Roth Strikes Out
LEIBOWITZ, HERBERT
Roth Strikes Out The Great American Novel By Philip Roth Holt, Rinehart & Winston382 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Herbert Leibowitz Department of English, Richmond College, City University of...
...That's one man's opinion...
...That's about it...
...Our Lady of the Sacred Blood is behind ya...
...They can't hit a lick...
...But Ma, think of Hank Green-berg, Allie Rosen and Sid Gordon...
...Knock the kishkas out of the ball...
...Relax, Norman, it isn't...
...He was the most talked about phenom since Clint Hartung, whom he outhit by 150 points, and the darling of the fans...
...He won't let go of the breast, so to speak...
...Be a good boy...
...He has a fine ear for the slogans, religious cant and public lies by which authority perpetuates "a comforting, mindless myth everyone has grown used to...
...6. Frank Mazuma, owner of the Kakoola, Wisconsin Reapers and capitalist entrepreneur who stages circuses to amuse the fans, provoke the other stuffy owners, and make the cash registers ring merrily...
...His dad was a semi-pro pitcher who made the kid into a switch hitter at age 3; at 6. by his own count—he was a nut on statistics—he had shagged 4,385,772 flies and had the biceps of a 20-year-old...
...They're Jewish...
...The entire Yeshiva Moshe Salanter sent him a parchment scroll with the injunction: "We're rooting for you, Peretz...
...Banished from baseball, Gil wanders the earth and returns as a Stalinist double agent in a subversive conspiracy to undermine the Patriot League...
...He seems to need nostalgia and autobiographical realism to keep his narrative buoyant—and funny...
...But there's a hitch in his swing: his logomania calls attention to the monotonous rhythm of his performance...
...Fancying himself a master strategist of satire, Roth doggedly works out every last conceit, every political analogy...
...The principal spokesman of Roth's revisionist history of baseball is Word Smith ("Call Me Smit-ty"), an octogenarian sportswriter confined to an old-age home...
...God blessed you with a Yiddishe kop...
...The kids loved him...
...7. General Oakhart, Commissioner of the Patriot League, ex-military hero, and pompous upholder of American law and order who believes that baseball is God's favorite sport (before his expulsion, Satan led the Archangel League in stolen bases...
...He hasn't used up his options...
...Turning down a bid from Max Lanier to jump with him to the Mexican League and spurning four lucrative bonus offers in order to go to college (and please his mom), he played for the Bucknell Broncos and drove other teams batty with his alliterative bench-jockeying...
...4. Two midgets: Bob Yamm, who wears 1/2 on his uniform, and O.K...
...editor, "Parnassus: Poetry in Review" Until recently, baseball was the great American sport, our national pastime, as the old saw went, a peculiarly native institution exportable only to a few Latin American neighbors and Japan...
...there was a magical dependency on exploits that would interrupt the dull routines of everyday reality...
...Yet there's this terrific hitter down on the farm, tearing up the pea patch...
...In salvaging that discredited canard, Smitty spins a convoluted yarn that is designed to make the mead hall laugh and weep at the travails of the Ruppert Mundys, a group of prematurely geriatric incompetents masquerading as ball players, who in 1943 played all 154 games of their schedule on the road...
...and from a young savage prospect: "Mistah Baseball—he dead...
...2. Roland Agni, the Ail-American boy-athlete and chanteur who, unfortunately for the life of the novel, is assassinated too late...
...He could make the box score sing like a miniature poem...
...That was signed by Pete Hamill and 2,455 other boys...
...The Horror...
...A Hem...
...They're no fun...
...lovingly narrated his seductions of Candy, Lolita, Lola Montez, Monkey, and U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. On the field and in the clubhouse, he was a flake whose mimickry could shoot tired bodies full of morale...
...In Our Gang, he destroyed his targets with methodical precision, using a Murderers' Row of Burlesque, Parody and Travesty, plus a repertoire of tricky dipsy-doodle pitches...
...While pitching a perfect perfect game he is enraged by a call by Mike ("The Mouth") Masterson and beans the ump, thus rendering his pharynx null and void...
...The Great American Novel is a prima donna of a book, a .250 hitter coming on with all the airs of a Ted Williams...
...Since Wordsmith Roth impersonating Grantland Rice imitating Francois Rabelais shuttles in and out of the narrative, needling, orating, punning, and wheezing, the reader needs a scorecard to identify the heroes who, in the Golden Age, would have fought at Troy or led the Babylonian League in Doubles-Entendres: 1. Gil Gamesh, a pitcher with a blazing fast ball developed by hurling strikes at the sour grapes on the walls of the Hanging Gardens...
...Ockatur, a nasty violent misshapen dwarf, who wears 1/16 on his uniform and vindictively blinds Yamm with a fast ball between the eyes...
