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Vol. 1, Iss. 1Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth What happens when America’s most phallocentric novelist destroys his protagonist’s penis? He writes a bad book. It is almost incredible that the very man who penned Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral, among other gems, could produce the tired, stale prose in Exit Ghost. Ironically, Philip Roth reminds us of his own mortality as an author while striving to capture the aging and decay of his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, now 71 and a novelist himself. In the ninth and final book of the Zuckerman series, which has spanned the most prolific twenty-eight years of Roth’s career, we encounter neither the uproarious and painfully honest author of Portnoy nor the discerning and caustic creator of American Pastoral. We are confronted, instead, with a brilliant writer groping to save a novel that just doesn’t quite work. Perhaps Roth sensed this problem, for his alter ego debates whether to publish an obviously flawed final book (à la Faulkner), or to “put the manuscript aside” (à la Hemingway). Or perhaps he actually meant to guard against too much personal association with Zuckerman, for the protagonist vociferously defends the staunch line dividing fiction from reality. Regardless, Roth’s final product—despite a few very impressive elements redolent of his previous masterpieces—is almost as disjointed as Zuckerman’s description of his own book: “Permanent groping is what it is now, a groping that goes well beyond the anxious groping for fluency that writing is to begin with.”In the first chapter, entitled “The Present Moment,” Zuckerman writes, “Here and Now. Then and Now. The Beginning of the End of Now.” Nearly three decades later, Exit Ghost is the “Now” to the “Then” of The Ghost Writer, the upstart Zuckerman novella in which Roth’s 23-year old alter ego embarks upon his literary career. In The Ghost Writer, the young Zuckerman goes on a pilgrimage to the remote Berkshire home of his literary idol, a fictitious author named E.I. Lonoff—purportedly America’s master of the short story—whose works have fallen into oblivion by the time of Exit Ghost. The fledgling author discovers Lonoff’s life to be as ascetic as his writing; he learns that the price of his idol’s craft is profound alienation from mankind and the consequent destruction of his marriage.Exit Ghost begins with the 71-year old Zuckerman, himself now America’s most renowned author, traveling from “the rural mountain road” of his Berkshire abode to New York for the first time in eleven years. He has returned not to reconnect with mankind, and not to gather fodder for a new book, but rather—wait for it—“to see a urologist at Mount Sinai Hospital.” But the tone of this wonderfully prosaic opening gambit soon becomes tedious. Roth is in his element with black and satirical humor (Portnoy’s Complaint says it all); the somber prose of a J.M. Coetzee or Cormac McCarthy seems like a foreign language to him. Richard Russo does in Straight Man, with a similar protagonist and subject matter, what Roth could have done if he had stuck with his usual grim humor in Exit Ghost. Zuckerman’s description of his daily diaper-changing routine is promising stylistically, but it is followed by a monotonous account of a typical old hermit’s life: he lives in isolation, he is out of touch with technology—“I continued to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is”— and he is apathetic toward current events. Like his dead idol, Zuckerman has spent eleven years reading, writing, listening to music, and spending time with Nature (and his impotent, incontinent self). This flirtation with eloquence and subsequent retreat to tedium pervades Exit Ghost. Roth has spells of brilliance, caustic wit, and poignancy. Sadly, these are but fleeting stops along the way of a trite and tiresome journey.It is surprising that Roth would try to vivify such a hackneyed, stereotypical character as the novelist pounding away at his typewriter in his wooded haven. And it gets worse: Zuckerman is very much the proverbial cranky old man. He gripes, repeatedly, about the ubiquity of cell phones; he corrects grammar; he loathes vigorous young men. Admittedly his analysis on the infiltration of technology is rather eloquent—“that the immense loneliness of human beings should