Review of The Constant Gardener now available here. Capsule review: Good, but could have been even better.

As someone obliged to regard the artistic endeavours of my (oh so advanced) three-and-a-half year-old daughter with the frowning awe of a latter-day Clement Greenberg, I found this odd project weirdly compelling.

Link via Boing Boing

More substantial posts on the way, I hope, including a very belated critique of what I consider to be some very problematic facets of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (which I've just got around to finishing) and Michel Houellebecq's latest, which so underwhelmed me that I was uncharacteristically willing to loan it to a friend going on holiday, despite the fact I had reached only about page 160 (that's around the point where H's narrator begins providing resolutely unerotic descriptions of receiving oral sex on demand from a complaisant lover 20 years his junior (perhaps it's the fly-leaf photograph of a cadaverous-looking Houellebecq, glanced while turning the pages, that caused the sexual exploits of Daniel 1--a thinly disguised proxy for the author--to make me feel a tad queasy. In this reader's mind's eye there was an unwelcome vision of the apparently somnolent Frenchman (once described as bearing a passing resemblance to Arthur Scargill) engaged in prolonged sessions of pornography-perfect sex. Such a criticism might seem crudely ad hominem, but in my defense I'd claim that Houellebecq in this apparently highly autobiographical novel readily invites such mockery. The voice of blackly comic despair from the earlier books has become, through familiarity and success, closer to the opinionated whine of the bored and pampered. Houellebecq, holed up, like his narrator, in his luxurious Spanish beachside villa, brings to mind a line from a writer with whom he has much in common, Philip Larkin: "The shit in the shuttered chateau."

On the subject of Larkin, his final (?) published poem, Aubade, says more about the terror of death in 50 lines, in fact, is simply more terrifying, than the 160 pages I've read of The Possibility of an Island.)

But then again, maybe I'll change my mind when I actually finish the book. I could do an about-turn and declare it a "work for our times." In any case, I'm rambling for far longer than I planned. Plus I have to tackle Roth and his vision of his fellow Americans in jackboots first.

OK, first off, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an entertaining work, its “counterfactual” premise evoking for me those yellow-jacketed Gollancz sci-fi novels that I borrowed from the local library before I dutifully moved on “proper” literature. In fact, the alternative history that Roth limns in this novel—-that Charles Lindbergh’s successful Republican candidacy for the American presidency ushers in a pro-Nazi administration—-seems like a more restrained version of a book by another Philip, The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, which envisions a United States sliced up by the victorious Axis powers (I liked Dick’s vision of the Nazis' priorities: by the early 1960s there are men on Mars but TV has yet to get off the ground).

But whereas sci-fi employs dystopias as entertainments, we expect that Roth, as a serious novelist, has appropriately (more) serious aims. We expect a message above and beyond those bromides peddled by genre fiction, which usually boil down to being “totalitarian regimes aren’t very pleasant.” Roth seems to want refine the slightly more sophisticated warning delivered by 1935’s It Can’t Happen Here (the novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis that depicted a fascist regime in the US) by suggesting that not only are Americans not immune from the risks of fascism, but that the country’s inherent anti-Semitism needed only a convincing demagogue to ignite and foment pogroms across the mid-West.

This is where my problems with the novel begin. First, whereas Lewis’s novel had a clear political purpose—-to awake an isolationist nation to the threat growing in Nazi Germany—-the extra-literary reasons that could explain why Roth would feel it necessary to depict working-class Americans as itching to become Cossacks seem to be lacking. There has been some vague talk that has attempted to find a correlation between Lindberg—-vain of his plain talking demeanour and fond of taking to the air (literally) whenever troubles arise-—with the current incumbent of the White House, who likewise appears to be airborne when, or rather soon after, major crises arise. But such veiled parallels seem weak, and such is Roth’s skill with evocative detail that any attempt to impose the situation at the start of the 21st century on this dense work of supposition is likely to be a stretch.

