NP Roth essay re his new novel

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 14:56, Richard Romeo wrote:
> 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."

The implication here I think is that, although it was not his intention
to write a key to the 2004 election he won't be surprised if people
apply him that way vis a vis Bush and the Christian Right  (as Kafka was
applied vis a vis the Soviets though he wrote without foreknowledge)

>From what I've seen so far the new novel will revolve around the tension
between two strong ideas. 

1. The Jewish experience in America has been on whole so good.
(Isn't Roth always pretty high on this in his writing)

2. Such a happy outcome of "the relentless unforeseen" is not inevitable
and certainly would not have  been foreseen in light of the European
experience.  "The terror of the unforeseen" is always present in other
words.

(quotes are from last paragraph of the essay as you note below)

> 
> 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
>