produce this boundless longing to be heard, and the accompanying disregard for being overheard”—but Roth’s septuagenarian alter ego is far from the first old codger to make this observation. He even admits: “I knew…I was at one with all the cranks who imagined…that the machine was the enemy of life.” And yet he continues to harp on technology at several other points in the novel, as if he forgot to delete a few passages from an earlier draft.Zuckerman’s intended short-term trip to New York for bladder surgery quickly becomes complicated. After bitterly discovering that his collagen injection has failed—“‘A fucking dream,’ by which I meant the dream of being suddenly like everyone else”—the old man who has “long since killed the impulse to be in the present moment” yields to that very urge. He decides on a whim to exchange houses with a “reliable writing couple in [their] early thirties” from Manhattan’s Upper West Side whose apartment-swap listing he (a little too coincidentally) reads upon opening a newspaper for the first time in a decade. Unbeknownst to Zuckerman, he then walks into a web of relationships that quickly shatters the wall of solitude he has been constructing for eleven years.First and foremost on his list of problems is the woman of the apartment, Jamie Logan, a budding writer five years out of Harvard with a big brain and bigger breasts. Zuckerman thought himself beyond possible arousal—“I hadn’t sat so close to such an irresistible young woman in years…she had a huge pull on me, a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire”—but he becomes transfixed by Jamie’s vitality and confident sexuality.Five scenes from a play Zuckerman is casually writing, “He and She”—title borrowed from Chekov—are scattered throughout the novel. These scenes contain some of the worst writing of Roth’s career. In one of the few humorous sections, Zuckerman admits to Jamie his sexual infatuation:SHE: What will impress you?HE: Your breasts impress me.SHE: Tell me something I don’t know.The evolving drama—half fiction, half fiction within fiction—between Zuckerman and Jamie is never plausible. At its best, the dialogue is effectively uncomfortable. Usually it’s just awkward. Roth is certainly not the first to attempt to capture the sexual dynamic between older men and younger women. One of his literary influences, Saul Bellow, brilliantly depicts the sexuality of older men in Herzog (which Roth seems to subtly reference: “Otherwise, I told myself, you’ll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman). And compared to a contemporary master, J.M Coetzee, who adeptly portrays illicit sexual relations in Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians, Roth’s prose in Exit Ghost sometimes seems utterly juvenile. A few lines are hilariously bad, and one wonders if Roth intended them so:Scene II.HE: Do your breasts give you confidence? SHE: Yes.HE: Tell me about that.Scene III. HE: How stupidly of me.SHE: Yes, (laughs) how stupid of you.HE: I guess I’m afraid of you. SHE: (Long pause): I’m a little afraid of you.Scene III.SHE: Say why it kills you.HE: Because I’m crazy about you.SHE: Well…I just wanted to hear it.”HE: You misuse “hopefully.”SHE: (She laughs. Shyly—to his surprise—she asks) Am I? Do I?After Zuckerman then explains her linguistic error, SHE says, “Don’t do that. You did it yesterday. Don’t do it again.”From shy and flirtatious to bold and admonishing in three lines? There’s a reason Roth is a novelist, not a playwright. The five dispersed scenes are certainly not a display of his writing prowess. They do, however, effectively blur the distinction between the real and the unreal. In this vein, Roth writes in one of his best passages, “Isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.”Zuckerman indulges his sexual fantasies through fiction because the reality of his impotence is too cruel to face. As long as he avoids the play format, Roth still frequently strikes gold. He writes, “I set out to minimize [the impotence] by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came into contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking thirty-year old girl…and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.”The second obstacle to Zuckerman’s departure from New York is Richard Kliman, a friend and ex-lover of Jamie Logan, fresh from Harvard and brimming with self-confidence. Kliman is particularly insufferable