Travels in Kafkaland
APPLE, MAX
Travels in Kafkaland The Counterlife By Philip Roth Farrar Straus Giroux. 324 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Max Apple Author, "The Oranging of America, " "Zip, " "Free Agents, " "The...
...They keep at their business...
...It isn't even a story that can end: more imagining is always possible...
...But 1 think not...
...There is no doubt that the dramatic center of all the imaginings in The Counterlifeis Judea...
...Like Kafka's dung beetle climbing the walls, they travel...
...In this novel life as a man enters the Kafka range...
...Instead, he is taking the idea of what might have been in another direction he has been following subtly, and I think consciously, for some time...
...Or, in other Kafka works, try to become engaged or dig a hole or have a meal, it's just about impossible...
...I can imagine an epilogue to this novel —also an image...
...They may be impotent, but the Zuckermans are active on all other fronts...
...The life that might have been is the only one Kafka could imagine...
...In this theater, mortality is just another act...
...The entire novel takes place in Kafkaland...
...The experiment in The Counterlife is the merger of Roth and his best mentor, Franz Kafka, and it is a genuine merger not a mere influence...
...The world, as big and enticing as ever, is what it always was, only the Zuckermans are slightly different...
...The narrative concludes with an image —the vibrant physical existence that was "metamorphosed" out of the novel, an erect penis...
...Nathan Zuckerman, robbed of his English lady, makes the same decision...
...This is what Roth has done...
...Roth has never ducked the issue of what it means to be a man...
...The authors, a little embarrassed, smile...
...When a novelist tries something new it rarely delights readers...
...Everything is moving along...
...What if you're not a man...
...But Kafka's scent has been long in Roth's nostrils, and in this novel it blossoms into a deep, wonderful aroma...
...It might be reasonable to assume that Philip Roth, in this his 16th novel, is engaged in the kind of haphazard experiment that the imagination, and sometimes literary fashion, demands...
...Henry Zuckerman, robbed of the brief pleasures of his dental assistant's mouth, decides to risk a dangerous operation...
...rubric, he is not entering into this old debate...
...Let me find sleeping there what I've worked for, what I want, a woman with whom I'm content, pregnant with our future, her lungs quietly billowing with life's real air...
...His narrative method has drawn much attention, yet it is a staple of the 20th century...
...In the background Prague and Newark are turning away, but to the east, in Jerusalem, workmen are rolling out a red carpet...
...Along the way, in the truncated sections of this novel, the Zuckerman boys, seeking the arousal of the penis, discover one another...
...Yet here he is in The Counterlife telling half stories, imagining what his novel would be like if one character rather than another died, finally talking to his characters, reminding them and himself that the writer is in charge, perhaps...
...So writers desire experiment, and over time such experiment leads to identifiable changes, the kinds of phenomena we study as literary history...
...But as they frantically search for an authentic life, they keep finding, like Kafka's characters, that it's almost impossible to do the simplest things...
...The chapter set in Israel rouses Roth's best prose and his sympathetic political intelligence, but this is not a story that can end in the Promised Land...
...The triumph of this kind of power, though, is always ironic...
...Nathan knows how lovely it would be if his Maria could slip from syntax to sinew, and in the realm of the narrative she can and does...
...Reviewed by Max Apple Author, "The Oranging of America, " "Zip, " "Free Agents, " "The Propheteers" For his latest novel, Philip Roth has descended into the murky arena of daydreams, the underworld of narrative, a place usually brushed aside in the rush of action and speech, unraveled by the very closure of a sentence...
...Neurology and psychology limit the imagination enough, and language itself is a kind of noose...
...But the house of Zuckerman is a Jewish house, not a Greek one, so death and suffering are not the tickets to wisdom...
...There's only been a slight change, the matter of impotence...
...Had Roth been self-consciously looking for a literary experiment, he would not have selected such a stale one...
...The solidity of routine, even when the routine is a void, is the characteristic pathos and comedy of Kafka...
...This, too, isaconcept worthy of Kafka...
