Philip Roth, “The Human Stain” (2000) – I started reading Philip Roth in basically the dumbest way: I picked up “The Plot Against America” as a teenager who was interested in alternate history fiction. Needless to say, I didn’t get whatever I was looking for, and wasn’t that interested in what was on offer from the man then enjoying his position atop the American literary heap. Many years later, my second Roth was “American Pastoral.” I didn’t and don’t like that one. I could see the talent. But you’re just not gonna hook me with “did you know that the New Left was an oedpial (or in this case, elektral) rebellion against :checks notes: Philip Roth’s generation, and to an extent, Philip Roth and his friends, personally??” And I’ve studied the New Left enough to not be, as they say, a fan.

But I read more, because I’ve committed myself to reading “important” writers, out of historical/critical interest even if I don’t think I’ll enjoy them. By the time I was reading “Portnoy’s Complaint,” I was pretty glad this commitment (compulsion?) led me back to Roth. There really is no one quite like him in terms of craft. I do think one of the reasons I can appreciate his work more now is because I have spent a number of years thinking about the craft of writing myself, though obviously not to the same effect (or in the same fields). 

“The Human Stain” is about a dude getting cancelled! Except not really. It is funny to see some of the ways the “political correctness”/cancellation discourse has changed, or hasn’t. This was published in 2000 and was written, and is set, during the Clinton/Lewinski impeachment imbroglio. It’s in this background that Roth’s self-stand-in, Zuckerman, relates the story of Coleman Silk, star classicist and academic power-player at Athena University in the Berkshires, brought low by political correctness… or was he? Silk loses his job because of a campaign, a few years before the action of the novel starts, to do him in when he refers to two black students – who had never shown up in his class, he didn’t know who they were or what their race was – as “spooks.” 

This is about a lot more than the hounding of an innocent high-end academic, though. In fact, we see relatively little of Silk’s booting, even as we learn the ins and outs of his life both before and after. It’s even implied that Silk could have fought, and likely won, but chose not to. Zuckerman meets Silk as Silk emerges from years of writing the indictment of the university that slandered him, that he sees as having killed his wife (his wife died during the contretemps)… and as Silk has decided to abandon the writing project. Silk has something else in his life- an affair with one of the cleaning staff at the school, who’s about half his age (note- she’s thirty-seven, Silk is seventy-one). Faunia, his new lover, has her own stuff going on, having lived through a history of abuse, survived the death of her two children, and is currently being stalked by her deranged Vietnam vet ex-husband. 

I guess you could say that the strength of this novel is that everyone “has their own stuff going on,” as I so eloquently put it (with the interesting exception of Zuckerman, Roth’s narrator alter-ego, who we hear less about). We learn all about Faunia, her ex-husband, the French theory-lady who leads Silk’s accusers, various members of Silk’s family, and above all, Coleman Silk himself. In keeping with this book, and with Roth himself, Silk is a complex, fascinating, deeply frustrating character, who has led a brilliant life and done dark, fucked-up things. I don’t know how many spoilers we need to have for a decades-old literary fiction novel, but, just in case, SPOILERS: Coleman Silk, who spent his academic career depicting himself as a kind of Harold Bloom figure, complete with Jewish background, is, in fact, a black man who has spent decades “passing.” We go, unsparingly, into the logic of the decision, the will with which the young, ambitious, light-skinned black boy Silk decides to abandon his family and his beloved mother in order to live his dreams of success and, more than anything, of individuality- to be a him, rather than part of an “us.” 

We get all of this over the course of a novel of average length, and more. It’s easy to describe this novel, and most of its features, in such a way that it sounds like the complaint of an obnoxious mid-twentieth century white American male intellectual, pissed that time is passing him by. These tropes are the sort of thing that a substantial portion of the critical internet, your Toasts and your Booktoks and what have you, were connected to a network in order to pass negative, usually “snarky,” judgment upon: the “political correctness gone mad” scenario that impels the book, the “they were the REAL racists!” angle, the woman depicted as an anti-intellectual “natural” woman-child and everything a seventy-something pedant needs, of course the French theory lady persecuting the old-school intellectual is sexually frustrated, etc. etc. And, in classic Roth fashion, there’s validity to all of that. Roth was an obnoxious midcentury intellectual over-achiever who did not care for any of the moralizing – good, bad, or indifferent – that has, historically, gone with pretty much every politics – left, right, and center – that took hold in America during his lifetime. He couldn’t necessarily have predicted our current situation, but he did have a good hard look at the nineties (a depressingly large portion of the landscape hasn’t changed since), and still dangled all these features out there, like a matador’s cape. 

