The Mexicanadian Threat

European and Middle Eastern countries are often bounded by hostile neighbors. The Battle of Britain was a turning point in the Second World War. Yet if the English had lost the Germans still would have had to cross the Atlantic to invade the United States. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle imagines the colonization of America by the Axis powers. In Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, it’s a homegrown fascist backlash that makes the country vulnerable. But before we feel a smug superiority to the geographic turmoil abroad, we should be aware of the threat of invasion from the South or the North, from Mexico or Canada, who someday may turn into the equivalent of the Axis powers. While the landmass of Mexico or Canada might not rival Russia, China or even India, they are both greater than Japan, Italy and Germany, our enemies during the second world war. Why are we being complacent? Why are we not arming ourselves against an invasion, particularly by the Canadians? Back in the 50’s there was a popular television series called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. The series was a thinly veiled manifesto of Canadian superiority. Remember Canada boasts Alice Munro one of the greatest short story writers in the world and lest we forget Dan Aykroyd emanated from Canada. The Canadians will start by taking over organs of culture like The New Yorker, where many of Munro’s stories have appeared, and SNL which Aykroyd once dominated and before long their will be mounties and dogsleds lined up along our borders. It might seem like an unholy alliance but who is to say that one day Canadian short story writers and humorists won’t join forces with the followers of Mexican culture heroes like Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz. In a deadly pincer movement Canadians and the Mexicans will place their puppets in The White House.

Philip Roth: Unmasked

Remember the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life in which the Jimmy Stewart character is shown what Bedford Falls would be like if he weren’t part of the world. Imagine what your Jewish doctor, dentist or lawyer would be like had he never decided on the profession and had become a famous writer instead. You’ll have more of an appreciation of William Karel and Livia Manera's Philip Roth: Unmasked, the documentary currently playing at Film Forum (the showings are all free by the way). It might sound like a prejudicial statement, but Roth is by his own admission is Homo Hebrais. In fact, during the film he describes how when he was in college he wrote pathetic short stories about sensitive characters, invoking Salinger’s name with a note of wistful disparagement. Then he read Joyce who left Dublin and never stopped writing about it. Bellow’s Chicago, Malamud’s Brooklyn, Hemingway’s Michigan and Faulkner’s Mississippi are all invoked in the same breath. By the way, Roth reveals that he writes standing up which is something that Hemingway also did. So what is your dentist like in this alternate universe where he is filling your mind rather than your cavities? The film is more about Roth’s work than his personal life, though Roth does describe his first marriage as being “lurid” and “derailing” him. He quotes I.B Singer who was also accused of giving defamatory portraits of Jews, in talking about the reaction to Portnoy’s Complaint, “What should I write about, Portuguese pimps?” And he describes the effect of the psychoanalytic treatment he underwent after his disastrous first marriage and what it did for his imagination realizing that, as a writer, he had all the “permission a psychoanalytic patient has” to say anything. There is a wonderful vignette about how he prepares his parents for the reception of Portnoy’s Complaint, finding out later that on the way home to New Jersey his mother was crying “he has delusions of grandeur” and how after the book came out people would call out to him on the street “hey Portnoy leave it alone.” Later in life Roth shows himself struggling more with death than sex in both his life and work. He gets to know a gravedigger and tours a cemetery in order to pick out his own gravesite. “I don’t think that one’s for you,” he’s told after selecting a plot near his parents’ graves. “There no leg room.” “Well that important,” he quotes himself as responding. “I’m going to be there for a long time.” Roth is as great extemporizing as he is working in the more premeditative mode of actual writing and the film is filled with wonderful nuggets. Roth does say in the very beginning of the film in answer to a question about being a Jewish American writer, “I don’t write in Jewish. I write in American,” but countervailingly everything began for him when he realized he could triage his own condition writing about Newark and Jews, pathology and anatomy. Come to think of it, despite the curmudgeonly soul described by the actress Claire Bloom (Roth’s second wife), in Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir the portrait of the writer that emerges partakes
 of the family doctor, dentist and divorce lawyer all rolled into one.

Little Tales of Misanthropy

One of the most disconcerting elements about the search for beauty is its lack of conscience. Creativity and humanism can be strange bed fellows which is another way of saying that many famous artists are shits. Bergman was notorious for his many failed marriages and relationships and if the portrait of the writer in Through a Glass Darkly is any reflection of his parenting, then we can conclude that he wasn’t much interesting in child raising. Updike’s Too Far To Go is a heartbreakingly beautiful description of the breakup of a marriage, but the breakup of Updike’s first marriage was the palette and one can’t help wondering if the breakup were not somehow unconsciously staged for the sake of the writing. Philip Roth’s one time wife Claire Bloom has documented the deficiencies of her former husband’s character and V.S. Naipaul’s extreme sadism towards woman has been described in Patrick French’s biography. Saul Bellow was married five times and fathered a child when he was 84. On the female side Doris Lessing abandoned two young children and husband to pursue her career and reading the way Patricia Highsmith discarded lovers, it’s not surprising that she wrote a collection a collection of stories called Little Tales of Misogyny. In spite of the extended tantrum of fame and the greater amounts of opportunity that fame produces, are these creative geniuses any more narcissistic or sadistic than your average Jack or Jill? Or does the destructive behavior of talented individuals stand out in relief since we consciously or unconsciously idealize those who mirror our heart’s desires? Is the average Joe, the man amongst men, whose goodness derives from his more modest level of self-absorption and ambition, any less selfish and sadistic in either his real or fantasy life, or is the problem simply that we expect more from the artist?