...What if that main actor, the penis, forgets his lines...
...What a pair of vaudevillians those Zuckerman boys are...
...Those Zuckerman men, like Gregor Samsa, don't know how to stop for impotence or even for death...
...The Zuckerman brothers imagining other lives are like Gregor Samsa learning to walk on the walls and ceiling, taking in a new perspective...
...There are no verbal tricks, no games, and the reader is not confused...
...The prose is clear, the characters are whole, the situations dramatic...
...It's like waking up "metamorphosed...
...There is a lot of commotion, but nothing happens...
...Not only in Portnoy's Complaint, that Iliad of masturbation, but throughout his fiction...
...Henry tries on impotence and Zionism, Nathan sports impotence and Christendom—no matter the Zuckerman or the setting, the main character in The Counterlife is the penis...
...Imagined lives and truncated stories are as healthy as any others...
...Roth and Kafka, looking as alike as the Smith Brothers on the cough drop box, are taking abow, each deferring politely to the other...
...And of course it could have been, except here Roth is after something else: the nature of narrative, not desire...
...In a series of travels Roth has revealed the house of Zuckerman, often sad, yet always a funhouse...
...Roth has not been in this territory before, and for good reason...
...We become accustomed to a certain range of characters and events, a certain predictability...
...The death of the hero courses through the novel like an heirloom seeking its appropriate setting...
...The formal triumph of The Counterlife consists of the author's equal treatment of all possibilities, an imagined life is as serious, as possible, as "real" as any other...
...Ifyou'renot aman, you're one of the visions of what you might havebeen...
...The erection, the stretch, the panther are a relief, an ode to simple health...
...The greater your effort, the more difficult the simplest things become...
...In fact, there could hardly be a greater difference than there is between the pinched, activeworld of Roth's fiction and the closed circle of Kafka's...
...His works bristle with the possible, his characters speak and act exactly the way we know real people speak and act...
...that's what makes us buy book after book, follow a career...
...The chapters are titled "Basel," "Judea," "Aloft," "Gloucestershire," "Christendom...
...And if you're notyou're getting things back to what they were, the dream of health becomes your burden...
...They keep right on being dentists, writers, travelers, dead or alive, real or imagined...
...Now he adds something new, the death of a hero...
...After long immersion with weakness, the strength hardly seems strong...
...My Life as a Man, thetitleofoneofhisnovels, could be a subtitle for his collected works...
...Nathan's erection, preceded by his promise of circumcision, reminds us of Gregor Samsa's sister stretching her body after the insect's death, and of the panther, his roar filled with freedom, who replaces the "hunger" artist in his cage...
...The dentist, not yet 40, becomes impotent...
...In The Counterlife Roth kills and resurrects Henry and Nathan Zuckerman...
...But the predictability the reader craves is the writer's enemy...
...At one moment this busy narrative is so "quiet" that we can hear the writer praying: "When I return let me find in my bed beneath our blanket all those beautiful undulations that are not syntactical, hips that are not words, soft living buttocks that are not my invention...
...Everything described in the novel "happens...
...Just change one thing—for example, wake up as a dung beetle rather than a human —and then see how difficult it is to even get out of bed, regardless of how hard you try and how late you are for your train...
...Where else would a dead Jew go...
...The reader is ready for vintage Roth, thinks this might be a Portnoy Part II: The Revenge of the Penis...
...They try on all the hats they can reach, including the death mask...
...To see several versions of the same event and decide which, if any, is "true" has become a regular dramatic premise even on television...
...He imagines the life Henry might have lived as an ardent Zionist in Judea, and Nathan as a would-be father and suburbanite in English Christendom...
...The Counterlife is not in any identifiable stylistic manner Kafkaesque...
...He starts The Counterlife with the dilemma of Nathan Zuckerman's brother Henry...
...Or try to tell a story and you'll see what happens...
...Although Roth uses the "What is truth what is fiction...
...There you are...
Vol. 70 • May 1987 • No. 7