Indeed, such is Roth’s narrative talent that his docu-drama approach would almost fool anyone with a passing knowledge of the history (or rather pre-history) of the era. However, a second look should expose gaps. For example: While nobody could persuasively argue that the American character is intrinsically more democratic than the German or Italian, it is equally asinine to present a scenario, based on the facts as they stood at that time, in which all it takes to push the U.S. into a pro-Nazi state is the intervention of a famous aviator. The United States, unlike Germany, emerged victorious from the war, did not suffer the (perceived) humiliation at Versailles, or the subsequent struggles between extreme right- and left-wing elements that paved the way for a man who promised unity and order. In short, the United States at the start of the 1940s lacked the turmoil that fascism requires, and to present the lurch into Nazism as the product of the fortuitous arrival of Lindbergh at the Republican Party Convention tests the realist novel’s (even a counterfactual one) contract with the reader that even fictional events should be accommodated by actual human psychology, whether it be individual or mass.

Moreover, the flip side of Roth’s demonization of Lindbergh as the American Hitler is the book’s somewhat inexplicable deification of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who is supposed to miss out on his unprecedented third term due to a Republican landslide. As Roth must know, Roosevelt had imbued the casual anti-Jewish sentiments of his WASP aristocratic background. This manifested itself most acutely through his refusal to order, or rather his complete unwillingness to discuss, the bombing of the concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz. The callous turning away of would-be Jewish refugees from the U.S. under the auspices of the War Refugee Board is another example of an Administration not exactly characterized by philosemitism. (More on the subject here.) Faced with such facts, one wonders if the Roosevelt depicted in The Plot Against America has not been lightly whitewashed to make him stand out all the better against the banality of evil represented by Lindbergh? This again raises the question of what the responsibilities are of the novelist who decides to insert his fictional world into the realm of facts.

So, if the book lacks a clear didactic purpose and is grounded in a problematic historical perspective, this is troubling, because any book that draws on the suffering of minorities during the Second World War is open to accusations of taking a shortcut to profundity over mass graves. But for a work with an agenda no wider than illustrating the author's individual and idiosyncratic perspective on the Jewish experience in the United States, nodding in the direction of the Holocaust starts to take the reader into the territory occupied by Sylvia Plath when she is talking about "chuffing" off to Dachau in the poem "Daddy."

In my next post, I'm going to talk a bit more about this: how by focusing on fabricated terrors, the novel elides the true horrors and injustices that were unfolding during the book’s timespan, but, alas, in the real world.

In the alternative reality presented in The Plot Against America, the relocation of America’s Jewish population—including the narrator’s family—under the Homestead 42 scheme is seen one of the final steps in cementing the Lindbergh Administration’s totalitarian tendencies. But this fictional act of state coercion pales in comparison with the real Executive Order 9066, which Roosevelt signed in February 1942 to order the incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Two-thirds of those held in camps were U.S. citizens and all inmates over 17 were asked “loyalty questions,” interrogations that outraged the Nisei (U.S.-born Japanese Americans). The real suffering of acknowledged innocent American citizens has largely been overlooked by U.S. popular culture (the only film I can think of that addresses the subject, albeit tangentially, is the 1955 classic, Bad Day at Black Rock) because those who were the victims of the policy shared the same skin color as the official enemy.

In the light of the neglected reality, what is one to make of Roth’s “lifting” of actual state policies to forward his fictional scenario? The novelist, of course, owes nothing to the polity and is free to burgle reality to construct a subjective vision. But one wonders what Japanese-American readers (the ones Roth might still attract after the gleeful presentation of anti-Japanese stereotypes in Sabbath’s Theater) make of these unacknowledged parallels?

Whether Roth consciously or unconsciously modeled the experiences of his characters after those endured by other Americans remains open to question, but it is unarguable that the elephant-in-the-room in this book is the Holocaust, the real extirpation of millions of Jews. Unsurprisingly, the Final Solution is not directly addressed by any of the characters in the novel—if it were, I suspect that Roth’s hysterical soufflé would collapse in an instant. Despite Roth’s search for gravitas since the early 1990s, he is essentially a comic novelist, whose identity is inexorably linked to optimistic, affluent, post-war America. The Plot Against America reflects this identity in its family-based histrionics, the faint echoes of Portnoy in the narrator, and upbeat conclusion. To juxtapose these frothy elements with the Nazi genocide would be like holding a photograph of Disney’s Cinderella’s Castle against a picture of the gates of Auschwitz.

