SOURCE: Leonard, John. “A Child of the Age.” New York Review of Books 47, no. 10 (15 June 2000): 6-9.

[In the following review, Leonard views character Nathan Zuckerman as a reflection of Roth and traces Zuckerman's development throughout The Human Stain.]

1.

Like Portnoy in the Holy Land, Zuckerman in the Berkshires can't get it up [in The Human Stain]. The problem isn't the state of Israel. The problem is absence of a prostate. All that worry in The Counterlife about quintuple bypass heart surgery turns out to have been beside the point. Cancer is the point. Philip Roth's autumnal novels are riddled with it. As if the rioting cells were Mickey Sabbaths, anarchist-provocateurs, the body itself is besieged, plundered, ridiculed, and desecrated. At least since American Pastoral (1997). Zuckerman has been impotent. In The Human Stain, he is also incontinent, with cotton pads in his plastic underpants. Why should Roth spare us the prurient details of our dying—a morphine drip, an IV pole—any more than he has ever spared us the baroque graffiti of our unobstructed id, the priapic troll and vagina dentata?

Here I should say that I take this personally. Some of us have been taking Roth personally all our reading lives. If you happen to be an American male born six years after him, and allow for the usual cycle of his thinking up, writing down, and seeing published each of his twenty-four books, the books seem to arrive just in eerie time to be about exactly what you're going through. You are always following dreadful suit. When, say, Goodbye, Columbus shows up at the end of the Fifties, in your junior year of college, you have already decided that you can't go home again, not without feeling like an anthropologist among the Moonies. On consulting Letting Go, you find your doubts about grad school superscribed in fiery signs. Whatever its faults, When She Was Good is a Grimmly punitive fairy tale about marrying too young, and the wrong person. If Portnoy [Portnoy's Complaint] is sui generis (a “talking cure” for Salinger's Seymour), the rest of the books somehow savagely correspond with your own discovery of baseball and breasts: artistic vocation, erotic transgression, political disgust; addictive behavior, symbolic parricide, pastiched selves.

Almost before you've felt bad Roth crowds you with second thoughts and hindsight, secret diaries and wiretap transcripts, telephone calls from the governor at midnight and last-minute DNA evidence. (This just in from the Witness Protection Program, the Freedom of Information Act, and postmodernism: you are an unreliable narrator of your own life.) At your window, his back is turned: been there, done that, moved on very spooky—like Anne Frank in E. I. Lonoff's study, Angela Davis in Swede Levov's kitchen, and the ghost of Mickey Sabbath's mother. Our feet are stained with the gripes of Roth.

What's worse, we think like Roth, or at least the Zuckerman we've known since he was a tadpole in short stories by Peter Tarnopol:

The disputatious stance, the aggressively marginal sensibility, the disavowal of community ties, the taste for scrutinizing a social event as though it were a dream or a work of art—to Zuckerman this was the very mark of the intellectual Jews … on whom he was modeling his own style of thought.

Roth is to us what Zuckerman is to Jimmy Ben-Joseph Lustig in The Counterlife: “You're a real father to me, Nathan. And not only to me—to a whole generation of pathetic fuck-ups. We're all satirists because of you.” We even sound like him in our own skulls, as if we were stand-up comics or manic-depressive analysands or late-night deejays, picking up the paranoia in the ether through the fillings in our speedfreak teeth, the box scores and killing sprees, channeling Kafka, Céline, and Lenny Bruce. Nor does it matter that we weren't born to it, under the burning Spanish tile in a Southern California tract house, renegade Catholics or lapsed Baptists. He made us. For children of the Fifties with literary ambitions, it was necessary to be horny, skeptical, sarcastic, and Jewish—to be Augie or to be Nathan—just as it's obligatory for white kids in the punk suburbs these days to hip-hop.

And now, with the usual lag in Roth years, as if he were a pottery clock, a clam-bed fossil, or a peat bog in reverse, he tells us that we've had it. That we are not safe in our ovaries or our colons or our aortas from “the stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away … the ceaseless perishing.” That we can't hold our water, get it up, figure it out, make amends. That we got everything wrong, and our children hate us: “Learn before you die,” thinks Coleman Silk in The Human Stain, “to live beyond the jurisdiction of their enraging, loathsome, stupid blame.” But our license has expired. “People come apart,” Norman tells Mickey in Sabbath's Theater: “And aging doesn't help. I know a number of men our age, right here in Manhattan, clients, friends, who've been going through crises like this. Some shock just undoes them around sixty—the plates shift and the earth starts shaking and all the pictures fall off the wall.”