...Branch Rickey got all the credit for breaking the color barrier in baseball, but it was really Roth who routed the reactionary rednecks with their racist ribbings as quick as you can say Jackie Robinson...
...a zealous Christian-imperialist-missionary-cum-salesman who, after successfully proselytizing the Japanese to adopt Baseball as their national sport, brings the one true faith to the Africans in the heart of their jungle darkness, only to be outwitted and outraged by their ritual violation of the sacred Rules and Regulations of the Game...
...For two bucks the fan could forget his "vile powerlessness," all the hexes, hoaxes, whammies, and loneliness he suffered...
...It "soaks on in the brine of fantasy and fabrication," waterlogging the reader's brain...
...A Solon of jingling pieties and platitudes...
...Listen to Momma...
...There are surprisingly few good novels about baseball...
...Nickname Damur, Frenchy Astarte, and Hot Ptah (a one-legged catcher), among other divine bushleaguers...
...5. Mister Ulysses S. Fairsmith, manager of the Ruppert Mundys, Uncle Sam (US, U.S...
...Roth belabors his invention endlessly...
...Told him how he wrote Yogi Berra's famous ad-lib speech...
...As Abner Dou-bleday might have said, "Baseball is life...
...Having once dated F. Scott Fitzgerald, she nagged him to give up baseball for writing: "Pfeh, Philip, baseball's a goy-ische game...
...Roth's chief talent has always been mimicry...
...The Paris Review sent George Plimpton to interview him about his precocious feats and did Roth ever put Mr...
...Behind their backs, Philip, all kinds of anti-Semitische things they say about them...
...His mother, Lillian, wanted better things for her son...
...Now Philip Roth has put in his bid for the Hall of Fame with an ambitious extra-inning affair that he has brazenly called The Great American Novel...
...Born in the shadow of Ruppert Stadium in Newark, he almost lost an eye when Cliff Mapes hit a screaming line drive against the knot hole through which Philip was watching the Bears demolish the Jersey City Giants...
...Life is a pennant race of mysterious heroisms, unexpected reversals of fortune, and broken dreams...
...The Great American Novel is no different—just longer...
...Aw gee, Ma, I don't want to play with the Grub Street Grandees...
...Frank the wasp Merriwell on...
...From Mr...
...Which is a shame...
...A sex-crazed, daft teenager, a combo Whizkid, Quizkid, he played and managed the Adolescent Psyches to an unprecedented six World Acne Championships...
...3. A pantheon of fallen pagan idols and raggle-taggle gypsies with such names as John Baal (which allows for the torrid pun: Basebaal-get it, gentle reader...
...Reviewed by Herbert Leibowitz Department of English, Richmond College, City University of New York...
...The entire nation seemed in tune with its elaborate fantasy system...
...What a talent...
...This crackpot tries, with gallant paranoid humor, to force Official Organized Baseball into acknowledging that the Patriot League truly flourished from 1880-1945...
...The slumps are epical...
...A bloody bore in a portentous political allegory...
...Graduating from Bucknell, Philip played a season in the Three-I League (Israel, Italy, Ireland), rewriting the record book...
...This particularly grotesque attempt at satiric humor includes tribal kids cannibalizing the baseballs, savages eating the gloves, virgins being deflowered with the broken ends of Louisville Sluggers, and Conradian punch lines...
...Phil had the greatest slingshot stroke since David leveled Goliath with a beanball...
...only the ones by Ring Lardner Jr., Bernard Mala-mud, Mark Harris, and Robert Coover come to mind...
...When he's good, he's very very good, but when he's bad, his slumps are epical...
...His beautiful sexy daughter, Doubloon, is paralyzed from the waist down in an accident resulting from horseplay: How about that for a punitive fantasy, Mel Allen...
...Why he even talked Bill Veeck into hiring a midget and Pete Gray, the one-armed batsman...
...A kid by the name of Alex Portnoy...
...described the brawl with Brooklyn's star, Norman Mailer, in Mister Laffs over who would be the first to write the Great American Novel (Ahem...
...recounted his daring escape from the doghouse by tying together a leather rope of catchers' mitts...
...Fairsmith: "The Horror...
...Baseball was transcendental experience, with the fillip that the quantitative materialism of statistics, the Gross National Product of winning and losing, let the fan reenact the game: a sort of instant mythic replay...
...He was known as the Master Baiter...
...Because Roth was a natural for a baseball classic...
...Please send an autographed ball and picture of yourself...
...Not to be outdone, the tough Irish punks of Park Slope implored him: "Hit the bejesus out'a the ball, Phil...
...A humorless ideologue, he harangues and indoctrinates the Ruppert Mundys, "the misfits of the Master race," in dull fundamentals about the worldwide class struggle...
...Bring him back...
...To borrow his alliterative antics, he relied heavily, almost exclusively, on oral shenanigans: slick-sick-schticks...
...Be a word-smith...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 10
