MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM

Sixty years after the classic Call It Sleep, Roth, quite astoundingly, is back inside the consciousness of a Jewish immigrant boy in New York before WW 1—continuing, though with differences, the Joycean rodeo of consciousness that that first book began. Nine-year-old Ira Stigman—the boy-protagonist here—and his parents have just moved from the shtetl-like security of the Lower East Side to "white" Harlem. The bonds of culture are weaker uptown—few Jewish friends, no religious studies—and the insecurity is echoed by the larger world's threats, such as the war (Ira's uncle is drafted, sent off to fight in Europe with a great chorus of sidewalk lamentation—a fine scene that also reminds us how ancient a distaste unmodern Judaism has for soldiering). Ira, though, is more preoccupied with defending himself against Irish bully-boys and the slippery tactics of an upscale grocery store as it makes an arrangement with Prohibition; with fending off various pederastic moves (including one by his teacher) and with his own burgeoning sexuality (mortifyingly, unwillingly, come to focus upon his own mother). In a prose that is formal but warm, Roth tells Ira's tale in a shapely, controlled manner that benefits from the slight aloofness of memory trolling in the depths of very long ago. Interrupting all this are asides addressed to the author's computer ("Ecclesias"). But in these—though they are often touching, the whitened confessions of an old man and long-blocked writer—Roth consciously dilutes what spell he might have spun from Ira's story. A kind of double-entry bookkeeping, the contemporary musings of the octogenarian unavoidably call forth a pathos that the Ira-narrative wants to keep well away. And so the emotional temperature of the whole work falls out of whack—with spots too warm, spots too cold: never quite a steady climate. Still, Roth's return is a genuine event—and Call It Sleep devotees will find it unthinkable not to see what it's all about.