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expendablemudge's review
3.0
Rating: 3.5* of five
Posthumous books don't often turn out well (eg, Dream of Fair to Middling Women oh dear oh dear). Books excavated from immense piles of prose don't often turn out well (eg, Of Time and the River, echhh) either. And this book is both. Did it turn out well? Compared to Call It Sleep, no. Compared to much of the publishing world's present output, yeah.
I found Ira, the author's alter ego, to be a bit tedious in all Roth's books. I don't love Rabbit Angstrom (John Updike's most famous character) either. But editor Willing Davidson (what a great name!) found some less irritatingly self-absorbed things to focus this novel on than, say, the entire book A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, which I found nigh on unreadably whiny. Ira's love for his wife M is a huge point in his favor, and though she is never brought to life in the text but is instead shorthanded in as "aureate" or "golden" or smilingly bathed in the sort of light that the Virgin Mary is usually portrayed lit by, she remains the believeable focus of Ira's striving and working and expending effort on. It's curious how that happened; I usually have a hard time with characters that are sketched in when they occupy a central place in a narrative. I felt M, represented by a simple single letter, was appropriately left as an Object of Veneration; it was *right* somehow that she was a collection of qualities with no recognizable voice of her own.
Edith, God love her, is as much a cipher as ever, and luckily little missed in this book.
I compare this mining job to the pseudo-weighty Jonathan Littell and Andrea Levy stuff lighting things up in Literatureland; An American Type is refreshingly honest and clear and taut compared to those book, among others I've read that have received unstinting praise. It deserves a place on every Roth lover's shelves. I won't recommend it wholeheartedly because it's a bit dull compared to his brilliant first book, and fourth book (A Diving Rock on the Hudson). But give it a chance...there is magic at the very end, worth working for, worth making the effort to see...much like Roth felt life was, I think.
Posthumous books don't often turn out well (eg, Dream of Fair to Middling Women oh dear oh dear). Books excavated from immense piles of prose don't often turn out well (eg, Of Time and the River, echhh) either. And this book is both. Did it turn out well? Compared to Call It Sleep, no. Compared to much of the publishing world's present output, yeah.
I found Ira, the author's alter ego, to be a bit tedious in all Roth's books. I don't love Rabbit Angstrom (John Updike's most famous character) either. But editor Willing Davidson (what a great name!) found some less irritatingly self-absorbed things to focus this novel on than, say, the entire book A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, which I found nigh on unreadably whiny. Ira's love for his wife M is a huge point in his favor, and though she is never brought to life in the text but is instead shorthanded in as "aureate" or "golden" or smilingly bathed in the sort of light that the Virgin Mary is usually portrayed lit by, she remains the believeable focus of Ira's striving and working and expending effort on. It's curious how that happened; I usually have a hard time with characters that are sketched in when they occupy a central place in a narrative. I felt M, represented by a simple single letter, was appropriately left as an Object of Veneration; it was *right* somehow that she was a collection of qualities with no recognizable voice of her own.
Edith, God love her, is as much a cipher as ever, and luckily little missed in this book.
I compare this mining job to the pseudo-weighty Jonathan Littell and Andrea Levy stuff lighting things up in Literatureland; An American Type is refreshingly honest and clear and taut compared to those book, among others I've read that have received unstinting praise. It deserves a place on every Roth lover's shelves. I won't recommend it wholeheartedly because it's a bit dull compared to his brilliant first book, and fourth book (A Diving Rock on the Hudson). But give it a chance...there is magic at the very end, worth working for, worth making the effort to see...much like Roth felt life was, I think.
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