Philip Roth, author
I have just finished reading Nemesis, the most recent of Philip Roth’s novels.
I like Roth.
He is my favorite writer.
And the thing about reading a book, particularly fiction, is that it captures you in a way that nothing else does, and stays with you for a long time.
Sometimes a lifetime.
What makes a book so powerful is the way it is able to communicate much more than a story. It communicates a kind of relationship between the author and the reader.
The reaon it is able to do this, I think, is that the book is a vehicle for transmitting a kind of power (here I search for the right word, but perhaps there is not one in the English language).
If you go to a museum and you walk through the galleries, you will sometimes pass a painting that captures you in a way that is different from the others. This is particularly true I find with modern art. Every once in a while there is something that communicates more than just the ‘picture’. Often times a Rothko will do this for me.
The painting is acting as a kind of transmitter of an emotion that the painter was trying to capture and communicate. Rothko is dead, but his painting still radiates the moment of that capture and the captured emotion.
Novels do this in an even better and more powerful way.
When i finish a good novel, I don’t think, ‘good story’. My mind is bent in a way, warped by the experience, and changed. That is no bad thing.
Roth often does this to me, the way Rothko does.
What makes Roth’s books so powerful (at least to me) is that he is, in a way, opening himself and telling his own story through the novel and through the characters he writes about. You can’t read Roth as a one-off. All of his work stands together as a body and tells an overall story (much as Rothko’s paintings do). It’s a process, a maturation. There is an arc of story to both their life’s work.
In the case of Rothko, you can also see his slow slip into depression as the works get progressively darker. His life ended in suicide. I am sure Roth is not headed in the same direction.
Roth grew up in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey in the late 1940s. Many of his books are based in and around Weequahic.
Roth’s first book, Goodbye Columbus was made into a movie of the same name, but it was his third book, Portnoy’s Complaint that brought him fame and great success. I read it years ago and it captured me. Yet it was his later books, all from Newark, that really wove themselves into the way I thought and saw the world. Particularly the Nathan Zuckerman trilogy and American Pastoral.
Even now, with Nemesis (and Roth has been writing since 1959) the power of the narrative only grows stronger and the weave ever deeper and more complex.
Nemesis is about the polio epidemic that ravaged the USÂ in the late 1940s.
The protagonist, Bucky Cantor, is a 23-year old phys ed teacher who has been rejected by the draft because of his bad eyesight. Instead, he becomes a playground director as polio begins to ravage his small community of Weequahic, New Jersey.
Bucky retreats to Indian Hill, a summer camp, to be the waterfront director.
Indian Hill is a place where Jewish children from Newark are sent to spend the summer in a quasi- American Indian setting. The cabins are all named Mohawk or Iroquois. There is an Indian (quasi Indian) ceremony around the campfire for the boys, all of which Roth explains in great detail.
When I was a kid I went to Camp Seneca, which was just like Indian Hill in the novel. So much so that I also lived in cabins named Mohawk and Iroquois.
In Roth’s novel, the camp director, a Mr. Bucksbaum, is taken by an 1923 book instructing camp directors to embrace Indian lore.
Bucksbaum takes it to heart.
I suppose so did Bob Howard, who founded Camp Seneca, and also used to dress as The Great Chief, repleat with Peace Pipe. I think Bob Howard was also a public school phys ed teacher during the rest of the year.
in the novel, Big Chief Bucksbaum calls upon the Great Indian Spirit Wacanda to lead the camp.
At this paragraph I almost choked.
As a child I clearly remember Bob Howard, dressed in full Indian regalia, walking before the campfire and raising his arms, his feathered head dress, his cocoa powdered make up – raising his arms and chanting “Wacanda Day Doo”.
How some things stay in your memory.
Wacanda Day Doo.
Philip Roth.
We had a counselor, Wolfie, with a withered right arm – withered from childhood polio.
You see how the novel and my own life, which is totally unkown to Roth, intertwine.
Powerful stuff.
Now, what does this have to do with video.
What makes Roth’s novels so powerful; what makes all novels so powerful (and one day we’ll talk about The Great Santini and my father who went to The Citadel), is that they speak directly to the reader. And, when the author is good, they are not just one book, but a continuing body of work.
In the world of video we don’t have ‘authorship’, at least not yet.
We don’t have it because up until now, it was so expensive to create a video or TV show that it had to be done by a corporation and by an army of workers – editors, cameramen, producers, etc…
All that has changed.
Yesterday.
Now it is possible for anyone to pick up a video camera and start to tell a story.
Their own story.
In whatever way they choose.
We are waiting for the Philip Roth of video to appear.
And I am sure she or he is there.
Somewhere.
