Ο Φιλιπ Ροθ στα 75 του χρόνια αποδεικνύεται, εκτός από σπουδαιότερος, και παραγωγικότερος Αμερικανός συγγραφέας. Δεν πρόλαβε το «Exit Ghost» να ολοκληρώσει τον δρόμο του προς τους φανατικούς θαυμαστές του σε όλο τον κόσμο (στα ελληνικά, ας πούμε, δεν έχει ακόμα κυκλοφορήσει από τις εκδόσεις «Πόλις») και ένα καινούργιο βιβλίο του βρίσκεται στα βιβλιοπωλεία.
Στην «Αγανάκτηση» ο Ροθ «σκοτώνει» και πάλι τον ήρωά του. Μόνο που αυτός είναι ένας νέος από το Νιούαρκ, τραυματισμένος θανάσιμα στον πόλεμο της Κορέας |
Λέγεται «Indignation» («Αγανάκτηση») και, αν και ο ίδιος το θεωρεί νουβέλα, όπως εξηγούσε σε συνέντευξή του στον «Observer», οι εκδότες του προτίμησαν να το προωθήσουν ως «μυθιστόρημα». Στις 230 σελίδες του ο Ροθ εγκατέλειψε το προσφιλές θέμα των τελευταίων του βιβλίων, τα γηρατειά και τον θάνατο («Exit Ghost», «Everyman», «The Dying Animal»). Αυτό δεν σημαίνει ότι ο ήρωάς του επιζεί. Απλώς είναι 19 χρόνων, λέγεται Μάρκους Μέσνερ, έχει τραυματιστεί θανάσιμα στην Κορέα και ενώ βρίσκεται σε κώμα από μορφίνη, θυμάται την προηγούμενη ζωή του, που σε πολλά σημεία της μοιάζει με αυτήν του Ροθ όπως την έχουμε γνωρίσει στα βιβλία του. Είναι ένα είδος «μεταθανάτιου μυθιστορήματος», όπως λέει ο Ροθ.
«Ηθελα να ξεφύγω από όλους αυτούς τους γέρους άνδρες. Δεν αντέχω πια να σκέφτομαι αυτό το θέμα, δεν έχω τίποτα νέο να προσθέσω», είπε στον Ρόμπερτ ΜακΚραμ. Δεν λέει, όμως, να εγκαταλείψει το θέμα του θανάτου, αφού ήδη ολοκλήρωσε μία ακόμα νουβέλα γύρω από μια... αυτοκτονία. «Δεν κάνω κανενός είδους ψυχοθεραπεία», επιμένει. «Ηθελα να δω αν μπορούσα να οδηγήσω έναν από τους χαρακτήρες μου στην... τρέλα».
Τώρα ψάχνει για ένα καινούργιο θέμα. «Η αρχή ενός βιβλίου είναι κόλαση», λέει. «Αυτό είναι το πρόβλημα όταν γράφεις μικρά βιβλία. Τα τελειώνεις πολύ γρήγορα. Ετσι αποφάσισα να βρω ένα μεγάλο σχέδιο, που θα με φτάσει μέχρι το τέλος της ζωής μου. Να το τελειώσω την προηγούμενη μέρα και μετά... το φάντασμα να κάνει την έξοδό του».
«Ηθελα να ξεφύγω από όλους αυτούς τους γέρους άνδρες. Δεν αντέχω πια να σκέφτομαι αυτό το θέμα, δεν έχω τίποτα νέο να προσθέσω», είπε στον Ρόμπερτ ΜακΚραμ. Δεν λέει, όμως, να εγκαταλείψει το θέμα του θανάτου, αφού ήδη ολοκλήρωσε μία ακόμα νουβέλα γύρω από μια... αυτοκτονία. «Δεν κάνω κανενός είδους ψυχοθεραπεία», επιμένει. «Ηθελα να δω αν μπορούσα να οδηγήσω έναν από τους χαρακτήρες μου στην... τρέλα».
Τώρα ψάχνει για ένα καινούργιο θέμα. «Η αρχή ενός βιβλίου είναι κόλαση», λέει. «Αυτό είναι το πρόβλημα όταν γράφεις μικρά βιβλία. Τα τελειώνεις πολύ γρήγορα. Ετσι αποφάσισα να βρω ένα μεγάλο σχέδιο, που θα με φτάσει μέχρι το τέλος της ζωής μου. Να το τελειώσω την προηγούμενη μέρα και μετά... το φάντασμα να κάνει την έξοδό του».
