Word: rothian
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...Humbling” comes shortly on the heels of last year’s “Indignation,” a similarly clipped, brutal character study, this time of a younger Rothian hero, Marcus Mesner: the already- (or almost-) deceased narrator who must recount and scrutinize the events that lead to his expulsion from Winesburg College and a death sentence at the front lines of the Korean War. Like in “The Humbling,” the thematic and narrative concerns of that book seemed more important to Roth than the construction of an illuminating or sympathetic...
...life takes. And Coixet has a tendency to linger on some of her scenes, giving them an unnecessary, darkly portentous quality. Some of this story's effectiveness derives from the fact that even severely threatened life often goes waywardly forward, immune to portent. There's also a non-Rothian reconciliatory note - a sort of emotional consolation prize - in Kepesh's relationship with his awful son - that I could have done without...
...downfall, in typical Rothian fashion, is filtered through the textures of separate memories. One of them belongs to Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's longtime fictional impersonation, who as a high school student had been befriended and bedazzled by Ira at the peak of his glory. The other narrative voice is that of Murray Ringold, Ira's elder brother and Nathan's long-ago high school English teacher. Now 90, Murray meets Nathan again and decides to talk about a troubled past: "I'm the only person still living who knows Ira's story, you're the only person still living...
Mickey Sabbath could have been Big Bird. Instead he is spending his closing years in rural Massachusetts nursing resentments and his ragged individualism. His sole and meager support comes from his wife Roseanna, an Alcoholics Anonymous member who nearly drank herself to death for typically Rothian reasons: "because of all that had not happened and because of all that had." Chief among them were Sabbath's neglect and his affair with Drenka Balich, the lusty wife of the local Croatian innkeeper...
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