Modern Masters and Old-School Monsters
Is it a conspiracy or just a coincidence that both Saul Bellow and Philip Roth have chosen for the protagonist of their latest novels an aging humanities scholar enamored of the ancient Greeks? Bellow's Abe Ravelstein, a philosophy professor famously modeled on the author's friend Allan Bloom, grounds his thinking in Plato and Aristotle; Roth's Coleman Silk, an African-American passing for Jewish who teaches classics, is devoted to Homer and the tragedians. Both men find in the works of these dead white males a combination of values, wisdom and insight into the human condition that transcends time and place.
The other thing these novels have in common is a first-person narrator who closely resembles the author and who functions in the story mainly as a witness. Bellow's Chick in Ravelstein is a moderately successful writer who has encouraged his friend to set down his educational ideas in a book that inexplicably becomes a bestseller and makes its author, Ravelstein, rich enough to afford the material luxuries he likes to lavish on himself. Chick holds Ravelstein in awe as a kind of mentor--even though Ravelstein is the younger man--and is urged by the vain and bombastic Ravelstein (who, as it happens, is dying of AIDS) to write a memoir of him when he's gone.
Roth's familiar Nathan Zuckerman in The Human Stain is, like his creator, a well-known novelist who jealously guards his privacy yet whose life and work are disrupted by Silk, who entreats him to write the story of the disgraced professor's downfall after being unjustly accused of racism. Where Chick is a rather passive character, claiming merely to record "piecemeal" the larger-than-life antics of his pal Ravelstein, Zuckerman the irrepressible novelist is drawn so deeply into Silk's story that he becomes an investigator who imaginatively reconstructs events he could not have witnessed. Roth makes it clear to the reader that his book is fiction, which gives him license to excavate the imaginary facts in search of deeper truths.
By contrast, it's unclear whether the author of Ravelstein is fully aware of the unreliability of his own narrator. Chick/Bellow so adores and admires Ravelstein/Bloom that his affectionate account reveals not only a brilliant teacher and colorful individual but an obnoxious, slovenly, intellectually arrogant, cruel, overbearing, egomaniacal blowhard. More ironic still, as argued persuasively by Louis Menand in the New York Review, the real subject of Bellow's book may not be Bloom at all but the author's most recent former wife, a gorgeous Romanian mathematician portrayed here as a high-powered physicist named Vela, against whom he takes literary revenge with a scathingly nasty if superficial portrait.
Following that line of speculation I would go further to suggest that the wry equanimity of tone that pervades his prose is a reflection of Bellow's contentment with his fifth and latest wife--named Rosamund in Ravelstein--a bright but blandly angelic young woman less than half his age who, in the novel as in life, is devoted to taking care of him in his twilight years. It's as if Bellow, having survived into his mid-80s with his stylistic and intellectual gifts intact, can't quite believe how lucky he is to be living his final chapters in such sweet company.
Roth on the other hand, at 67 a generation younger than Bellow, shows no sign of mellowing with age. If anything, his fierce engagement with the issues of our time, and of all time--freedom, identity, justice, betrayal, hypocrisy, integrity, family--is more intense than ever in The Human Stain. The creator of the comic masterpiece Portnoy's Complaint has in recent years taken that manic energy and turned it toward the darker reaches of contemporary history for the sake of exploring, in maximalist terms, profoundly vexing questions: What is the nature of the human soul? Why must the good suffer? How do the most intelligent people still manage to deceive themselves? How does history inevitably invade and change our supposedly private lives? Roth's vision may be tragic, but the passion, anger, exasperation, wit and curiosity that fuel his sentences make this latest book, like the five that preceded it in the 1990s, yet another invigorating and consciousness-shaking performance.
In a recent interview, Roth cited Bellow's great 1954 novel The Adventures of Augie March as one of his early inspirational examples of "verbal freedom, imaginative freedom," a liberating model of the individual voice that every writer aspires to. In The Human Stain, the theme of freedom, of creative individuality, also occupies a central place: Coleman Silk, a physically and intellectually gifted light-skinned black man, decides, like so many Americans before him in fact and fiction, to reinvent himself. Having ruthlessly rejected his own mother, Silk sets out on the Nietzschean/Emersonian path to become what he is, and succeeds, only to be brought down, some 50 years on, by "the stranglehold of history that is one's own time." Like the ruined king in Oedipus at Colonus, Silk's dignity and heroism reside (as Zuckerman imagines it) in the consciousness of his conduct amid "the terrifyingly provisional nature of everything" that conspires to destroy him. Roth offers no catharsis, no resolution, no "closure," only a pained awareness of ambiguity and grief.
By inventing rather than accepting a received identity, Silk takes on a lifelong secret that is a private burden, but a burden that empowers him to move freely in a society otherwise closed to most individuals of his "group." In unraveling Silk's story, Zuckerman/Roth reveals the slipperiness of fixed notions of identity and at the same time explores not only Silk's secret but the shadowy zones in the souls of his other main characters as well--especially Coleman's much younger lover, Faunia Farley, a supposedly illiterate, much-abused, long-suffering, hard-luck, tough-minded woman who, despite her dreadful life, forcefully rejects the role of victim.
In the probing portrayal of Faunia we see the dramatic difference between Roth's and Bellow's respective interest in women: where Bellow is content to describe from a bemused distance his female characters in Ravelstein, Roth in The Human Stain attempts to enter the minds of his--even the unsympathetic academic villain, Delphine Roux--and examine the workings of their psyches from their own point of view. Faunia is a complex and compelling character with a power and wholeness one might not expect from an external description of her situation. Roth brings her alive in all her contradictory subjectivity.
The human stain is itself a resonant metaphor, first cited by Faunia in reference to a tamed crow. It alludes to the taint that people leave on everything they touch, and to the indelible marks of identity we bear despite our every effort to erase them, and to the imperfections of our messy lives that may have their roots in the biblical curse of the knowledge of good and evil, and finally to the incriminating spots on Monica Lewinsky's dress, "the smoking come" of a president whose human weakness and public persecution provide the atmospheric backdrop for the terrible tale of Coleman Silk.
As in his previous novel, I Married a Communist, Roth is indicting the moral corruption of a social order that, in its hypocritical piety, demands the ritual sacrifice of anyone who won't abide the tyranny of mass thought. He resists all ideology, struggling instead with human unknowableness--another kind of stain--the enduring mystery of who we are and what makes us act as we do. Roth is no optimist and is therefore long-shot Nobel Prize material: his work unsettles more than it uplifts. But like Bellow, who won that honor in 1976 and is the acknowledged dean of American letters, Roth is a monster among fiction writers who may in time cast an even longer shadow.