«Είμαι 75 χρόνων. Περίεργος αριθμός. Για μένα, τουλάχιστον, είναι μια περίεργη ανακάλυψη. Στα νεανικά σου χρόνια δεν πηγαίνεις σε μια κηδεία κάθε έξι μήνες», είπε ο Ροθ σε συνέντευξή του στον «Observer» |
Ο Ροθ μοιράζει τον χρόνο του ανάμεσα στο απομακρυσμένο εξοχικό του στο Κονέκτικατ και ένα διαμέρισμα στη Νέα Υόρκη. Περισσότερο ζει στην ερημιά παρά στο Μανχάταν, που τον λατρεύει σαν βασιλιά. Ζει ολομόναχος από το 1993, όταν πήρε διαζύγιο από την Κλερ Μπλουμ. «Εχω απομακρυνθεί τελείως από την κοινωνία», εξομολογείται στον ΜακΚραμ, καθισμένος στον κήπο του σε ένα τοπίο που θυμίζει Ελβετία. «Ολοι οι φίλοι μου εδώ γύρω πέθαναν. Ο Ρίτσαρντ Γουίντμαρκ έφυγε πριν από δύο μήνες. Ο Αρθουρ Μίλερ πέθανε· ζούσε σε απόσταση μισής ώρας. Το ίδιο και ο Μπιλ Στάιρον και ένας φίλος μου γιατρός στην κοντινή πόλη. Εκανα μια λίστα αυτών που πέθαναν τα τελευταία χρόνια. Την κοιτάω και κλονίζομαι. Είμαι 75 χρόνων. Περίεργος αριθμός. Για μένα, τουλάχιστον, είναι μια περίεργη ανακάλυψη. Στα νεανικά σου χρόνια δεν πηγαίνεις σε μια κηδεία κάθε έξι μήνες».
Ισως γι' αυτό να γυρνάει πίσω στα παιδικά του χρόνια. Η «Αγανάκτηση» ξεκινάει από το Νιούαρκ, τη γενέτειρά του, δοξάζοντας την πολυεθνική της ζωντάνια, αυτούς τους «σκληρά εργαζόμενους ημι-ξενοφοβικούς Ιρλανδούς, Ιταλούς, Γερμανούς, Σλάβους, Εβραίους και Μαύρους» κατοίκους της. Στο Νιούαρκ, που έχει γίνει διάσημο στα πέρατα του κόσμου χάρη στα βιβλία του, μια πλατεία φέρει το όνομά του. «Βρίσκεις τα καλύτερα ναρκωτικά σ' αυτή», λέει πικραμένος ο Ροθ. Η πόλη έχει αλλάξει υπερβολικά. «Δεν τολμάω να περπατήσω πια στους δρόμους. Σχεδιάζουμε καμιά φορά με τον Πολ Οστερ (σ.σ. τον άλλο διάσημο συγγραφέα που μεγάλωσε στο Νιούαρκ) να πάμε για ένα λογοτεχνικό προσκύνημα στις ρίζες μας, αλλά θα πρέπει να πάρουμε μαζί μας κι έναν αστυνομικό. Τόσο επικίνδυνο είναι».
Ο τίτλος του νέου του βιβλίου έχει μια πολύ αστεία ιστορία. Προέρχεται από τον... κινεζικό εθνικό ύμνο, που τόσες φορές ακούσαμε στη διάρκεια των Ολυμπιακών Αγώνων του Πεκίνου. Ο ήρωάς του, ο Μάρκους Μέσνερ, είχε, όπως και ο Ροθ, αριστερούς δασκάλους στο Δημοτικό. Δίδασκαν στα παιδιά, εκτός από αμερικανικά πατριωτικά τραγούδια, και προπαγανδιστικούς κινεζικούς θούριους. Ο Ροθ θυμάται σουρεαλιστικές σκηνές στο Νιούαρκ, παραμονές της εισόδου των ΗΠΑ στον Β' Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο. «Ολα εμείς τα Εβραιόπουλα να τραγουδάμε τον εθνικό ύμνο της Κίνας! Ο μόνος Κινέζος που ξέραμε ήταν αυτός που είχε το καθαριστήριο».