Philip himself, in Patrimony, contemplates the tumor eating his father's brain, “the fingernail that had been aggrandizing the hollows of his skull for a decade, the material as obdurate and gristly as he was, that had cracked open the bone behind his nose and, with a stubborn, unrelenting force just like his, had pushed tusklike through into the cavities of his face.” Looking down at the grave these books dig for us, we feel like Nathan's brother Henry:

My brother was a Zulu, or whoever the people are who wear bones in their noses: he was our Zulu, and ours were the heads he shrunk and stuck up on the post for everyone to gape at. The man was a cannibal … a pure cannibal, murdering people, eating people, without ever quite having to pay the price. Then something putrid was stinging his nostrils and it was Henry who was leaning over and violently beginning to retch. Henry vomiting as though he had broken the primal taboo and eaten human flesh—Henry, like a cannibal who out of respect for his victim, to gain whatever history and power is there, eats the brain and learns that raw it tastes like poison.

Still, there's some jack left in the old box.

2.

He explained that puppets were not for children; puppets did not say. “I am innocent and good.” They said the opposite. “I will play with you.” they said. “however I like.”

—Sabbath's Theater

There is this to be said for an impotent Zuckerman hiding out in the Berkshires. He has stopped playing with himself and jerking around the rest of us. He's run out of his own multiple beings and sundry counter-Zuckermans, those Moshe Pipiks and “Philip Roth”s. For the moment, he seems even to have exhausted Israel as a subject, although the last word on the Diaspora Blues will not be spoken until both Roth and Cynthia Ozick are done with their career-long cabalistic smackdown. He's more interested in other people and all of a sudden listening to them as though he were Studs Terkel or Charles Kuralt. Thus, in American Pastoral, he will listen so hard to Swede Levov the athletic hero of his Newark youth, the manufacturer of fine gloves and monstrous daughters, that he has to write a book about what he hasn't heard. Thus, in I Married a Communist, he listens so hard to Murray Ringold, the high school teacher who initiated him into “masculine intensities,” who taught him to box with books, that he swallows and then spits back up at us a vulgarized and reductive history of a lost American left. And thus, in The Human Stain, he listens so hard to Coleman Silk, a seventy-two-year-old professor emeritus of classical literature at nearby Athena College, that he actually intuits a resounding unspokenness.

Silk arrives on Zuckerman's doorstep in the summer of 1998 pursued by furies. Three years before, this scholar who for decades at the college taught “the wrath of Achilles, the rage of Philoctetes, the fulminations of Medea, the nakedness of Ajax, the despair of Electra, and the suffering of Prometheus” who for the next sixteen was its first and only Jewish dean of faculty, had been hounded off campus, into seclusion, by accusations of racism. In a lecture ball he had asked out loud about a couple of missing students—students he had never seen in class, students he had no idea were African-Americans—“Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?” Meaning, naturally, ghosts. (Hearing the word “spooks,” you and I are likely to think of the CIA and The X-Files. This seems not to have occurred to anybody at Athena.) The ensuing abuse, much of it anti-Semitic, took a toll on Silk's equanimity and his wife's health. He stewed, she died, and now, to up the ante in a cycle of retaliation that's very Greek indeed, no sooner has Silk found a female willing to sleep with him—a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman named Faunia Farley—than he starts getting poison-pen letters from the postmodern chairperson of the Department of Languages and Literature, Delphine Roux, and intimations of disgust from his Orthodox son, Mark, who likes to rant about what David did to Absalom and Isaac did to Esau. Silk wants Zuckerman to write a book on his persecution.

There is a lot to be said about Faunia—incest survivor, apparent illiterate, abused wife, lethal mother, failed suicide, milker of cows, lover of crows, and one more example of the tendency of Roth's protagonists to find randy sexual partners among the lumpen, the declassed, or the Eastern European—who explains that “the human stain” is the trail we leave behind of “cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen.” And as much to say about her stalker ex-husband. Les, an ice-fishing Vietnam vet so deranged by the feedback loop in his head of severed ears and rivers of blood that he's not to be trusted in a Chinese restaurant (Roth at his scary-Gogol best). And quite a bit to say, too, about Delphine Roux, who may look like Leslie Caron and may have written her dissertation on “Self-Denial in Georges Bataille” but has an inordinate amount of trouble composing a personal ad for The New York Review, in which the dreamboat she seeks seems most to resemble either Milan Kundera or Coleman Silk.