to the impotent, incontinent Zuckerman because he represents youthful manhood and virility. Kliman soon becomes the old man’s nemesis, for he intends to write an exposé-biography of Zuckerman’s literary hero which would reveal E.I. Lonoff’s “great secret.” (“I assume the great secret is sexual,” Zuckerman says. “That’s very astute of you,” Kliman responds dryly.) When confronted with the young man’s seemingly indomitable will, Zuckerman writes, “There it was: the tactless severity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his coherence, blind with self-confidence and the virtue of knowing what matters most. The ruthless sense of necessity. The annihilating impulse in the face of an obstacle. Those grand grandstand days when you shrink from nothing…Everything is a target; you’re on the attack; and you, and you alone, are right.” Kliman, too, flashes some wisdom about intergenerational tension: “Look, old men hate young men. That goes without saying.”But even the relationship between Zuckerman and Kliman, which constitutes some of the best writing in the book, often morphs into absurdity.In one scene, Zuckerman tells the young firebrand that he will do everything in his power to prevent the publication of the subversive biography. Zuckerman calls on himself to “Let the intensity out! Let the belligerence out! It’s all called back—the virile man called back to life! Only there is no virility. There is only the brevity of expectations … in taking on the young and courting all the dangers of someone of this age intermingling too closely with someone of that age, I can only end up bloodied.” But as if to intentionally spoil the eloquence of these lines, Kliman’s response is utterly ludicrous: “You stink…you smell bad! Crawl back into your hole and die! You’re dying old man, you’ll soon be dead! You smell of decay! You smell of death!” Is this a joke? If so, it is neither funny nor appropriate. If not, it is wholly implausible. Many neighboring passages in Exit Ghost could easily have been written by two different authors, as if Roth wanted Zuckerman to oscillate between lucidity and senility in his very narration. Whatever his intent, it does not work. If anything, he merely soils those surprisingly few passages that contain the eloquence and insight the author’s faithful audience has come to expect.Almost as frustrating as Roth’s constant flux between beautiful clarity and exasperating absurdity are his myriad digressions. One section about Bush’s reelection in 2004 is particularly unbearable. Yes, Bush won. Yes, Democrats (and most New Yorkers) were rather depressed. That was three years ago. The trite diatribes against Bush and the Republican Party are both ineloquent and distracting. Even worse is a twenty-one page digression about George Plimpton, inserted inexplicably at a crucial moment in the plot. This is akin to a twenty-three year old F. Scott Fitzgerald pedantically including sundry school essays and unrelated plays in This Side of Paradise. But could America’s most heavily decorated living author really have made such an amateur mistake? There seems to be no other explanation. In fact, Roth’s incessant literary allusions (especially pervasive in Exit Ghost) seem to corroborate the view that he used all the tools at his disposal to clothe an essentially mediocre novel in impressive garments. He alludes, implicitly or explicitly, to Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Keats, Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, Tolstoy, Chekov, Dostoevsky, Irving, Conrad, Hardy, both Brontë sisters, and a slew of other authors, as if to enrich an impoverished book by referencing better ones. The end result is a fragmented novel, assembled from many parts but never crystallizing into a coherent whole.Exit Ghost is a rather unsatisfying conclusion to the spectacular nine-book Zuckerman series. Given the author’s proven ability, his latest work naturally has some redemptive moments. It is well worth the read for those few passages where Roth lives up to his potential, and for its historical import in the oeuvre of this brilliant writer. The title seems to be taken from a Shakespearean stage direction. And so, while it is perhaps time for Nathan Zuckerman to feebly exit the stage after a magnificent twenty-eight year show, one can only hope Philip Roth will delve into the theater of his genius and wow the audience once more.

