Word: streamings
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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...
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...
...knowing yet: an entire winter of record-shattering cold, let alone a single week, might be a meaningless blip in the overall scheme of long-term climate trends. In fact, last week's cold wave was caused by a phenomenon that is by no means rare. The jet stream, a stratospheric wind that governs the movement of air over North America, dipped temporarily south of its usual course. As it did so, the stream pulled along a vast high-pressure system from Siberia and the Arctic Ocean...
...theories have been floated to explain these irregular, rapid variations. The leading one, advanced by Lamont-Doherty's Wallace Broecker and George Denton of the University of Maine, involves a kind of cyclic ocean current that has been likened to a conveyer belt. Broecker and Denton note that a stream of unusually salty (and thus especially dense) water flows underneath the Gulf Stream as it moves from the tropics to the North Atlantic. When this salty stream reaches the far north, it is forced to the surface as water above it is blown aside by the winds; it then discharges...
Piecing all those together is quite a chore for a novel that also wants to be a religious allegory, a comedy of bad manners and a portrait of the interior life at a time when TV ads clog the stream of consciousness like shimmering dead fish. Long stretches where the laughs come hard are followed by sudden bloomings of comic rhapsody. This wayward frolic is a bit like Oscar's car. Sometimes you could swear it was stone dead -- until it starts up and runs right over...