I love it but what is the message? Is it just a cautionary tale against assimilation for Jews? l also notice that in "The Plot Against America" on of the things done to erase the jews was to have their children live with white rural American families. What's the message for goyish readers?
>>23318351Hmmm, I don’t know about that interpretation, but maybe. In fact, it struck me how surprisingly conservative/reactionary Roth seems in some works, like in this one with the leftist revolutionary chaos of the 60s and 70s being portrayed in a rather bad light. Radical interpretations of feminism emasculating men, and leftist race politics targeting Whites (and by extension I guess sometimes White-passing middle-class and upper-class Jews like Swede Levov, so MAYBE it’s something like a “warning against assimilation” like you say?). I think there are definitely at least some ways in which more conservative/reactionary-tending Jews like Roth have some sympathy for those who feel beleaguered by political correctness and race politics. He also explores some of the excesses of political correctness in The Human Stain, with (mild spoiler) Professor Coleman Silk jokingly wondering aloud whether two students enrolled in his class yet never having showed up yet some way into the semester are “spooks” (ghosts), but with this being misinterpreted as him calling them “spooks” (racial slur for Blacks), even though he didn’t know they were Black students when saying that, yet they are, causing a massive uproar which leads him to resign, and all the rest of campus politics and political correctness in academia explored, etc.. He was also funnily enough regarded as a “self-loathing Jew” for his poking at the values, self-consciousness, and sometimes insularity of middle-class Jewry in books like Portnoy’s Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus, so I found that a funny part of Roth. Wasn’t there even some case of rabbis and some Jewish intellectuals/critics being in an uproar over one of them, I think Portnoy’s Complaint?I think Roth is a cool guy, eh calls out both Jews and Gentiles and doesn’t care about anythinghttps://youtu.be/F_lama_Zwmo?si=T6ndzmdi7lhIUWaw
>>23318351If you read it in the context of the Zuckerman novels that proceed it it seems to me to be largely based around the challenge of telling someone else's stories without having the capacity to fully understand the characters or the significant events of their lives. It's a rejection of a narcissistic endlessly recursive self-analysis that tortured Roth in the 80s (Counterlife, Operation Shylock) even if that means directly confronting the inexplicable lives and values of people who you feel you are entitled to relate to and yet nevertheless fail to. You see these cycles of failures to understand all throughout the novel, set through the eyes of Job-like figure losing everything yet without any faith in God or any cultural identity to appeal to, perhaps most deeply cursed by a failure to understand himself.
