Well, never being satisfied is Roth’s great theme. I wish I had 5op for every time the phrase ‘on good terms with pleasure’ is wistfully summoned in the ‘My Life’ trilogy. For pleasure and the Roth man are incompatible: they just do not get along, they just cannot work it out, they just get on each other’s nerves. In Portnoy the condition was seen as a subject for black satire (the hero’s desires harshly ridiculing his highmindedness), in My Life as a subject for tragic farce (the hero’s highmindedness proscribing his desires); in the last book, however, the condition is seen as too disabling to be a subject for anything but itself. This is not only no joke, Roth seems to be saying, it is no novel either, nor anything else that has a shape: it is simply how it is. One feels both relieved and surprised when Roth expresses it so poignantly (in a projected introduction to a course of lectures which Claire calls ‘Desire 341’):
I am devoted to fiction, and I assure you that in time I will tell you whatever I may know about it, but in truth nothing lives in me like my life.
Paradoxically, too, Roth seems in this novel to have moved beyond autobiography. He no longer looks at life with the selective eye of the novelist: he looks at his own past with the fastidious frown of the literary critic, grading, evaluating, trying to separate the serious from the unserious. (I have always wondered why Roth’s ‘bookish-ness’ relies on translated works — Chekhov, Gogol, Kafka, Dostoevsky — for its points of reference. I suspect that Roth now regards novels as how-to books about life, and he prefers to get their tips on living without the distractions and evasions of a responsive verbal surface.)
And what a sorrily half-tone world seeps through the self-immersion. The Professor of Desire is by far the most exotic in its locations of all Roth’s novels — the East and West coasts, London, France, Italy, Prague, Hong Kong — and yet the changing landscapes remain blissfully unobserved (a derisory ‘Sorry, Yank, ‘e seems a bit sleepy tonight’, for instance, is the extent to which Roth captures the texture of life in our own country). ‘The whole damn thing could have taken place in Cincinnati!’ says Kepesh after his Far East debacle — and indeed it could have done. My Life as a Man contains a good, sharp section in which the narrator focuses his eyes on the year of 1968 and realises just how much has happened while he’s been asleep inside himself. Not even this release — or injection of balance — is available to Kepesh: he is lost in a truly lugubrious solipsism, a mere patball of the neuroses which stride unchallenged through his psyche. Accordingly, all ironic distance has gone; nothing separates author and narrator; Roth sees no more than Kepesh sees.
How else has the world changed? It is quieter and flatter than it used to be, and there is no delight in it. Roth’s novelistic ear, arguably his greatest gift as a writer, has evidently been well cauliflowered by recent events: only the Jewish-American characters retain their own voices, while everyone else joins the stilted and lachrymose debate on the hero’s despair. Even the expository prose has lost its relish, settling for a droll, automatic elegance: it is full of ugly chimes (‘my father intends, by the very intensity …’, ‘ending the term’s work with three masterworks’, etc.) and back-to-the-drawing-board formulations (‘my year as a visiting fellow in erotic daredevilry’, ‘she is not only stunning-looking, she is also real’, etc.). Some of the book’s aridities may be an attempt to create a reflection of despair, but the zestlessness does sometimes read like a failure of professional sincerity, or nerve.
Now what? Will the vision re-expand, as it seems to yearn to do, or will it squirm deeper into the tunnel of the self? Is Roth’s subject the situation of the American writer (something that could do with a little analysis)? Or is Roth’s subject identical to — entirely contiguous with — his life as a man?
* * *
It is an awkward and recent truth that most contemporary novelists are deeply influenced by their own lives, and not least by the amount of praise, fame and money their work attracts. A few unpierceable geniuses may smile at the thousandth rejection-slip, may yawn at that staggering cheque, but such things tend to affect the confidence — and the writing. This doesn’t matter so much in England, where the boundaries between success and its opposite are often hard to establish. (J. Cowper Powys is the obvious example, a monument of neglect far more renowned for his obscurity than many of his rivals were famed for their fame.) Over in America, though, you can’t help knowing where you stand.