Auteur Theory

Andrew Sarris was for many years the film critic of The Village Voice and a champion of the auteur theory. He once commented that everyone wanted his job. What he meant by that was not that everyone literally wanted to be chief film critic of The Village Voice, though back in the heyday of the New York intelligensia, in the 50’s,60’s and 70’s when names like Clement Greenberg, Alfred Kazin, Harold Clurman and Susan Sontag were held in higher esteem than their  counterparts are today and at least one film critic, Peter Bogdonovich of Esquire, went on to Hollywood fame, being a critic wasn't a bad job to have. Sarris was referring to the fact that there was an intrinsic envy in the adoration of followers. They journey to Mecca not only to worship Mohammed, but to be him, to supplant him, to take what he has. Bernard Malamud's work might have been a source of admiration for other Jewish American novelists like Bellow and Roth, but the admiration was inevitably tinged with a certain desire to triumph and replace him. Nathan Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer makes a journey to visit his idol E.I. Lonoff, who is to some extent modeled on Malamud. In no writer or artist is the ambivalent nature of admiration and inspiration more manifest than Chekhov. Even male readers identify with his three sisters. Masha, Irina and Olga speak to the primacy of the future over the present, the power of that which has yet to be, over what is, of the way in which we all derogate what we possess.  Chekhov is so good in fact at revealing what seem to be our heart’s secrets that he makes us feel that we could have written the plays ourselves. In the realm of essay writing Montaigne has a similar effect, but gaining an audience with the artist, writer or critic who talks to you is a mixed blessing. Perhaps this conflict explains the murderous relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine. Sooner or later, he or she looks at you and realizes that you want to appropriate his work and made it your own. He realizes that you want his job.

Freedom

“They resemble any number of well-meaning couples for whom ‘the home’ has become a citadel of aspirational self-regard and family life a sequence of ennobling rites, each act of overparenting wreathed in civic import—the ‘issues’ involving cloth versus disposable diapers, or the political rectitude of the Boy Scouts, or the imperative to recycle batteries—and the long siege of the day heroically capped by ‘Goodnight Moon’ and a self-congratulatory glass of zinfandel.” The reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom have been universally over-the-top, but this quote from Sam Tanenhaus’s piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is particularly significant. However much one agrees with Tanenhaus’s praise of the book, Freedom certainly inspired him to make one of the most cogent statements ever written about the parenting style of the baby boom generation. Furthermore, when he was first appointed editor of the Book Review several years back, Tanenhaus, the author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography and The Death of Conservativism, was rumored to be more interested in non-fiction than fiction, to the consternation of many novelists and short story writers. By assigning himself the review of Freedom, and concluding that the novel “illuminates, through the steady radiance of the author’s moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew,” he is making an argument for the gravitas of fiction at a time when the serious novel has failed to lay claim to its classically oracular role. By writing about Freedom in the way he does—thereby adding Franzen’s book to the list of great American novels, from Herzog and Catch-22 to Portnoy’s Complaint, Rabbit Run, The Natural and, mostly recently, Infinite Jest—Tanenhaus is making a case that there is still a great American novel.

True Crime

Ben Novack Jr. possessed one of the world’s largest collections of Batman objects and paraphernalia. His wife Narcisa Veliz Novack, a former stripper, is now accused of engineering his murder with the help of her brother Cristobal and two other men. Novack was found bound and gagged and bludgeoned to death in the Hilton Rye Town last summer, where he had gone for a convention. Narcisa is being accused of both leaving her husband’s suite door open and providing the pillow with which he was smothered. Novack was the son of the owner of the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami, and his 86-year-old mother, Bernice Stempel Novack, had also died under suspicious circumstances. What we have here is a horrible crime, which also contains a bit of a jeremiad. After all, on the surface, Novack was a person of wealth and obsession who married into the underworld instead of taking the route more common to his class and background by marrying a nice Jewish girl of an equally well-to-do family, and having the kind of wedding Philip Roth described in Goodbye, Columbus. Looking at the surface details, it appears that Novack was a person of sensibility whose particular tastes (love of a superheroes) would fuel his desire to escape the seemingly narrow, safe world into which he was born. Emma Bovary committed suicide and Novack was murdered, but did they both suffer from overactive imaginations?