is why it is so rarely attempted...

...He is neither bad nor truly irresponsible, but he is married to Lucy, the unhappy child of an unhappy marriage, and she is not so much a person as a kind of poisonous distillate of something soft and rotten in the American sexual psyche...