ΒΛΕΠΕ ΚΑΙ:
ONE OF THE ways to recognize truly great writers is that even their mistakes engage us.
Philip Roth is our greatest living novelist, and his new book, "Indignation," is an irritating, puzzling and fascinating bundle of mistakes, miscalculations and self-indulgences. (This being Roth in a slightly retrospective humor, there's also a great deal of what used to be called self-abuse, actual and symbolic, but that's another story.)
Ισως γι' αυτό να γυρνάει πίσω στα παιδικά του χρόνια. Η «Αγανάκτηση» ξεκινάει από το Νιούαρκ, τη γενέτειρά του, δοξάζοντας την πολυεθνική της ζωντάνια, αυτούς τους «σκληρά εργαζόμενους ημι-ξενοφοβικούς Ιρλανδούς, Ιταλούς, Γερμανούς, Σλάβους, Εβραίους και Μαύρους» κατοίκους της. Στο Νιούαρκ, που έχει γίνει διάσημο στα πέρατα του κόσμου χάρη στα βιβλία του, μια πλατεία φέρει το όνομά του. «Βρίσκεις τα καλύτερα ναρκωτικά σ' αυτή», λέει πικραμένος ο Ροθ. Η πόλη έχει αλλάξει υπερβολικά. «Δεν τολμάω να περπατήσω πια στους δρόμους. Σχεδιάζουμε καμιά φορά με τον Πολ Οστερ (σ.σ. τον άλλο διάσημο συγγραφέα που μεγάλωσε στο Νιούαρκ) να πάμε για ένα λογοτεχνικό προσκύνημα στις ρίζες μας, αλλά θα πρέπει να πάρουμε μαζί μας κι έναν αστυνομικό. Τόσο επικίνδυνο είναι».
Ο τίτλος του νέου του βιβλίου έχει μια πολύ αστεία ιστορία. Προέρχεται από τον... κινεζικό εθνικό ύμνο, που τόσες φορές ακούσαμε στη διάρκεια των Ολυμπιακών Αγώνων του Πεκίνου. Ο ήρωάς του, ο Μάρκους Μέσνερ, είχε, όπως και ο Ροθ, αριστερούς δασκάλους στο Δημοτικό. Δίδασκαν στα παιδιά, εκτός από αμερικανικά πατριωτικά τραγούδια, και προπαγανδιστικούς κινεζικούς θούριους. Ο Ροθ θυμάται σουρεαλιστικές σκηνές στο Νιούαρκ, παραμονές της εισόδου των ΗΠΑ στον Β' Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο. «Ολα εμείς τα Εβραιόπουλα να τραγουδάμε τον εθνικό ύμνο της Κίνας! Ο μόνος Κινέζος που ξέραμε ήταν αυτός που είχε το καθαριστήριο».
ΒΛΕΠΕ ΚΑΙ:
Philip Roth is our greatest living novelist, and his new book, "Indignation," is an irritating, puzzling and fascinating bundle of mistakes, miscalculations and self-indulgences. (This being Roth in a slightly retrospective humor, there's also a great deal of what used to be called self-abuse, actual and symbolic, but that's another story.)
Readers familiar with Roth's 28 previous books will recognize familiar territory, characters and preoccupations in "Indignation." The year is 1951, and Marcus Messner is the brilliant but overprotected son of lower-middle-class Jewish parents in Newark, N.J. -- in this case, a second-generation kosher butcher and his wife. Marcus makes straight A's at the local college, helps out in the store and, increasingly, chafes at a father whose overwhelming preoccupation with his gifted only child's welfare and physical safety seems to be moving from the merely obsessive to the genuinely pathological.
Marcus, suffocating from his father's emotional terror over the fragility and capriciousness of life, resolves to escape by transferring to a small Midwestern institution, Winesburg College in Ohio. (The literary allusion is intentional, but it's hard to know what Roth intends by it, since Sherwood Anderson's fictive city was a place of unexpected virtues; Messner's is the outer circle of hell.)
Marcus has chosen his new school based on its sunny catalog; he even buys clothes that mimic those of the models in the brochure. What he finds there is unexpected -- Gentile, insufficiently appreciative of his striving and, worst of all, pious in that most goyische of ways, mandatory chapel too.
Marcus, suffocating from his father's emotional terror over the fragility and capriciousness of life, resolves to escape by transferring to a small Midwestern institution, Winesburg College in Ohio. (The literary allusion is intentional, but it's hard to know what Roth intends by it, since Sherwood Anderson's fictive city was a place of unexpected virtues; Messner's is the outer circle of hell.)