If appropriating the Holocaust, even obliquely, to present what is ultimately a piece of speculative whimsy is such a problematic venture, why did Roth do it? I think it is linked to Roth’s uneasy relationship to his background, mentioned above. It is well-known that Roth has a long-standing interest in East European writing, having edited a collection for Penguin. Speaking of a visit to Prague to honor Kafka, Roth reflected on the encounters he had there with writers:

“They made me very conscious of the difference between the private ludicracy of being a writer in America and the harsh ludicrousness of being a writer in eastern Europe. These men and women were drowning in history. They were working under tremendous pressure and the pressure was new to me - and news to me, too. They were suffering for what I did freely and I felt great affection for them, and allegiance; we were all members of the same guild.”

Is it possible that such an experience led Roth to share George Steiner’s attitude that authoritarian regimes somehow perversely “value” the writer more than affluent democracies such as America’s, which simply ignore them? The spectacle of the oppression of Eastern Bloc writers in the Cold War era caused many writers in the West to bemoan the paltriness of their oppression. Roth, who has made the journey from having characters using a slice of liver as a sex aid to joining the august canon of The Library of America, has recently done a sterling job of showing repression and ideological extremism in America, perhaps in an effort to underline the seriousness of the issues facing a writer living in a fractious democracy.

Recent books have covered the McCarthyite hearings (I Married a Communist), Political Correctness (The Dying Animal), and left-wing terrorism (American Pastoral). But none of these scenarios could plausibly present the narrator (in Roth’s case typically a proxy for the author) as at risk for merely existing. The Eastern European scenario--glorious persecution of the artist--is sadly a non starter. Having the route to this ultimate accolade barred can do strange things to a writer. For example, Harold Pinter ludicrously tried to lay claim to the mantle of hunted dissident when he announced that his circle of well-heeled socialist artists, the 20 June Group, would “meet again and again until they break down the windows and drag us out.”

Although Roth is no stranger to theatrics, he is a cannier and less coarse operator than Pinter. And in The Plot Against America, with its moats of postmodern self-reflexivity and crennelations of anti-anti-Semitism, Roth has found a secure refuge in which to wallow in a warm bath of victimhood. With its final section entitled “Perpetual Fear,” the novel aspires to the unassuageable paranoia of Kafka, who occupies the tallest plinth in Roth’s pantheon. Yet whereas Kafka’s deadpan style (at least in translation) and curiously indifferent narrators heighten the reader’s sense of dread, the bare-knuckle anxiety and worst-case-scenario speculation in the Roth novel appropriately achieves quite the contrary effect.

With apologies to the Harper’s Index, here are some factoids that caught my eye during recent reading, online & offline, presented in the form of figures:

8: Average age, in years, of cars in Germany (Source: “In Germany, a Puzzling Prescription for Economic Health,” New York Times )

40,000,000,: Approximate population of France during the Second World War (Source: A review of Tony Judt’s “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, The New Yorker)

1,500, 6,000: Number of Nazi administrators and German policemen, respectively, who ran and policed France during the German occupation (Source: ibid)

1, 50: Percentage of German population who were Jewish and percentage of Berlin doctors who were Jewish, respectively, at the end of the 19th century (Source: “Are Jews Smarter?," New York Magazine)

301:1: Ratio of American chief executives' compensation to the pay of the average production worker in 2003 (Source: “Too Many Turkeys”, The Economist)

431:1: Ratio of pay in 2004 (Source: ibid)

500,000,000: Estimated reduction, in dollars, of Microsoft’s tax bill achieved by officially selling its products in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa through an Irish-based subsidiary, Round Island One Ltd (Source: Irish unit lets Microsoft cut taxes in U.S., Europe, Wall Street Journal)

30: Address on Herbert Street, Dublin, of the legal domicile of Round Island One Ltd (Source: ibid)

30: Address on Herbert Street, Dublin, of the headquarters of Matheson Ormsby Prentice, a firm of solicitors who offer to assist multinationals “unbundle the traditional value chain and locate appropriate profit generating functions in Ireland." (Source: ibid)