Staring Up At the Blue Whale

Philip Roth passed.  What do I feel about this?  He passed a few days ago.  First there were just reports.  Then there was salutatory commentary.  Then there was disparaging commentary.  Then there was commentary trying to reconcile the two. 

There are plenty of twentieth century author’s whose depictions of women seem hollow.  I didn’t feel that way about the daughter in “American Pastoral”, who oddly becomes a Jain, and lives as a homeless vagabond.  I didn’t feel this way about the mother in “The Plot Against America” as she frets about whether or not they should flee America for Canada.  And I certainly didn’t feel that way reading his book “Shop Talk” where he, at least to my eyes very thoughtfully interviews Mary McCarthy and Edna O’Brien. 

Perhaps I need to read further.  The women in “Everyman” were certainly stock characters.  But sometimes you need stock characters.  Perhaps I need to read more critically.  Perhaps I’m just a male reader at the end of the day.  And it is rather straightforward to identify with male's author's male characters. 

Regular readers know I have been reading War and Peace aloud to my daughter, for nearly two years now.  Surely, Tolstoy has an uncanny ability to render humans of both gender.  This, at least to my decidedly male assessment, reading another man write about women, he seems unnervingly accurate, as if it were obscene to be so intimately involved in another person’s thoughts. 

Roth was Roth.  He wasn’t trying to be Tolstoy.  "Indignation" was short but when I read it from start to finish in one pass a few years back it struck me as a perfect novel.  I was able to completely suspend disbelief and savour this particularly unfair dynamic that he’d drawn together where a young man’s life is sacrificed by ignorant, callous people. 

I liked the story about him visiting the Museum of Natural History after finishing one, later novel.  This man who suggested that old age wasn’t a battle but a massacre.  He stood staring up at the blue whale, suspended there in the museum and thought to himself, ‘What?  Am I just gonna stare at whales now?  Get back to work.”  Keep fighting one’s way through the massacre until the end.  The fast bullets haven’t yet started to fly.   

Sunday 5/27/18