Philip Roth Unbound
APPLE, MAX
Philip Roth Unbound Operation Shylock: A Confession By Philip Roth Simon & Schuster. 398 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Max Apple Author, "The Oranging of America," "Zip," "Free Agents," "The...
...Take that famous underdog Jacob, to whom Roth alludes in the epigraph of this confession: "So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak...
...Roth is that, has been for years...
...Know what Heine liked to say...
...Follow me...
...The friend of the goy, the enemy of the goy...
...The coarse Jew, the gentle Jew...
...The arrogant Jew, the wounded Jew...
...Go on...
...The new Jew, the old Jew...
...The impostor looks like Philip Roth, talks like him, wears the same style shoes and trousers, and, like the novelist, he has Jews on the brain...
...He's on the shakiest ground, not certain that he has escaped the "frenzied, maniacal, repulsive, anguished, odious, hallucinatory that whose existence is one long tremor...
...Just when we know what's up with this Philip Roth, however, in comes another one?in Israel...
...Owing so much, what has he given back...
...Besieged by his other, by the Mossad, by a relentless Arab friend, and by his own dense history, Philip's choice comes down to the question that has plagued him throughout his career...
...The novelist labels him in Yiddish, "Moishe Pipik...
...Why, everything—what came of it was everything] That cryptography whose signification I could no longer decode had marked me indelibly four decades ago...
...We f—ed and we talked and we watched TV...
...The good Jew, the bad Jew...
...All those critical rabbis and community leaders have grown old, many are dead...
...Now we have two Philips on one shiksa, two Philips in tiny Israel, two Philips more entwined than those other battling look-alikes the Arabs and the Jews...
...He's a regular Everyman's Library on his own...
...Mere words, and nasty ones at that, loshon hora...
...For 33 years he's been clawing through plots, juggling sentences, turning himself inside out to get the right prose rhythm...
...Both change their identities, fight for the Jews, and suffer wounds in the groin...
...Compared to an angel, even Jacob seems a kind of Pipik, yet he holds his own and wins his reward from the God of Israel, creator of Pipik's ancestor, the Jewish joke...
...Patrimony is absurdity laced with dignity and narrated with tranquillity...
...At least it seems that way...
...The other is a real Mr...
...In Roth's confession there's no therapeutic help and the stakes are higher: not Portnoy's sanity, but the author's...
...In this battle of the Phils, it's the powerful author with the mind of steel versus the dying fraud with the steel between his legs...
...Still, in those last few books the all-star pitcher changed his delivery...
...She confessed without so much as a trace of shame that the erection that had outlived him had given her solace for two days and two nights...
...This has caused some of his people problems...
...Two out of three have been memoirs...
...That imagined letter recounts Philip the fraud's death and "posthumous honeymoon...
...The stunned writer springs into action...
...Once the other Philip Roth enters the picture all bets on memoir are off...
...Finally, what's he going to do for the Jews...
...This one-man band plops himself into the middle of the writer's life at the very moment he's recovering, starting to feel he's his old self...
...In its somber rhythms and its clinical medical detail, it seems the work of a writer looking at his own age spots as he types...
...Who could stop you...
...We're in exactly the right mood, we're feeling sorry for our buddy the writer, no longer a spring chicken: "By the time you're pushing sixty, deciphering the pathology of story-making comes to be just another middle-age specialty...
...The accusation: He shows not the Jews, but human vices labeled as Jewish vices—and—he shows them to the goyim...
...Nothing, just silence until Philip I "imagines" a letter from Jinx "written in a hand so minuscule that I could only decipher it with the aid of the magnifying lens from my two-volume set of the OED...
...Philip, you've got us eat-ing out of your hand...
...The lover of Jews, the hater of Jews...
...Trapped in an Israeli classroom, he reads the travel diaries of Leon Klinghoffer and recalls his youthful entrapment in a similar place...
...out of the inscrutable words written on this blackboard had evolved every English word I had ever written...
...It's light years from that jokester and mimic who brought masturbation into mainstream American fiction...
...The defiant Jew, the appeasing Jew...
...It was the argument between a young writer and the Jewish establishment, although that establishment was hardly established...
...Yes, all and everything had originated there, including Moishe Pipik...
...To top it all off he's dying of cancer, and while doing so and saving the Jews still has the time and energy to satisfy, via a prosthetic penis, Yasshiksa nurse Wanda Jane, "Jinx," herself a recovering anti-Semite...
