Word: roth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Grumpy might have been safer. Old Country Jews believed that acknowledging good fortune would attract an evil eye, a kineahora. Roth brings this useful superstition home when, as a teenager, the Merry Levov contracts a lethal case of '60s political self-righteousness. She blows up the town's general store-post office, killing a passerby, and then vanishes...
...will search the shelf of contemporary fiction long and hard to find a parental nightmare projected with the emotional force and verbal energy that Roth brings to American Pastoral. Every time she passes a young woman, Mary Dawn hopes it is her daughter. Hope, in fact, is no help. It only inflames the pain every day. Eventually the mother starts to habituate expensive psychiatric clinics. The ideal marriage dissolves, and long before he sickens with terminal prostate cancer, Swede begins to die of heartbreak...
Despite generous reprieves of humor, dialogue that leaps directly from page to ear and a richly textured narrative about the lost world of the '40s and '50s, Roth never lets up on his Jersey Job. When, after five years, Swede tracks down his daughter, she is living as Mary Stoltz in a squalid room in crumbling downtown Newark. She is worse than dead: an unwashed, half-starved, self-styled member of the Jain religion who prattles about the murderous effect soap and water have on germs at the same time that she confesses having blown up three more people...
This moral lunacy is dramatized with the piercing common sense that characterizes both Roth's funniest and soberest works. "The world is not a place on which I have influence or wish to have any," says Merry through a veil, a safety net for microbes. Swede's reply cries out to distraught parents everywhere: "You are influencing me! You who will not kill a mite are killing me...your powerlessness is power over me, goddamn...
...stakes have definitely increased since Alexander Portnoy's mother had a conniption 50 years ago about her son's eating food that wasn't kosher. Never before has Roth written fiction with such clear conviction. Never before has he assembled so many fully formed characters or shuttled so authoritatively through time. One barely notices that the narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, the Newark-born writer who is Roth's frenzied alter id in the Ghost Writer trilogy. Significantly, the one character who most resembles Roth is a quiet master leather cutter, 40 years at Newark Maid, who lets his scissors...