Roth has worked out so frequently and acrobatically with fictional versions of himself that his entanglement here with a doppelganger insisting that he's Philip Roth—a double whose visionary "diasporism" gets the hapless narrator tied up in plots engineered by the Mossad, the PLO, and God knows who else- -is as logical as it is frenetically funny. Arriving in Jerusalem just after a hallucinatory withdrawal from Halcion, Roth is comically vulnerable to the double who's using his striking resemblance to the novelist to curry favor and raise money for his reverse-Zionist project: to return all Ashkenazic Jews from Israel, where fundamentalist Muslims threaten them with extinction, to the relatively benign cities of Europe. When Roth threatens legal action against the double, whom he christens Moishe Pipik, Pipik sends opulent, dyslexic Chicago oncology nurse Wanda Jane "Jinx" Possesski, a charter member of Pipik's Anti-Semites Anonymous, to intercede for him. Roth, falling in lust with this latest shiksa, finds himself slipping into Pipik's identity, spouting off diasporist speeches, and unwittingly accepting a million-dollar check for the diasporist cause from crippled philanthropist Louis B. Smilesburger. A zany ride back to Jerusalem from Ramallah, where he's incidentally delivered a loony, impassioned anti-Zionist tirade, ends with Roth rescued by a young lieutenant seeking a letter of recommendation to NYU, and the check lost or stolen. As he takes in the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk, Roth ponders Pipik's insistence that "I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS" and, under challenge from every side, questions his notorious Jewish self- hatred. Still ahead: antiquarian David Supposnik's request that Roth write an introduction to Leon Klinghoffer's recently discovered travel diaries, Roth's kidnapping, and his agreeing to undertake a secret mission in Athens for the Mossad. A deliberately anticlimactic epilogue substitutes for the final chapter that would have described the secret mission. No matter: rarely have fact and fiction, personal confession and wild imaginings, led such a deeply, unnervingly comic dance.
Pub Date: April 8, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-70376-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
How do "impossible" couples evolve? In this most recent, luminous novel by Tyler, a "fairly chilly" man, muffled in loneliness, learns that a man and a woman can come together "for reasons the rest of the world would never guess." One can leave the principality of self to tour another's—to love "the surprise of her. . .the surprise of himself when he was with her." Macon Leary, married to Sarah, is an author of travel books for businessmen whose "concern was how to pretend they had never left home"—who want safe and comforting accommodations and food, who want to travel "without a jolt." Macon and Sarah, devastated by the senseless murder of their 12-year-old son in a fast-food shop holdup, are about to part. Sarah will leave this man that she claims remains "unchanged," who refuses to argue with the knowledge that the world is vile. Immobilized by a broken leg (was that accident an unconscious wish?), Macon will settle in with the family he started with—two brothers (one divorced) and sister Rose—in ultimate safety, where like plump, brooding fowl, the four deliberate in soothing converse, rearrange the straws of domesticity, Enter the "impossible" Muriel Pritchett, shrill as a macaw, single mother of a pale, wretched young boy, scrabbling for a living at various jobs, and existing messily on a cacophonous Baltimore street. Muriel has arrived at the Leary compound to whip into line Edward, Macon's pugnacious Welsh corgi who's fond of treeing bicyclists and family members. Muriel cows Edward while talking nonstop, and gradually Macon will find himself in "another country" of noise and color, where red slippers with feathers are necessary accessories to a woman in the morning. From a perspective where Macon feels he's a "vast distance from everyone who mattered" and a marriage where he and his wife seem to have "used each other up," Macon will find in foreignness his own "soft heart." Again in Tyler's tender, quiet prose, a delicate sounding of the odd and accidental incursions of the heart. Tone-perfect, and probably her best to date.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1985
ISBN: 0345452003
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985
It’s not quite idiomatic—for that there’s Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s version—but the translation moves easily...
“ ‘I don’t need any…translations,’ muttered Raskolnikov.” Well, of course he does, hence this new translation of an old standby of Russian-lit survey courses.
Driven to desperation, a morally sketchy young man kills and kills again. He gets away with it—at least for a while, until a psychologically astute cop lays a subtle trap. Throw in a woman friend who hints from the sidelines that he might just feel better confessing, and you have—well, maybe not Hercule Poirot or Kurt Wallender, but at least pretty familiar ground for an episode of a PBS series or Criminal Minds. The bare bones of that story, of course, are those of Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, when Dostoyevsky was well on the road from young democrat to middle-aged reactionary: thus the importance of confession, nursed along by the naughty lady of the night with the heart of gold, and thus Dostoyevsky’s digs at liberal-inclined intellectuals (“That’s what they’re like these writers, literary men, students, loudmouths…Damn them!”) and at those who would point to crimes great and small and say that society made them do it. So Rodion Raskolnikov, who does a nasty pawnbroker, “a small, dried-up miserable old woman, about sixty years old, with piercing, malicious little eyes, a small sharp nose, and her bare head,” in with an ax, then takes it to her sister for good measure. It’s to translator Katz’s credit that he gives the murder a satisfyingly grotty edge, with blood spurting and eyes popping and the like. Much of the book reads smoothly, though too often with that veneer of translator-ese that seems to overlie Russian texts more than any other; Katz's version sometimes seems to slip into Constance Garnett–like fustiness, as when, for instance, Raskolnikov calls Svidrigaylov "a crude villain...voluptuous debaucher and scoundrel.”
It’s not quite idiomatic—for that there’s Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s version—but the translation moves easily and legibly enough through Raskolnikov’s nasty deeds, game of cat and mouse, and visionary redemption.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-033-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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