And, like Johnny Cash’s matador, he “killed just one more” (well, probably more than that, if his subsequent novels are any good). Nothing is simple for Roth, even when he says it is, he almost always complicates it with the left hand what he has narrators declare in ignorance about with his right (he actually comes pretty close to uncomplicatedly condemning the internet, but, hell, who can blame him). Things aren’t what they appear- but for Roth, that’s never a reason to ignore the appearances, or soften the aspects of either the depths or the surfaces of the human tragedies we create in order to spare our sensibilities. What this results in, when it works, are gripping narratives, needing little or nothing in the way of formal tricks, verbal pyrotechnics, or genre hooks to sustain the reader’s interest- just prose, polished to diamond clarity and hardness, about the complexities of being alive. I can’t really encapsulate everything that happens here, except to say it is, indisputably, human, in all the messiness that implies. *****

Sergio De La Pava, “A Naked Singularity” (2008) (read aloud by Luis Moreno) – It’s like “Infinite Jest,” but good! This was recommended me by a friend early on in grad school. I’ve had her copy for most of a decade, as she tends to flit amongst the continents and isn’t anchored by physical belongings (plus this copy is donged up a little and would not sell at the used places). I tried reading it physically but wasn’t in the mood, then, when I started having a “contemporary lit fic” slot in my audiobook rotation, thought this would do the trick.

Sergio De La Pava originally self-published this, but then a publisher picked it up and it won some awards. Gotta say, it does feel a little older than it is, more 2000 than 2008, when it got picked up. A lot of stuff about how weird and off-putting television is, and pretty much none about how weird and off-putting the internet is, for instance. This is one feature, along with its length and discursiveness, that led me to compare it to “Infinite Jest” – Wallace had that weird Gen X fear of/fascination with TV, too. 

That said, the saving grace of “A Naked Singularity” versus “Infinite Jest” is that the former has incident and life, where the latter has pretentious noodling and the stink of death. I don’t use either of those descriptors lightly, for different reasons. I heard the word “pretentious” applied to me a lot, it won’t surprise you to know! And it didn’t help that the best response I could muster would be pointing to the fact that most of the people using it weren’t using the word properly. They couldn’t tell me what I was pretending to be. Well, they didn’t have to, because they meant “annoying” (can’t really disagree with them there, in retrospect) “in an intellectually-themed way.” In any event, that made me have a flinch reaction to the word, not so much because it was hurtful to me and more because it seemed just too easy and underthought. But “Infinite Jest” does pretend, and so did David Foster Wallace- pretend to be avant-garde, pretend to be humanist, pretend that there was anything “new” in whichever version, at least the third, of “new sincerity” it and he were trying. And it reeks of death not just because of the subject matter, but because it’s clear that Wallace’s answer, insofar as he fails in eluding question, is to batten down the hatches from the mean old world and cultivate a set of virtues that sound less New Sincerity and more Second Great Awakening… 

Anyway! There’s my review of “Infinite Jest,” if you’re wondering. I wouldn’t call “A Naked Singularity” an entirely successful novel, but again, has an emphasis on incident (a good idea if you can’t really summon up convincing internal space, which De La Pava sort of can and which Wallace could not) and is, for lack of a better term, lively. This is the story of a few days in the life of Casi, a young Colombian-American lawyer in the New York City public defender’s office (De La Pava is, or at least was, also a public defender). Casi’s a hot shot- takes on too much but always succeeds, has gotten all twelve of the cases he’s taken to trial to a not-guilty verdict (in keeping with judicial reality, the vast majority of his cases are plea deals sans trial). He lives in an apartment with Brooklyn with a variety of white, TV-obsessed Gen-Xer neighbors. He gets into philosophical discussions with them, with his family in New Jersey, and sometimes with other lawyers. These are generally less compelling than his efforts in the legal direction – we get some good sequences of Casi trying to hold back the tide of bullshit drug war prosecutions destroying lives – but they’re not the worst in the genre. 

