Word: roth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LIKE TO forget that beneath the jacket of this book the initials "PR" are emblazoned into the cover, like a Brooks Brothers bathrobe, or a towel set. I would like to not care who Philip Roth is, whether or not he has earned the license to write a novel so apparently decadent and outrageous, or whether this is the appropriate follow-up to a story about a gargantuan sci-fi mammary gland. The Great American Novel is certainly utterly bereft of Greatness, but it is great in the way that Tony the Tiger intones the word...
However wry Roth is, baseball is a religion in this novel. A ghostly past of Mel Ott, of Honus Wagner, the Folo Grounds, Kenesaw Mountain Landis -- it haunts this book. To Word Smith, it fled with America's innocence. In the bleachers at Fenway the other night, thinking of this, and badly shaken by the rendition of "Knock Three Times" that had just been piped to us at a deafening level, the kid in front of me with the baseball cap began loudly to taunt the center-fielder with the ageless imputation that he bit the dust. This convinced...
...ROTH, OF COURSE, works in everything else under the sun -- transvestites, midgets and an incredible panoply of solidly imaginative caricatures. All of this, as well as the moral aura surrounding a proud and gentlemanly game debased, is milked for all the socio-cultural comment it's worth. There is a Moby Dick thoroughness about the subject: Roth did a lot of homework in Cooperstown, and there is an ambling love of detail for its own sake that recalls Melville's novel (which, by the way, Roth calls "five hundred pages of blubber"). The innuendoes of the game itself...
Most of all, then, The Great American Novel is a narrative home run, perhaps over a close left field wall, with no one on base, but a home run nevertheless. Roth takes a myth that everyone knows is destroyed anyway, and picking apart the baseball ethos lovingly, savoring its madness and its magnetism, he betrays an exasperated affection for it that he may not have felt when he began. He leaves us laughing but wistful, smug but reverent, and with a musty, clinging air of ambivalence about lost American dreams. Perhaps it's despair folded over, cynicism gone hysterical...
WEST GERMANY. With no large established Communist Party, West Germany seems to be the target of the most concerted new radical assault. The country crawls with left-wing organizations. In addition to Roth's Jusos, there is the small West German Communist Party, which with funds channeled from East Germany has spawned 130 other orthodox Marxist groups across the country. Out on the extreme-left edge of the West German political scene are another 260 assorted groups, including such outfits as Red Dawn and Red Flag, which specialize in tearing up German institutions with troublemakers known as chaoten...