There are two brilliant dance scenes, one to Sinatra's recording of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” the other to Gershwin's “The Man I Love.” plus more of the Mahler we have come to expect in Roth: and pages on dairy farming that remind us of his love of know-how, those earlier inquiries into glovemaking, zinc mining, and taxidermy: and a number of references to non-Greek literature, from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens to Balzac, Stendhal, and Mann to Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau to Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Kristeva. That all this happens in the Summer of Monica encourages Roth to hyperventilate about “righteous grandstanding” and “ecstasy of sanctimony,” despite the fact that the American public, if not the media, didn't care what Bill Clinton put in his mouth.

But the unspokenness is elsewhere. In several senses of the word. Coleman Silk himself will prove to be a “spook.” At his funeral—there is an amazing amount of death in The Human Stain—his sister Ernestine tells Zuckerman: “As while a college as there was in New England and that's where Coleman made his career. As white a subject as there was in the curriculum, and that's what Coleman chose to teach.” And yet, as we begin to understand in an abrupt flashbacking on page 85, while we're still shaking our heads to get them started, Silk himself was born black, if light-skinned and green-eyed on the wrong side of the psychic tracks in East Orange, New Jersey, not far from Zuckerman's own Weequahic. Ever since he got out of the navy and moved to Greenwich Village in the Beat Fifties, this Howard dropout has been passing as both white and Jewish. Not even his children had a clue.

Imagine Zuckerman's excitement at a “heretofore unknown amalgam of the most unalike of America's historic undesirables”—and his very own White Negro! He is permitted to imagine Silk's desire, from earliest childhood “to be free: not black, not even white—just on his own and free”; his intoxication on “the elixir of the secret … like being fluent in another language”; his determination to forge “a distinct historical destiny,” “to become a new being,” to “bifurcate”; “the high drama that is upping and leaving—and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands”: plus, of course his discovery of “the we that is inescapable: the present moment, the common lot, the current mood, the mind of one's country, the stranglehold of history.” Playacting, imposture, ventriloquism, displacement, espionage, masquerades, counterlives, audacity betrayals, revenge, exile, hatred of decorum, “antipathies in collision,” sexual terrorism, self-transformation, and the Shane-like vanishing act—aren't these the great Roth themes, strummed on as if every novel in the last fifteen years were a harp like Sylphid's in I Married a Communist? Weren't we told in that novel, too, that “the hardest thing in the world is to cut the knot of your life and leave”?

Moreover, Zuckerman is allowed to go back and look at New Jersey all over again through green eyes and black skin, to beat up Jewish kids in the boxing ring, visit West Point under false pretenses, be refused a hot dog at Woolworth's in the nation's capital, get kicked out of a whites-only cathouse in a Southern port, and write poetry, cultivate “singularity,” and sleep like a spy with Steena, the blond Icelandic Dane, in a who-cares bohemia, before marrying Iris, a left-wing Jewish painter of abstractions whose “irreversible hair”—“You could polish pots with it and no more alter its construction than if it were harvested from the inky depths of the sea, some kind of wiry reef-building organism, a dense living onyx hybrid of coral and shrub”—will be the perfect camouflage for whatever their children eventually look like. And finally, in a grueling scene that reminds us of just how good Roth can be when he isn't telling us what to think about his characters before we've even met them. Zuckerman's imaginary Silk can “murder” his own mother, a dignified hospital nurse, by ordaining her out of his life forever. “You don't have to murder your father. The world will do that for you.”

Nathan actually admires this brutal act: “It's like the savagery in The Iliad.” On the other hand, and there's always another hand in Roth, Silk's mother is more persuasive: “You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.”

