Word: iras
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...Ira E. Stoll '94 was President of The Crimson...
Those who wondered not only whether but how Roth would resolve his dilemma now have at least an introductory answer. The first installment of Mercy of a Rude Stream displays documentary rather than novelistic ambitions. It takes its young hero, Ira Stigman, from his eighth year, in 1914, after he and his parents have moved from the Lower East Side to an apartment in Harlem, up to age 14. It also offers interpolated passages in which Ira as an aging man conducts imagined conversations with the computer on which he is writing his life story. Late in this novel, Ira...
...Ira's way -- and Roth's as well -- takes the reader through a pretty grim, no-frills narrative. The order is relentlessly chronological. Ira, devastated by the loss of his East Side haunts and friends and upset by the anti-Semitic taunts he hears in heterogeneous Harlem, ages predictably year by year. He adores his mother and fears his irritable father. He changes schools. He develops a nascent interest in girls and feels ashamed of himself for doing so. The outbreak of World War I is noted on the first page; the armistice is mentioned on page 153. Transitions...
Even the dialogue seems abstracted, drained of felt emotion. Ira's immigrant relatives say book-talk things like "Woe is me" and "I would spit in his face, if I could but see him." Memories of his past have obviously obsessed Roth for most of his adult life, but he no longer seems willing -- as he did so memorably in Call It Sleep -- to let his readers experience and savor them firsthand. Perhaps when later volumes of Ira's story appear, the place of this first long chapter in the grand design will be clearer. For now, the book...
...wouldn't cry about that," says a senior Administration official. "The President can still declare victory as long as universal coverage is promised at some point." Yet Clinton's plan could stall completely unless Moynihan's worries about the "collateral consequences" are addressed. Inexplicably, Moynihan and Ira Magaziner, the Administration's health-care guru, have yet to talk about employer mandates. "We want to get everything in order first," says a White House aide, who predicts the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office will "shortly endorse our financing assumptions" -- an optimism other Administration officials don't share. The problem, says Moynihan...