Word: winesburg
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...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 relationship with the character. The ambiguity that...
...young Jewish man from Newark, N.J., with a formidable intellect and an equally formidable anxiety. This anxiety first takes hold when his father transforms from a nurturing role model and friend into a fear-ridden monster. Fight after fight leads Marcus to relocate to the town of Winesburg, Ohio, and a college of the same name, in 1951. And here the anxieties only compound: Marcus buries himself in work, falls in love, fights with both his roommates and the college’s faculty, and in so doing pushes himself into isolation. By the end of this brief, cruel novel...
...vein of Main Street, Winesburg, Ohio explores the frustrations and loneliness of people living in a small town at the turn of the twentieth century; a typical character, married to the wrong man, cries: “I wanted to run away from everything, but I wanted to run towards something...
...reading Winesburg, Ohio, I have always felt a certain connection with its unhappy residents, with its quiet streets. Its characters are people whom I’ve known, a hundred years on. Their isolation and misery were mine, genetically; it might actually have been my own, if my parents hadn’t managed to move out of Toledo the year I was born. Small Midwestern towns do not hold the exclusively anthropological interest for me that they do for many Harvard students, who have only flown over them, crossing from blue coast to blue coast. They are not alien...
That is the technical explanation. But rereading Winesburg, Ohio, I felt that it was not explanation enough. What had happened to the earnestness, the heartbreaking sincerity of the Ohioans of Winesburg, of Clyde? What had happened to the small town as microcosm of all the frustrated hopes and inchoate ambitions that are so purely American? Carelessness alone does not justify dropping the ball so spectacularly in an election that had so much riding on it. Something had fallen apart...