Marcus has chosen his new school based on its sunny catalog; he even buys clothes that mimic those of the models in the brochure. What he finds there is unexpected -- Gentile, insufficiently appreciative of his striving and, worst of all, pious in that most goyische of ways, mandatory chapel too.
Fresh from the protective bosom of his tight-knit -- OK, claustrophobic -- Jewish family, he finds it impossible to fit in. He shatters the phonograph record, a Beethoven quartet, of one roommate who insists on playing music through the night, ends up in a fistfight with another roomie whose Protestant silences Marcus can't bear. He works weekends in the local inn's taproom, enduring imagined anti-Semitic insults and prissily disdaining the tobacco and beer others might find convivial because he neither smokes nor drinks alcohol.
This being a Roth novel, Marcus also falls hopelessly, obsessively into erotic thrall to the requisite inappropriate shiksa: "I had fallen in love with an ex-teenage drunk and inmate of a psychiatric sanitarium who'd failed at suicide with a razor blade, a daughter of divorced parents, and a Gentile to boot. I had fallen in love with -- or I had fallen in love with the folly of falling in love with -- the very girl my father must have been imagining me in bed with on that first night he'd locked me out of the house."
Specter of Korean War
Marcus also has become obsessed -- indeed, he seems incapable of feeling anything in any other degree -- with the possibility he will fail in school, get drafted and die in Korea. (ROTC is one of his classes.) A reader quickly gathers that the fear isn't entirely unreasonable, since on page 54, the narrator -- Marcus -- announces that he is, in fact, already dead. It's one of this frustrating book's several miscalculations. (One selects that noun consciously, as this conceit seems less a narrative device than it does a strategy.) It also lends a kind of dreary inevitability to Marcus' "indignant" self-destructive course, the high point of which is the increasingly self-righteous protagonist's extended confrontation with Winesburg's dean, who summons him to discuss his problems adjusting to the school.
The two fence verbally over Marcus' listing of his father's occupation as "butcher" rather than kosher butcher and over his refusal to record his religion on his application. Marcus uses the opportunity to oppose mandatory chapel and religion in general, but instead of using his own -- Roth's -- argument, he uses Bertrand Russell's classic "Why I Am Not a Christian," which, we're told, the younger Marcus, a champion high school debater, had committed to memory. The basic problem with this confrontation, which one senses the author meant to be pivotal, is that between the younger man's callow, self-righteous indignation and the dean's priggishly smug, self-satisfied piety, there's no side worth choosing.
In recent years, much of Roth's best work has come when he sets the emotional specificity of his exquisitely drawn characters against the general backdrop of some large, recognizable historical event, as is the case in "I Married a Communist" and "The Plot Against America." One suspects that the Korean War and a conventionally religious Midwestern college and town were chosen to frame this story because Roth had the war in Iraq and the influence of the religious right on his mind. Roth, in full-throated confrontation with our society's treacly religiosity, would be something to read. Held at a distance, as it seems to be here, it's the rhetorical equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
Descriptive writing
It's all a bit of a shame, because there's wonderful descriptive writing in "Indignation," particularly when the author describes the Messner family's kosher butcher shop:
"Though I was enrolled in a pre-law program, I did not really care about becoming a lawyer. I hardly knew what a lawyer did. I wanted to get A's, get my sleep, and not fight with the father I loved, whose wielding of the long, razor-sharp knives and the hefty meat cleaver had made him my first fascinating hero as a little boy. I envisioned my father's knives and cleavers whenever I read about the bayonet combat against the Chinese in Korea. I knew how murderously sharp sharp could be. And I knew what blood looked like, encrusted around the necks of the chickens, where they had been ritually slaughtered . . . the smell of blood was the first thing that would hit me whenever I visited my uncles and aunts in their stores. That smell of carcass after it's slaughtered and before it's been cooked would hit me every time. Then Abe, Muzzy's son and heir apparent, was killed at Anzio, and Dave, Shecky's son and heir apparent, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Messners who lived on were steeped in their blood."
Misplaced center
It is that passage, quoted only in part here, that ought to have been the emotional center of Roth's novel and the engine of a genuine indignation. Were the father's fears really so exaggerated or the son's anxieties really so neurotic, if he did indeed end up dead on a Korean hillside?