Vol. 1, Iss. 1 The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon  

When Michael Chabon declared in 2002 that modern short fiction was comprised almost entirely of “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story,” it was taken as an oath that his universally acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay would only be the beginning of what could be an entirely new direction in American fiction. Whether Chabon’s new ideas about fiction will be granted credibility, however, depends largely on his continued success as a writer—which is precisely why Yiddish Policeman’s Union, his first significant work since Kavalier and Clay, has been awaited with so much anticipation.

What gave Kavalier and Clay its headline-grabbing appeal was its desire to be anything but the “plotless stories sparkling with epiphanic dew” that Chabon felt had come to characterize American fiction. Kavalier and Clay was essentially a piece of genre fiction glorifying the “Golden Age” of comic books, but Chabon’s gifted prose created such an expansive and well-imagined universe that praise was heaped upon the novel nonetheless.

Not that the praise was without reservation. The Boston Globe wrote, “[T]he genre of the comic book is an anemic vein for novelists to mine, lest they squander their brilliance,” and they were hardly alone in their skepticism. The apprehension of the literary community toward genre-writing was understandable. It seemed as though Chabon was trying to single-handedly wrap the arms of the literature around all the aspects of American pop culture that it had so long avoided. Long after the advent of rock and roll and pop art, serious literature was the last enclave of artistic expression left relatively unspoiled by the mainstream sensibility. Now, all of a sudden, here was a major literary figure with a comic book fetish jumping at the chance to help write screenplays for the Spiderman franchise. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Chabon is the only writer, or even the first writer, in this movement, but he is certainly the most important.

Which is precisely why so much is at stake in the reception of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Chabon’s first significant work since Kavalier and Clay. The success of The Policeman’s Union would show that Chabon’s mini literary revolution is a force to be taken seriously, while its failure would allow Chabon’s critics to call Kavalier and Clay a fluke. Like Kavalier and Clay, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a piece of genre fiction with the classic noir detective story replacing the comic book aesthetic. If Chabon could once again write a novel as toweringly successful as Kavalier and Clay within the confines of an established genre, it would irrevocably grant pop literature a place in the literary world.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is set in an alternate reality in which millions of Jewish World War II refugees have taken up residence in the city of Sitka, Alaska. When the state of Israel was destroyed in 1948, Congress declared the land a federal district. But now, as the 60-year grant is coming to end and the cultural uniqueness of the predominantly Yiddish-speaking community is threatened by outside incursion, the residents of Sitka all agree that “these are strange time to be a Jew.” Many of the residents of Sitka have decided to move on; those who have chosen to wait it out are unsure of what changes the future will bring.

The hero of the novel is Meyer Landsman, a homicide detective who has found himself down on his luck. His father commited suicide, his sister died in a bizarre airplane accident, and he recently split with his wife of 15 years. Despite being depressed and suffering from alcoholism, Landsman is nevertheless an excellent cop, with “the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is a crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket.” In other words, Landsman is classic noir.

The mystery begins when Emmanuel Lasker, a tenant in Landsman’s hotel, is found shot through the head. It doesn’t take Landsman long to find out that Lasker is really one Mendel Shpilman, the son of an influential rabbi. As a child, Shpilman was a chess prodigy and was even rumored to have magical healing powers, but he soon devolved into a heroin addict known for his gang connections. In order to solve the mystery of Shpilman’s death, Landsman must first solve a chess problem designed by Vladimir Nabokov and the answer sends him spinning on a chase that spirals through the highest levels of the US government and beyond.

In the end, The Yiddish Policman’s Union is a pleasure to read because Chabon delivers on everything he promises. For one, the novel is epic, plot-driven and anything but predictable. Chabon also executes the noir style flawlessly, relishing in every corny metaphor and femme fatale. He brings all of his considerable talent to the prose and leaves little to be desired.

Nevertheless, it seems that his novel can’t help but fall into all the traps of a typical detective story. During the first two-thirds of the novel, the book is difficult to put down, but as soon as the loose ends are tied up and the red herrings exposed, the denouement becomes a chore to read, dragging on toward the inevitable for far too long. It felt somewhat like the end of every Scooby Doo episode after Velma rips off the mask. In other words, time to change the channel.

While that criticism can hardly be taken as an indictment of Chabon’s ability, it is an indictment of Chabon’s vision. Speaking in regards to the Yiddish Poliman’s Union, The New York Times stated that the detective story is “a genre that is by its nature so constrained, so untransgressive, it seems unlikely to appeal to the real writer.” Perhaps the fact that Chabon was unable to write his way out of the inevitable anti-climax only serves to show that it can’t be done. And if that’s the case, it is an unfortunate victory for the narrow-minded souls who feel that literature and pop culture cannot coexist.