It's an interesting try, more than merely perfunctory, which Roth has made easier for himself by giving “Silky” Silk a family almost as middle-class as Zuckerman's own—a father who is an optician instead of a chiropodist; a brother who will grow up to be a teacher instead of a dentist. But about Coleman there is nothing so heartbreaking as Swede Levov's belief that he has completed his assimilation, passed his citizenship exam, sealed “his unconscious oneness with America,” by marrying Miss New Jersey, the daughter of an Irish Catholic plumber; nothing as soul-searing as the sight of Mickey Sabbath, with his dead brother's gun and his clarinet, wearing the Stars and Stripes like a poncho. And there are many pages in American Pastoral that seem more black-inflected than these—about discovering “Afro-Oriental rhythms” and “a belly-dancing beat” on the darker side of town; about, at length, the Newark riots of 1967. Nor does Silk get a King Lear rant of his own. (Far from deploring what John Updike calls the “blocks of talk” in Roth, “one babbled essay after another,” I love him on his high hobbyhorses. Like Lippman on the West Bank of The Counterlife, he's a consummate “diatribalist.” What a great word!) Nevertheless, the navel into which Nathan gazes turns out to be a wound in all of us. Look how far Roth has come from, arguably, his silliest novel. The Breast, to, certainly, one of his very best, American Pastoral. From, so unsocialized:

Why shouldn't I be rubbed and oiled and massaged and sucked and licked and fucked, too, if I want it! Why shouldn't I have anything and everything I can think of every single minute of the day if that can transport me from this miserable hell!

To, with a star-spangled flourish:

… the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were a fugitive—initiating the Swede into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede's castle and there infecting everyone. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence and the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk.

At the end of The Human Stain Zuckerman knows that he will have to quit his cabin in the Berkshires if he hopes to save his own life. Where next for this “heretofore unknown amalgam” of Philoctetes and Woody Allen's Zelig, a counter-Forrest and anti-Gump? And on what mythic quest now that polymorphous perversity is out of the question? Jack and the Beanstalk? Puss in Boots? Bluebeard or Ferdinand the Bull? From too much consumption—of junk food and cheap sensations and disposable ideas—Updike's Rabbit exploded. But Nathan's “pathetic fuck-ups,” the outlaw children of the Ike era of Freudian psychology, nuclear families, nuclear explosions, and modernist art, never wanted to sell cars or play golf. So?

3.

What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that make them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.

—American Pastoral

I am guessing the idea of Coleman Silk was inspired by the case history of the late Anatole Broyard, the essayist and book critic and, once upon a time, a colleague of mine at The New York Times. I am told that he and Roth were almost neighbors in Connecticut. And certainly the broad outlines are similar—from the “charming and seductive boy” Roth describes, “a bit demonic even, a snub-nosed, goat-footed Pan,” to the boxing, the military service, NYU, the Greenwich Village womanizing, and what a friend called Anatole's “dancing attitude toward life—he'd dance away from you,” all the way to the thrilling conversation and the failure to tell the children the truth. But Anatole never pretended to be Jewish.

We had all heard rumors about Anatole, but were less interested in his passing than his sex life. Then Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote an article on him for The New Yorker, later included in his 1997 book. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man. And it was necessary to think again. Being black in this country. Gates reminded us, isn't “elective or incidental.” Every black child grows up shadowed by the fact that his or her actions either “honor” or “betray” the race, even as the black body is eroticized, demonized, fantasized, merchandised, and lynched, in a bad-faith culture that would itself be unimaginable without the blues. Suppose Harry Belafonte never wanted to be “the first Negro matinee idol”? Suppose Colin Powell refuses his role as a poster child for guilty white liberals? Suppose O. J., on whom we ladle so much symbolic significance, is empty himself of any personal meaning, a ping-pong ball of “radicalized” discourse? So when a character like Broyard won't tell his own grown children where he came from, who his parents were, or that he has a sister they've never even met, what are we to conclude, not only about passing, or about modernism's usual motley of fragmentation, alienation, and liminality, but also about the social construction of race from treaties, edicts, certificates of birth, cards of identity, and all the other barcoded tickets of admission to “authenticity”? “Authenticity,” says Gates, “is one of the founding lies of the modern age.”