With a dead protagonist/narrator (an atheist to boot), there naturally arises a question about how "Indignation" and its author conceive the afterlife, which, in this novel, is a kind of hell in which the same life is relived eternally in obsessive detail. It's not a bad conceit in and of itself, but the problem is that Roth has created such a self-involved protagonist in Messner -- even by Rothian standards -- that you rather think the silly twit would enjoy it.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
This being a Roth novel, Marcus also falls hopelessly, obsessively into erotic thrall to the requisite inappropriate shiksa: "I had fallen in love with an ex-teenage drunk and inmate of a psychiatric sanitarium who'd failed at suicide with a razor blade, a daughter of divorced parents, and a Gentile to boot. I had fallen in love with -- or I had fallen in love with the folly of falling in love with -- the very girl my father must have been imagining me in bed with on that first night he'd locked me out of the house."
Specter of Korean War
Marcus also has become obsessed -- indeed, he seems incapable of feeling anything in any other degree -- with the possibility he will fail in school, get drafted and die in Korea. (ROTC is one of his classes.) A reader quickly gathers that the fear isn't entirely unreasonable, since on page 54, the narrator -- Marcus -- announces that he is, in fact, already dead. It's one of this frustrating book's several miscalculations. (One selects that noun consciously, as this conceit seems less a narrative device than it does a strategy.) It also lends a kind of dreary inevitability to Marcus' "indignant" self-destructive course, the high point of which is the increasingly self-righteous protagonist's extended confrontation with Winesburg's dean, who summons him to discuss his problems adjusting to the school.
The two fence verbally over Marcus' listing of his father's occupation as "butcher" rather than kosher butcher and over his refusal to record his religion on his application. Marcus uses the opportunity to oppose mandatory chapel and religion in general, but instead of using his own -- Roth's -- argument, he uses Bertrand Russell's classic "Why I Am Not a Christian," which, we're told, the younger Marcus, a champion high school debater, had committed to memory. The basic problem with this confrontation, which one senses the author meant to be pivotal, is that between the younger man's callow, self-righteous indignation and the dean's priggishly smug, self-satisfied piety, there's no side worth choosing.
In recent years, much of Roth's best work has come when he sets the emotional specificity of his exquisitely drawn characters against the general backdrop of some large, recognizable historical event, as is the case in "I Married a Communist" and "The Plot Against America." One suspects that the Korean War and a conventionally religious Midwestern college and town were chosen to frame this story because Roth had the war in Iraq and the influence of the religious right on his mind. Roth, in full-throated confrontation with our society's treacly religiosity, would be something to read. Held at a distance, as it seems to be here, it's the rhetorical equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
Descriptive writing
It's all a bit of a shame, because there's wonderful descriptive writing in "Indignation," particularly when the author describes the Messner family's kosher butcher shop:
"Though I was enrolled in a pre-law program, I did not really care about becoming a lawyer. I hardly knew what a lawyer did. I wanted to get A's, get my sleep, and not fight with the father I loved, whose wielding of the long, razor-sharp knives and the hefty meat cleaver had made him my first fascinating hero as a little boy. I envisioned my father's knives and cleavers whenever I read about the bayonet combat against the Chinese in Korea. I knew how murderously sharp sharp could be. And I knew what blood looked like, encrusted around the necks of the chickens, where they had been ritually slaughtered . . . the smell of blood was the first thing that would hit me whenever I visited my uncles and aunts in their stores. That smell of carcass after it's slaughtered and before it's been cooked would hit me every time. Then Abe, Muzzy's son and heir apparent, was killed at Anzio, and Dave, Shecky's son and heir apparent, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Messners who lived on were steeped in their blood."
Misplaced center
It is that passage, quoted only in part here, that ought to have been the emotional center of Roth's novel and the engine of a genuine indignation. Were the father's fears really so exaggerated or the son's anxieties really so neurotic, if he did indeed end up dead on a Korean hillside?
With a dead protagonist/narrator (an atheist to boot), there naturally arises a question about how "Indignation" and its author conceive the afterlife, which, in this novel, is a kind of hell in which the same life is relived eternally in obsessive detail. It's not a bad conceit in and of itself, but the problem is that Roth has created such a self-involved protagonist in Messner -- even by Rothian standards -- that you rather think the silly twit would enjoy it.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
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