In the second half of the 1990s, when he was in the second half of his seventh decade of life, Philip Roth published three novels, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, that are sometimes referred to as "the American trilogy." Each was widely acclaimed. American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize, I Married a Communist was shortlisted for the IMPAC Award, and The Human Stain received the PEN/Faulkner Award. All three are on a big canvas, of hefty length, and address themselves to large issues in American life, such as domestic terrorism and identity politics. Since they were composed by a man who presumably had commenced receiving social security payments, the novels were often attributed to a late-life cataract of creativity. Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, had won the National Book Award in 1960, so there is a 40-year span between it and The Human Stain.
I have for the past few weeks been sunk in the quartet of novels that Roth wrote after he finished the American trilogy. They are Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis--a tetralogy handsomely collected in a Library of America volume under the title Nemeses. I've read American Pastoral and The Human Stain, and for whatever reason they do not affect me like these four even later novels, written when Roth was well into his 70s. In the Library of America volume, the four works come in at 446 pages. I can't say much about Nemesis, which I'm only around twenty pages into, but in two of the other three (Everyman and The Humbling) the survey of American society is replaced by the crabbed ruminations of a near septuagenarian who faces declining health and a gray tedium of days that are leading, he knows, toward extinction. The other two are death-infused as well, Indignation being set against the backdrop of the Korean War while Nemesis concerns a polio epidemic in Newark, New Jersey. The protagonists are in a state of quiet desperation. The consolations of religion are tartly dismissed, and, in the books with the older protagonists, the subject of suicide arises. I said I was "sunk" in the books, not "happily sunk." In The Humbling, the central character is an aging actor who suddenly can't act anymore, and, being very familiar with the world's dramatic literature, he calls to mind all the characters he knows who commit suicide: "Hedda in Hedda Gabler, Julie in Miss Julie, Phaedra in Hippolytus, Jocasta in Oedipus the King, almost everyone in Antigone, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Joe Keller in All My Sons, Don Parritt in The Iceman Cometh, Simon Stimson in Our Town, Ophelia in Hamlet, Othello in Othello, Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar, Goneril in King Lear, Antony, Cleopatra, Enobarbus, and Charmian in Antony and Cleopatra, the grandfather in Awake and Sing!, Ivanov in Ivanov, Konstantin in The Seagull." And these are only the plays in which Roth's protagonist has acted. He adds a few more that he knows about--"Deirdre in Deirdre of the Sorrows, Hedvig in The Wild Duck, Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, Christine and Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra, both Romeo and Juliet, Sophocles' Ajax." The conclusion of it is:
He should set himself the task of rereading these plays. Yes, everything gruesome must be squarely faced. Nobody should be able to say that he didn't think it through.
I guess I'm more of a novel reader and so was impressed by the body count of suicides in these plays. I'm surveying the novels I know and Anna Karenina is the only suicide I can think of. No, Hurstwood kills himself in Sister Carrie. Oh, and Simon Axler in Philip Roth's The Humbling, and a widow who takes a painting class from the protagonist of Philip Roth's Everyman. It's like he's trying to catch his genre up.
UPDATE: Yikes. When I clicked over to Facebook to post this, I saw the following "trending headline": "Philip Roth, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and literary icon, dies at 85."
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