Elliot's Reading Week of 6/6/21: More on Roth's Operation Shylock and two classic long stories/short novels

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 6/6/21

A few notes catching up on this week’s reading, starting w/ Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, about which one must wonder: Can Roth keep this plot aloft for the full length of the book (some 350 pp) or will it crash all around him? Every reader can appreciate the clever, intricate set-up of this novel, in which an imposter claiming to be Roth has turned up in the new in Israel where he is pushing a scheme to have Jews leave Israel and re-settle in their pre-war villages in Eastern Europe. Roth arrives in Jerusalem explicitly to complete a set of interviews with Israeli novels Appelfeld (this is real, actual) and is pursed and tormented in various ways by his alter ego, whom he names Moishe Pipik (Moses Bellybutton). The plot, as Roth is planning to put all this behind him and leave Israel, takes an odd turn as Roth is listed by MP’s paramour, who seduces Roth (or is it the other way around?), which makes MP a now-dangerous antagonist; Roth gives us about 20 pp. recounting the plot and explaining how ridiculous and improbable these events are - a weird post-modern divergence! I have read this novel before +20 years ago I think and can’t recall how Roth got out of this jam but at this point it seems he’s cut off various pathways. We’ll see.

Have also been reading a # of classic short stories (or short novels perhaps), notably Heart of Darkness and The Open Boat. Conrad’s HofD from the early 20th century today would require numerous trigger warnings, generally because of racist language; that said, however, it’s not a racist story. The entire piece is narrated by an old mariner, Marlowe, describing his early adventures as a young man on his first voyage as captain in an old “rust bucket” steamship traveling up the Congo on behalf of a Dutch trading company specializing in Ivory. We see from the start the cruel presence of these merchants and the terrible exploitation of black labor and disruption of an entire culture and way of life - all for a a material used for piano keys and billiard balls! At the apex of the novel, the steamer arrives at the most remote camp where they pick up the legendary merchant Kurtz - upon which Marlowe sees that K has created a system of brutality (partly by trading guns for ivory!) and hero-worship, which K., in his dying breath, renounces - a message that M is unable to deliver when he returns to Europe: a strange and enigmatic tale but in the end one of great sympathy for the tormented African people whose lives have been disrupted by European greed. 

As to Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, from the same period: Crane is by no means a popular author today, written off as a “mere” journalist and author of potboilers. What a miscarriage! Sure, Open Boat has a few strained images and passages that feel odd and quaint today, but it’s a terrific account of four men in a lifeboat struggling to get safely to shore - in a day when there was none of the safety and survival gear mandatory today. It’s a complete nail-biter story - based apparently on Crane’s experience - and I don’t think anyone could or has ever surpassed this story for construction, vision, and empathy. 

I did pick up on a few other pieces as well, but none that held my interest for long: A real dry spell these past few weeks in NYer stories; a look at Robert Coover’s most-famous story, The Babysitter - Coover has been a favorite of mine and was a personal friend when I was a books editor, but this story, innnovative as it was inits day and as it still is (composed of a series of one-paragraph sections, out of chronological order, about the goings-on among various families on a Saturday night in an Everytown suburb) - but today this story is nearly unreadable because of its depicted crude, violent mistreatment of women. The recent well-reviewed novel, The Recent East, despite a rare look at life in former East Germany ca 1990, is definitely not a novel meant for me or my now-ancient generation.