Ten Years in the Tub (35 page)

For a brief moment, as I put down
Chronicles
and picked up
The Plot Against America
, neither of them published for longer than a fortnight, I felt like some kind of mythical reader, dutifully plowing through the “new and noteworthy” list. I knew almost enough about what's
au courant
to throw one of those dinner parties that the newspaper columnists in England are always sneering at. They're invariably referred to as “Islington dinner parties” in the English press, because that's where the “liberal intelligentsia”—aka the “chattering classes”—are supposed to live, and where they talk about the new Roth and eat foccacia, which is a type of bread that the “chattering classes” really, really like, apparently. Well, I live in Islington (there's no entrance exam, obviously), and I've never been to a dinner party like that, and this could have been my moment to start a salon. I could have bought that bread and said to people, “Have you read the new Roth?” as they were taking off their coats. And they'd have gone, like, “What the fuck?” if they were my friends, or “Yes, isn't it marvelous?,” if they were people I didn't know. Anyway, it's too late now. The books have been out for ages. It's too late for the dinner party, and it's too late even to impress readers of this column. The Spree took care of that with their pictures. This was the one chance I had to show off, and they ruined it, like they ruin everything.

What's even more galling is that I had something to say about
The Plot Against America
, and that almost never happens. The truest and wisest words ever written about reviewing were spoken by Sarah Vowell in her book
Take the Cannoli
. Asked by a magazine to review a Tom Waits album, she concludes that she “quite likes the ballads,” and writes that down; now all she needs is
another eight-hundred-odd words restating this one blinding aperçu. That's pretty much how I feel about a lot of things I read and hear, so the realization that I actually had a point to make about Roth's novel came as something of a shock to me. You'll have heard my point a million times by now, but tough—I don't have them often enough to just let them float off.

Actually, if I put it this way, my point will have the virtue of novelty and freshness: in my humble and partial opinion, my brother-in-law's alternative-history novel
Fatherland
was more successful as a work of fiction. (You've never heard anyone say that, right? Because even if you've heard someone compare Roth's book to
Fatherland
, they won't have begun the sentence with “My brother-in-law…” My brother could have said it, but I'll bet you any money you like, he hasn't read the Roth. He probably lied about having read
Fatherland
, come to think of it.)
The Plot Against America
is a brilliant, brilliantly-argued, and chilling thesis about America in the twentieth century, but I'm not sure it works as a novel, simply because one is constantly reminded that it is a novel—and not in a fun, postmodern way, but in a strange, slightly distracting way. As you will know,
The Plot Against America
is about what happened to the U.S. after the fascist-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh won the 1940 presidential election, but for large chunks of the book, this is
precisely
what it's about: the alternative history drives the narrative, and as a consequence, you find yourself wondering why we're being told these things. Because if Lindbergh became U.S. president in 1940—and this book asks us to believe that he did, asks us to inhabit a world wherein this was a part of our history—then surely we know it all already? Surely we know about the rampant anti-semitism and the ensuing riots, the heroic role that Mayor LaGuardia played, and Lindbergh's eventual fate? We read on, of course, because we don't know, and we want to know; but it's an uncomfortable compulsion, working as it does against the novel's easy naturalism. When Roth writes, for example, that “the November election hadn't even been close… Lindbergh got 57 percent of the popular vote,” the only thing the sentence is doing is providing us with information we don't have; yet at the same time, we are invited to imagine that we do have it—in which case, why are we being given it again?

In
Fatherland
, my brother-in-law—Harris, as I suppose I should call him
here—takes the view that in an alternative-history novel, he must imagine not only the alternative history, but the historical consciousness of his reader; in other words, the alternative history belongs in the background, and the information we need to understand what has taken place (in
Fatherland
, the Nazis have won WWII) is given out piecemeal, obliquely, while the author gets on with his thriller plot. Roth chooses to place his what-if at the center of his book, and so
The Plot Against America
ends up feeling like an extended essay.

The thing is, I don't even know if I care. Did any of this really spoil my enjoyment of
The Plot Against America
? Answer: no. I could see it, but I didn't feel it. Who wouldn't want to read an extended essay by Philip Roth? It's only on the books pages of newspapers that perceived flaws of this kind inhibit enjoyment, and that's because book reviewers are not allowed to say “I quite like the ballads.”

I now see that just about everything I read was relatively new: Tom Perrotta's absorbing and brave satire
Little Children
, Tony Hendra's mostly lovable
Father Joe… Soldiers of Salamis
is, I think, the first translated novel I've read since I began this column. Is that shameful? I suppose so, but once again, I don't feel it. When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction.

In Scottish poet Don Paterson's clever, funny, and maddeningly addictive new book of epigrams,
The Book of Shadows
, he writes that “nearly all translators of poetry… fail to understand the poem's incarnation in its tongue is
all there is of it
, as a painting is its paint.” I suppose this can't be true for novels, but there is always the sense that you're missing something.
Soldiers of Salamis
is moving and informative and worthwhile and well-translated and blah blah, and on just about every page I felt as though I were listening to a radio that hadn't quite been tuned in properly. You don't need to write in to express your disgust and disappointment. I'm disappointed enough in myself.

The Book of Shadows
, though, came through loud and clear—FM through Linn speakers. Thought for the day: “Anal sex has one serious advantage: there are few cinematic precedents that instruct either party how they should
look
.” Your bathroom needs this book badly.

March 2005

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Case Histories
—Kate Atkinson

     
  
The Crocodile Bird
—Ruth Rendell

     
  
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
—John le Carré

     
  
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
—Nick Flynn

     
  
Help Us to Divorce
—Amos Oz

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
The Man on the Moon
—Simon Bartram

     
  
Every Secret Thing
—Laura Lippman