In Medias Res

Abstract

In Medias Res Ross Berger (bio) EAST COAST CONNECTION I grew up in a rural suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, about 35 miles away from Philip Roth's home in Warren. Charlotte Hungerford, in nearby Torrington, served as Roth's hospital for standard care for a better part of four decades. I was born there in the 1970s. Warren is located in Litchfield County, the northwest section of Connecticut, known for its remote beauty and two-hour drive to Manhattan. The latter, along with the area's woodsy calm, is why it has been a popular residential destination for many luminaries in the performing arts and literature, including Meryl Streep, Mia Farrow, Arthur Miller, William Styron, and Terrence McNally. Roth's name would be included among this list when proud Litchfield County residents rattled off its bona fides: "Bucolic and peaceful…" "Home to the first American law school…" "Plenty of celebs including…" I never once saw Philip Roth when I set foot in Litchfield County, and believe me, I was on the lookout in my early twenties whenever I was on break from college or grad school. But he was a man who protected his privacy dearly, so I tempered my expectations—eliminated them actually, as I was accustomed to doing (more about this later). I'd like to think I spotted him in person one Saturday evening in July 2000, among an exodus of participants of Midsummer Night Swing, a weekly summer-long "outdoor dance party" at Lincoln Center. The glut of people around me made it impossible to verify. Perhaps it was a random accountant who bore a resemblance to the great author. Or maybe it was Moishe Pipik, Roth's fictional doppelgänger from Operation: Shylock. Or maybe—no: likely—it was just wishful thinking. For a couple of years after that evening, I had tried to draw connections to Roth any way that I could, but to no avail. I didn't know anyone who went to Bucknell or University of Chicago in or around the time he did. And I had no publishing network to speak of. [End Page 119] The closest I got, which is not close at all, is my New Jersey story—a slight echo of American Pastoral through my mother, a native of Trenton. Her brother, my uncle, was a high school athletic star and war veteran just like American Pastoral's Swede Levov, who once hailed from a city bigger than Trenton—Newark. My uncle was slightly younger and served not in Korea like the Swede, but in a different conflict in the Pacific (Vietnam). Both were Jewish, physical, mythic. Both married non-Jews. Both could assimilate in either Jewish or gentile crowds, and, in either, be idolized and accepted as one of their own. Alas, these details are not unique or special in America's most populated state per square foot. It's just that American Pastoral is a deeply relatable fiction. If I must admit the obvious, my true connection to Roth has been as a reader. In this role, I found consolation as a student dealing with the long aftermath of a family tragedy and, once more, as a young writer in need of basic guidance. During each of these times, Roth served as a comforting sage-on-the-page, whose words were radar through the fog of trauma. WORDS OF HEALING I came to Roth's work after an on-again-off-again journey of reading Saul Bellow in my mid-to-late teenage years. It started when I studied Henderson the Rain King for a term paper in my tenth grade American Literature class. From a list of authors typed likely on an IBM Selectric (this was 1992, mind you, well past the era of the typewriter), I chose Bellow because of two descriptors next to his name: "Jewish" and "Nobel Prize-winning." (Admittedly, the former was the bigger enticement after months of reading nineteenth-century works with strong Christian overtones and Lost Generation novels rife with anti-Semitism.) I did not take to Henderson the Rain King. Finding it too tame and, at times, culturally exploitative, I moved on to Dangling Man and Seize the...