States of trial: manhood in Philip Roth's post-war America

Abstract

Ann Basu. States of Trial-Manhood in Roth's Post-War America. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 200 pp. $110 hardcover / $29.95 paperback.I think everybody here is wondering where the limit is, says Bill Orcutt, the neighbour of Swede Levov in American Pastoral (365). Orcutt, who is helping Levov's wife Dawn redesign the family home and is also sleeping with her, says in answer to helpless plea by the Swede's father, Lou, about the proliferation of divorce in American society: Where will it end? What is the limit? (Pastoral 364). Swede, asking himself how much more he can take after his daughter Merry's estrangement from the family, her transformation from lisping little girl to troubled teenager to domestic terrorist to born-again Jain, must now contend with performative moralizing from the man who, by having an affair with his wife, has further broken down the edifice of Levov family life. Swede might be wondering where the limit is; so might we readers, for whom experiencing the attritional suffering represented in American Pastoral is no passive delight either. The five main texts at the heart of Ann Basu's States of Trial, of which American Pastoral is one, share quality of tryingness, of pushing their protagonists to the limit-sometimes with exhilaration, sometimes in spirit of mischief, sometimes for purpose at least cagily political. For Basu, the personal trials undergone by Roth's characters in these five works (Operation Shylock, American Pastoral, I Married Communist, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America) resemble the sorrows of earlier protagonists, but their pains gain greatly in significance by being figuratively aligned with tests generated by historical and political processes (Basu 7).Basu is not alone in detecting a decisive turn towards broad historical consciousness (31) in late-period Roth, although, as she admits, she is unusual in placing that turn in 1993 with the publication of Operation Shylock. Her justification, which makes good sense, is the importance of literal to that work, the in Jerusalem in the late 1980s of Ivan the Terrible, or John Demjanjuk, who pled not guilty to having been guard at Treblinka concentration camp. Basu puts the concept of the at the center of her reading of Operation Shylock, which enables us to see the rest of the novel's events, in all their freewheeling, maddening implausibility, as trials too. Early in her introduction, Basu confirms that we are to read the word trial in its three interwoven but often conflicting senses of testing, suffering and experimentation (1); states, meanwhile, can refer to character's condition, or to the United States, or, in the case of Operation Shylock, to the warring states of Israel and Palestine. Basu points out the oddity by which procedural trials are arenas in which the compulsion to hear competing narratives wrestles with the urge to artificially reconcile or to flatten contradictory narratives so as to reach 'fitting,' but artificial, conclusion (12). For Basu, trials demand the expression of their antagonists' opposing realities only, of necessity, to subdue them; but there is no conclusion, natural or artificial, to the trials that Operation Shylock's Philip Roth is put through by the doppelganger he playfully names Moishe Pipik-only confusing, irritating, frequently frightening contradictions, tortures seemingly without limit.How could I be that and this? imagines Demjanjuk asking himself, as he stands for crimes he either never committed, or else committed lifetime ago (Shylock 63). How could I be that and this? is one of the animating questions of Operation Shylock, and of Roth's whole oeuvre, which brims, as Emily Miller Budick notes, with neurotics of highly visible and juicy sort (Budick 73) at pains to reconcile their divergent and conflicting impulses. In Roth's hands, being both that and this is the Jewish-American condition; it is certainly the condition of his many writer-protagonists, whom we so often see in the process of fictionalizing themselves even as their narrative describes the deceptions and self-deceptions of others. …