Real Fictions
I just finished reading James Wood’s review of Philip Roth’s latest. At first the quick attention to sentences, in that alert and intelligent way that Wood always has, and then the more magisterial moves toward the end, assuming a larger form in order to seemingly cover the world in three strides. (Like in the novel he praises, Wood’s criticism also builds or fabricates real fiction. In his own writings on other writers, he eschews both plodding mimesis and free-floating deconstructive play.) A sampling of both moves:
The fantasy of endlessness has found its form in late Roth—in a spare, pragmatic prose, apparently unconcerned with literary effects, focussed only on its subject. It is striking, by contrast, how proper and “literary” the earlier work now seems, with its tidy sentences and plush images sewn into the right places, its formal approach to verisimilitude.
And
Fiction, for Roth, is not what Plato thought mimesis was: an imitation of an imitation. Fiction is a rival life, a “counterlife,” to use the title of one of Roth’s greatest novels, and this is why his work has managed so brilliantly the paradox of being at once playfully artful and seriously real. In “The Ghost Writer,” Nathan Zuckerman, the young writer, laments, “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life!” So he sets out to answer his own challenge, and conjures an outrageous invented life for Amy Bellette, in which she becomes the survivor Anne Frank. In “Exit Ghost,” Zuckerman bewails his sexual impotence: “Why must strength’s abatement be so quick and cruel? Oh, to wish what is into what is not, other than on the page!” In the earlier novel, fiction yearns to keep pace with the scandal and presumptuousness and fictionality of life; in the later novel, life yearns for the scandalous freedom and fantasy of fiction. But for Roth there is no contradiction between the two positions. In both cases, the urge to create fiction—the urge to wish what is into what is not—is really just the urge to live more, to extend life, to bring back life, as Zuckerman yearns for the rejuvenation of his body. And both the urge to create fiction and the urge to extend life belong to the magical fantasy of endlessness.