...Nobody...
...Number 20, though, is something special...
...Shall I go on...
...Silence, exile, and cunning" may be fine for Joyce's young writer, but notwithstanding the Chofetz Chaim, you can't shut up a Philip Roth, neither one nor the other...
...Follow you...
...Want to know the fate of Philip II...
...Pipik, like the stylized comic characters of ancient Greece, straps on his phallus and struts across the stage of Roth's life...
...As if he speaks for all those rabbis who wanted to lecture the young Philip on his responsibility to shut up, the Israeli spy educates the writer with the words of the revered Chofetz Chaim, "You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people...
...We talk too much, we say too much, and we do not know when to stop...
...This is the mind/ body problem as it might be explained by Alexander Portnoy, well-known monologist of a previous confession...
...In that complaint there was a listener, the psychiatrist...
...Strangelove, delivers a lecture pinpointing Roth's weakness...
...Smilesburger, an Israeli Dr...
...Reviewed by Max Apple Author, "The Oranging of America," "Zip," "Free Agents," "The Propheteers" Throughout his long, prolific career, Philip Roth and his people have been a constant couple...
...That former young novelist has buried his own parents and, after bypass surgery, now listens to not quite the same heart...
...Only 15 years before Roth's first book, Jews were being hunted and slaughtered...
...Halcion madness" has led him to the brink of suicide...
...There are those 19 previous books all listed on the flyleaf...
...The Facts fills in some of the real life, especially the melancholy first marriage and its toll...
...The writing Roth is who he is...
...And now this, almost a knockout punch from a pill...
...Two, three, four times a day, without provocation, I'd begin to cry...
...The letter, some seven pages long, had the look of a document smuggled out of a prison, while the calligraphy itself suggested the art of the lacemaker or the microsurgeon...
...By the time you're pushing sixty, the representations of 'it' are 'it.' They're everything...
...When there is a break in the patter, another faculty, imagining, takes over, and it's just as noisy...
...Jacob and Pipik do have a lot in common...
...It's Aristophanes they should be worshipping at Wailing Wall—if he were the God of Israel I'd be in shul three times a day...
...The Jewish Jew, the de-Jewed Jew...
...The blackest mark against our people is not the eating of pork, it is not even marrying with the non-Jew...
...Patrimony is an unsentimental recounting of his father's last illness and his death...
...His Zuckermans and Roths and Port-noys, we know them better than our own friends...
...The rebuttal: If the satire fits wear it—and—if I didn't write it, the goyim wouldn't know...
...The reader's heart goes out to him...
...He's an organizer as well, a club man, founder of an AA for anti-Semites...
...the novelist asks his double...
...Roth the baseball fan knows that 20 wins put you over the top, certify you as Hall of Fame material...
...Fiction gives us such an illusion and nobody understands that illusion more than Roth, who has spent a lifetime sitting at his desk with guess who for company...
...But it's still Philip, so he turns the dying Herman Roth into a comic masterpiece, a Kaddish by telling, by making him live in words...
...He flies to Jerusalem, the inevitable place for the battle of the Philips...
...It has the tone of the master, the one who sees things whole...
...Post memoir and "pushing sixty," loshon hora or not, it's never been better...
...What could possibly come of those three or four hundred hours of the worst possible teaching in the worst possible atmosphere for learning...
...But Roth is no outline, we don't come to him as a blank page...
...In outline it's nothing new...
...There is a God and his name is Aristophanes...
...We're ready to see you too succumb to becoming one of the alte cackers, or ready to watch you recover the way we watched Styron beat depression...
...Thus, it is only a small surprise when Roth begins this confession talking about his troubles...
...The pious Jew, the rascal Jew...
...It was like the good old days.'" These Philips, the results of Roth's sin of talebearing, are a mob of Jews: "But inside every Jew there is a mob of Jews...
...You prove it...
...Today there is a Jewish establishment and Roth is one of its high priests...
...A tiny sleeping pill has devastated our friend the storyteller...
...Who made me this wonderful gift...
...He knows it, we know it...
...Moses Bellybutton against Philip Roth, an uneven match if there ever was one, and there have been plenty...
...worse than both is the sin of Jewish speech...
...It won't be pretty, but did we flinch from your father's tumor...
...He's a wild man, an anti-Zionist kook who has fathered Diasporism, a plan to send the Israelis back to Europe to save them from annihilation by Arabs or conflagration brought on by their own might...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 7
