NP Roth essay re his new novel

[Richard Romeo]

One of the other things that struck me about Roth's essay was that he
distances himself in his novel from explicitly alluding to today's
events through the eyes of the 40s:

" Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman a clef to
the present moment in America. That would be a mistake. I set out to do
exactly what I've done: reconstruct the years 1940-42 as they might have
been if Lindbergh, instead of Roosevelt, had been elected president in
the 1940 election. I am not pretending to be interested in those two
years -- I am interested in those two years. They were turbulent in
America because they were catastrophic in Europe."

Pynchon's historical works for the most part (GR, M&D) are always
commenting on today.

But Roth does mention Bush and cronies at the end of the essay which
find exemplifies some of the spirit that also occurs in Pynchon's
writings:

"And now Aristophanes, who surely must be God, has given us George W.
Bush, a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this
one, and who has merely reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the
writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as
precarious as anyone else's: all the assurances are provisional, even
here in a 200-year-old democracy. We are ambushed, even as free
Americans in a powerful republic armed to the teeth, by the
unpredictability that is history. May I conclude with a quotation from
my book? ''Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we
schoolchildren studied as 'History,' harmless history, where everything
unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The
terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a
disaster into an epic.''"

Rich