Word: roth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...probably never happened before: two novels by the same author, separated by 60 years and with no book of fiction in between. The appearance of Henry Roth's Mercy of a Rude Stream (St. Martin's; 290 pages; $23) not only breaks an epochal case of writer's block; it comes with a subtitle -- Volume I, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park -- and the astonishing dust-jacket information that this is only the first of six new novels that Roth, now 87, has completed. What he has apparently done, late in life, is tell the story...
...Roth was 28 when his first novel, Call It Sleep (1934), was published. This intense, impressionistic account of a young Jewish boy's first years among the vibrant immigrant life of Manhattan's Lower East Side drew some favorable notices. It was also panned in a few left-wing and radical journals for being too poetic and personal, selfishly autobiographical and insufficiently attentive to the class struggle then being underscored by the Great Depression...
...multilingualism and a culturally fragmented citizenry -- the Quebecification of America? There are those who fear so. "Whatever happend to the idea of E pluribus unum?" asks Robert Parker, chairman of Arizonans for Official English, an organization endorsing English as the state's official language. Republican Representative Toby Roth of Wisconsin is so alarmed he has introduced a bill -- the Declaration of Official Language Act -- that would eliminate bilingual ballots and require English-proficiency exams for all citizenship applications. Last March, California Republican Congressman John Doolittle submitted a constitutional amendment that would make English the official language...
...while I'm on the subject of the "Young Guns" series, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a sequel to "The Three Musketeers." I think producers Joe Roth and Roger Birnbaum picked this story with the fact in mind that Dumas wrote Twenty Years After and The Viscount of Bragellone to continue the Musketeer saga. But I'm sure that Roth and Birnbaum will change the former to Five Years After, a 40-year-old Musketeer couldn't possibly be cute...
...American culture, Philip Roth remarked before the fall of communism, everything goes and nothing matters, whereas in Central Europe nothing goes and everything matters. One remembers this when looking at the work of the Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, who lives and works in Warsaw but whose American reputation has been growing steadily since the early '80s. Her two current New York shows -- one at the Marlborough Galleries through June 5, the other, curated by the art critic Michael Brenson, at P.S. 1 in Long Island City through June 20 -- ought to be seen by anyone who cares about today...