Somewhere, Roth groans. In The Facts, he explained that what he does is “spontaneously set out to improve on actuality in the interest of being more interesting.” And if we don't believe him, as, say, Claire Bloom obviously didn't on reading Deception, well, stuff it: “I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so if I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.” So Silk isn't Broyard, and Milton Appel wasn't Irving Howe, and E. I. Lonoff wasn't either Bernard Malamud or I. B. Singer, and Felix Abravanel wasn't either Saul Bellow or Norman Mailer, and Eve Frame in no way resembles Claire Bloom, and so far as Roth's concerned. Tarnopol, Kepesh, and Zuckerman are infielders for the Bosox, and I am the Shah of Iran. As Madeline tells Mickey in the fabulous madhouse scene in Sabbath's Theater “The answer to every question is either Prozac or incest.” And this is after she has already explained that “you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.”

I bring up Broyard so I can slip in Henry Louis Gates. Such questions as Gates raises—in passing, about passing—seem not to have occurred to Silk, Zuckerman, or Roth. Maybe they will come up when Nathan, as promised, goes to dinner at Ernestine's house. But blood-red Vietnam is a stronger presence in these pages than black-and-white America. Compared to the passing of little-boy Bliss to Senator Sunraider in Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, or the underground scuttling in The Shadow Man of Mary Gordon's father from outcast Midwest Jewishness to the “iridescent ease” of Provence, Assisi, Languedoc, Toscana, and anti-Semitism, the treatment in The Human Stain of identity as something plaid, to be turned inside out or reversed like a raincoat, seems patchy and thin. When Coleman Silk discovers what he should already have known from his Greeks—“how accidentally a fate is made … or how accidental it all may seem when it is inescapable”—he is really running into a brick wall of Philip Roth.

What follows is unfair but so is Roth, for whom all of nature is “terrifyingly provisional,” the whole world is full of malice, and it is preposterous and maybe even evil that anyone should try to be pretend to be remember having been, or believe in the marginal possibility of one day being happy. Or even just getting away with it, whatever it is (And sometimes we do get away with it.) Listen to what he tells us here: “Of course nothing that befalls anyone is ever too senseless to have happened.” And: “For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there is really no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.”

Now listen to what Nathan said of Henry in The Counterlife: “He wants out of nowhere to have an elevated goal. … Russian literature is replete with just such avid souls and their bizarre, heroic longings, probably more of them in Russian literature than in life.” And about his general approach: “Wasn't everyone happier enraged? They were certainly more interesting. People are unjust to anger—it can be enlivening and a lot of fun. And what the stranger says about him at his imaginary funeral: “This insidious, unregenerate defiler, this irritant in the Jewish bloodstream, making people uncomfortable and angry by looking with a mirror up his own asshole.” And the great summing up: “The worm in the dream is always the past, that impediment to all renewal.”

Meanwhile, in Sabbath's Theater, Mickey “liked to think that distrusting the sincerity of everyone armed him a little against betrayal by everything.” And: “The puppet is you. The grotesque buffoon is you. You're Punch, schmuck, the puppet who toys with taboos!” And: “Despite my many troubles, I continue to know what matters in life: profound hatred.” And: “King of the kingdom of the unillusioned, emperor of no expectations, crestfallen man-god of the double cross, Sabbath had still to learn that nothing but nothing will ever turn out—and this obtuseness was, in itself, a deep, deep shock.” Finally: “Imagine, then, the history of the world. We are immoderate because grief is immoderate, all the hundreds and thousands of kinds of grief.”

Whereas the Swede will learn, in American Pastoral, “the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense.” Besides: “They were laughing at him. Life was laughing at him.” And true manhood, according to I Married a Communist, is “when you're out there in this thing all alone.” In addition to which “Every soul is its own betrayal factory. For whatever reason: survival, excitement, advancement, idealism. For the sake of the damage that can be done, the pain that can be inflicted. For the cruelty in it.”

Perhaps I've omitted some of your personal favorites. But compared to Roth, Nietzsche was Chuckles the Clown. It's all chaos theory, lacking even the pretty patterns of the fractals. Nowhere, of course, is it written that our great writers should cheer us up. Otherwise, the Shadow Warrior in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories would not have tried so hard to stutter out his “Gogogol” and his “Kafkafka.” Still, I suggest that Maria had a point in The Counterlife when she wondered: “Why isn't it okay for us to be happy?” And so did Henry when he asked. “Is duty necessarily such a cheap idea, is the decent and the dutiful really shit?” (Where is common cause, or sanctuary?) Nor, really, did Roth answer his own questions at the end of American Pastoral, that dazzling return, as if from the dead, of a John Cheever novel: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”