Vol. 1, Iss. 1Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje Michael Ondaatje’s most recent novel, Divisadero, intertwines multiple narratives overlapping in their settings, characters and parallel story lines. Ondaatje’s novel follows his description of a villanelle, a French form of poetry that repeats “familiar moments of emotion” rather than moving in a linear sequence. Ondaatje guides the reader through the separate chapters and characters around these “familiar moments of emotion.”He begins by delving into the story of two teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, who inhabit a farm in Northern California with their father and Coop, a boy who helps on the farm and lives with them. After a traumatic event in their past, Ondaatje leads us into each of their futures, whereupon he changes focus to probe into the lives of other characters who interact with Anna, Coop, and Claire. This is shown following Ondaatje’s discussion of Anna. Ondaatje focuses on Anna’s new boyfriend, Rafael, whose past involves a family friend named Lucien Segura, a writer. We learn that Lucien is the writer that Anna researches after leaving Northern California and that he used to inhabit the house where Anna stays in France. Similar connections continue to appear as Ondaatje explores his characters.Besides merely temporally and locally linking the characters, Ondaatje’s circling joins the characters in “familiar moments of emotion.” We see the communal struggle with how one’s past impacts one’s present. Ondaatje uses identities and names to mirror the struggle with the past and the present. Anna’s and Claire’s names are often confused by other characters in their past when their lives and experiences were still intertwined. When their paths diverge and their futures become distinctly separate, their identities are no longer confused. Anna, in fact, changes her name to create a new identity, in an attempt to sever her ties to the past. Rafael’s father imagines how his past could have been different with a different name, “he might have behaved and participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such a name.” Ondaatje beautifully articulates the significance of a new name through the character’s high, if fantastical, hopes to “turn into a three-ounce bird or a subtle grammatical form” with the new name he gives himself. However, the circling through these narratives makes it increasingly clear that past identities are not erased with new names.Ondaatje creates parallels in the various characters’ stories to reiterate the themes in the novel. Again and again we see traumatic, often violent, events in the past followed by an inevitable disconnect from this past. Anna’s father severely beats Coop for sleeping with Anna and she stabs her father to stop him. Following this, she flees her home and withdraws into herself, refusing to speak about her past. Coop leaves and begins a new life of gambling. Neither returns or ever expects to see the other again. Lucien is half-blinded early in life; a rabid dog smashes a window whose shards fly into Lucien’s eye. To avoid infection the eye is removed. During the trauma of a long recovery, he submerges into his fiction. Coop is again violently attacked and after this second encounter he has no memory of his past. This is the clearest instance of the disconnect. Ondaatje parallels these stories to emphasize the inevitability of the past’s impact on the present even when one attempts to forget it.Ondaatje also directs the reader’s attention to the format and medium of his novel. In the individual stories he often subtly references the form and the use of writing. Ondaatje reinforces the idea that writing can help one confront the past and oneself, but he also gives instances of how one can maintain distance from one’s past through writing. The writer, Lucien, cannot find peace with the memory of his friend from the past until he writes enough stories to relay all the details of her character. Only after his writing purge does Lucien feel that he has sufficiently confronted his past with her. On the other hand, Anna uses writing to hide from herself. She describes writing as “where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us”.In expressing these ideas, Ondaatje incorporates wonderful language throughout the novel. Unusual combinations of nouns and adjectives like, “a name as small as a keyhole” and “a tune that seemed to have no scaffolding” precisely and perfectly evoke the essence of what he describes in a way typical description could not. However, Ondaatje often seems to underestimate the reader’s ability to tease out his overarching ideas through his description of the characters’ actions and dialogue. Therefore, he heavy-handedly inserts statements laying out that which he had subtly informed the previous passage with. For example in a scene between Anna and Rafael, Ondaatje’s dialogue and description of their interaction creates the sense that Anna remains guarded with Rafael and wants to conceal her past. Directly after this passage Ondaatje flatly states in reference to Anna, “She is still fearful of true intimacy…Her past is hidden from everyone.” This detracts from the previous passage, which already implied these feelings. Without these additions, the novel would be more nuanced. Ondaatje’s writing can easily carry the novel and express his ideas without the direct statements he includes.Ondaatje’s skillful integration of multiple storylines, enchanting description, and accomplished use of format allow a reader to effortlessly enjoy Ondaatje’s mastery of language while simultaneously poring over his many levels of meaning. According to Ondaatje, “divisadero” can refer to both a division and the act of gazing at something from a distance. Ondaatje brings to light the inevitable elimination of the division and distance between the past and present, and simultaneously bridges the division between author and reader, not allowing us to merely experience at a distance.

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