The most consequential, for the plot anyway, philosophical discussions Casi gets into are with Dane, an older public defender. Dane plays the sort of devil/archon figure I’ve been increasingly thinking plays an important role in early twenty-first century literature. Dane foists a sort of perfectionist Nietzscheanism on Casi over Italian lunches. First telling a story of how he shit his pants during a trial, then telling a story of how he dedicated himself to a philosophically perfect defense only to blow it in the end, Dane slowly convinces Casi, over Casi’s own philosophical takes and good sense, to do a heist. How much Casi is convinced by Dane’s philosophy, and how much he’s inspired by some bad turns in his own life – losing his first case, coming up against some limitations in both legal, personal, and family life – is hard to tell, but Casi does tell Dane about a client who is moving a lot of money in the drug trade, and eventually agrees to take the score down. With swords.

This is a shaggy, lumbering work, sometimes agreeably and sometimes annoyingly so. The heist is a bit silly – swords! – but not badly done for all that. The sequences involving the criminal justice system are good, very human in an unsentimental but deeply felt way. The heist has some bad consequences, but not as bad a sudden cold snap that shuts down New York for a few days and gives the TV-obsessed neighbors some good scenes. The attempts at futurism – the rise of “video vigilantes,” jokes about media consolidation – are both somewhat prescient but still don’t quite land. He also intersperses a narrative of the great boxer Wilfredo Benitez, which is cool and all and kind of goes along with “Latino wiz kid knocked around by life” theme, but, you know… it’s kind of funny, the ways in which contemporary literature did, and did not, follow the path De La Pava laid out here, making this book feel both very current and like something of a time capsule simultaneously. ****

Kathy Acker, “Empire of the Senseless” (1988) – No less a figure than Sarah Schulman praised Kathy Acker big-time as the sort of transgressive, innovative figure you don’t get in the arts these days, as both cities like New York and San Francisco and the minds of their inhabitants take on capitalist bourgeois values. Schulman depicts Acker’s death in the late nineties as a great tragedy for American letters, the cutting off of a great young voice… It says something that you can still be “young” in literature at fifty, about the age Acker was at the time (she was vague about when exactly she was born), but Acker could be said to have “written young” – energetic, transgressive. 

Certainly “transgressive,” if by that we mean “depicts things people would rather not have depicted, generally in less-than-easy-to-scan prose.” We come out the gate with pedophilia, incest, apocalypse. Thivai and Abhor, outlaws, cyborgs, sometimes-lovers, wander semi-post-apocalyptic Paris. We’re not sure exactly what they’re doing – that would be sensible, and that’s not the empire we’re in, as the title reminds us – but they’re after something and meet all kinds of characters whilst they’re after it. 

Here’s the deal: it’s hard to shock people who grew up with the internet, or anyway, hard to shock them with –content–. You can sometimes get a content-tone combo, some disjunction, that can do the trick. I don’t claim to be unshockable. But writers like Ackerman at the tail end of the twentieth century who wanted to be shocking and relied on weirdness, edginess, or just randomness to do so… that doesn’t age well. As the back blurb of “Empire of the Senseless” puts it, “Navigating the chaotic city, they encounter mad doctors, prisoners, bikers, sailors, tattooists, terrorists, and prostitutes…” Terrorists, sure, you might not want to encounter. Mad doctors… well, depends how mad. The rest of them? Who sees tattooists as especially edgy or noteworthy these days, anymore than any other craft worker, like a chef or a bricklayer? I imagine you could drop this book in a high school library in many parts of this country, and if you alerted the school committee to its presence, they might put it on the list to ban… but they might not bother, either. 

There’s also the way the first few chapters include basically part of the plot of “Neuromancer.” The characters join with youth gangs of “Panthers” to do a cyber-heist to aid an AI with a name based on “Winter-something.” Pretty blatant! Supposedly, this is the sort of thing Kathy Acker just did, a sort of “intertextual” practice, and there’s interviews with both William Gibson and Acker and Gibson doesn’t seem to mind. Still and all… kind of seems like New York artsy writers ripping off genre writers and getting high-class plaudits for it. Granted, this was a period where some from the critical establishment were trying to take on board the existence, and effervescence, of science fiction, especially cyberpunk. Both cyberpunk as a literary movement, and the sort of theory-inflected cool-kid vibe the cyberpunk-theorists were trying to pull off, dissipated into the general cultural churn soon after, but it was definitely a thing…

All told, not sure what to make of this. Acker definitely is doing something and she definitely had chops. But it’s hard to react to this as much other than a time capsule. I’m a historian- I like a good time capsule. But I don’t think that’s what Acker was trying for, and there’s limits to how much time capsule qua time capsule can hold my attention. I’ll try some more Acker sometime, especially as I don’t think I’m letting go of fin de siecle literature and history as a topic any time too soon. ***