I found myself a few weeks ago recounting a bit of family history to a friend. I tried to give a sense of the four sisters and one brother (along with estranged mother and father) who arrived in New York in the 1890s from Germany. My grandmother and great aunts and uncle, especially to the eyes of a child, were strange and awkward beings, living in an American world never really far from the Old Country, at least in their reminiscences. (I heard only in whispers and never understood what transpired between their father and mother.) Noting this my friend suggested that I might like Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, a novel published in 1934, forgotten and then resurrected in the sixties when it appeared in paperback. As I found out upon reading but a few pages of the work, it justly deserves the status of “classic.” It is an extraordinary achievement.

I do not think I found much by way of shared experiences, at least as I remember them being retold, between my family and that of Roth’s fictional David Schearl’s, but the book took me to a world strangely foreign and strangely familiar: the consciousness of a hypersensitive child. The childhood eye, the lens that magnifies and distorts, and yet often registers intuitively great truths: this is Roth’s great narrative achievement. His text is modernist in its experimental style, unforgettable in its creation of character, and uncannily accurate in conveying sensory detail. The Noonday Press edition offers an essay by an Israeli scholar who explores one of the means that Roth uses to achieve his ends: the interplay of languages. We find the narrative and dialogue in English, which represents in speech Yiddish, the phonetic transcription of the heavily accented speech of the streets, Yiddish itself, and Hebrew and Aramaic in ritual use.  The interplay can make some passages difficult to comprehend (sounding out the phonetic spellings to understand what the character is saying) yet the immediacy of the speech is such that the print fairly yells at times of great stress.

This is a coming of age novel and takes in the attempts at assimilation to the “Golden Land” by David, his father and mother, and his Aunt Bertha. David’s father is an unforgettably violent and emotional man, suspicious of his wife, resentful of his son, and brutal in his treatment of both. The difficulty between husband and wife is introduced in the very first scene (she fails to recognize her husband at Ellis Island as he waits for her arrival), but the source of that difficulty is revealed gradually, through the increasingly comprehending eyes of David, their son. Aunt Bertha is an unforgettable shrew whose arguments with her brother-in-law reach poetry in their vitriol.

The mother, presumably very beautiful and smothering in her protective concern for David, is his emotional anchor; he clings to her, infuriating his father, and occasions his own fear in his furtive observations of the life that goes on about her – in one case, the attentions of his father’s work mate.

The mysteries of sex seem to be linked to dark cellars and “playing bad” with his neighbor’s daughter, and later with the step daughters of his Aunt Bertha. David’s fears are reflected in the building and on the streets of the Lower East Side. At one stage his gets lost in his wondering and is unable to communicate the name of his street to the solicitous policeman – his Yiddish English is too heavily inflected.  The scenes in the cheder, the Hebrew school that he attends, are aching in their portrayal of academic success and the pressures to exonerate himself.

The final section, multi-voiced, collage-like in construction, built around a central monologue that is stream of consciousness, moves in an almost hallucinatory way to climax and doubtful resolution. The loss of consciousness that ends the novel is the “It” that can be called “sleep” of the title. The waking from that sleep is David’s life to come.

Roth clearly had read his Joyce and other great modernists; he adapted their ideas to a unique rendering of immigrant life. The autobiographical elements are undeniable and piercingly conveyed in the consciousness of the child David. And then there is the sense of New York in the early years of the last century – teeming, chaotic, multi-voiced and intrusive. The stark contrast between the isolation of the boy and the throbbing demands of the city creates a tension that resonates with the rising conflicts of characters.

Somewhere, I think, David and his parents might have crossed paths with those German immigrants, Catholic not Jewish, but similarly culture-shocked, making their way to a new life in “the Golden Land.”

Authors call their writing “work” for a reason, and there aren’t many who worked like Philip Roth—or took it as seriously. Use of the past tense is necessary now that he’s officially announced his retirement. Forget his output for the moment; anyone aware of his daily writing routine—long, solitary hours spent standing at a podium because of a bad back—would probably agree the man deserves a break, and on his own terms.

But then there is that output. I was in high school when my mother, who grew up on the Newark-East Orange border and professed to know people who knew the people Roth was writing about, steered me to Goodbye Columbus and The Ghost Writer (I later picked up Portnoy’s Complaint on my own, along with Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson). A college roommate, generally allergic to literary fiction, came back from English class one afternoon unable to stop talking about “The Conversion of the Jews.” When my wife and I first met, she was reading (and recommending) The Professor of Desire, Letting Go, and When She Was Good; she later had a colleague who insisted on the brilliance of Sabbath’s Theater. All of these would have been enough, but American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, and Everyman were still to come. It seems as if there’s always been something new from Roth to read, and when there wasn’t, there was still plenty to go back to: He wrote 31 novels, novellas, and collections over his career, eight since 2000.

And none of it, he notes in a New York Times interview, came easy.

I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time … I can’t face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can’t do that anymore.

The admission is admirable, and the self-awareness preempts the possibility of a misfire like those that have come from other writers (take your pick) in late-career. “If I write a new book it will probably be a failure,” he has said. Roth mentions baseball, and maybe he knows it’s better to go out like Ted Williams with a homer in your final at-bat than, say, like Willie Mays circling under fly balls in a Mets uniform. He is said to be at peace with the decision, happily learning the intricacies of his iPhone and entrusting the estimable Blake Bailey with his biography.

Work is ever-present in Roth’s fiction, in the portrayals of his protagonists’ families and forbears—shop-keepers and ditch-diggers and glove-makers and radio actors. But so is the work of his writer-narrators, like the oft-appearing Nathan Zuckerman laboring to understand the tragedies and injustices one is doomed to suffer in the short course of a lifetime. “Amateurs look for inspiration,” says his Everyman narrator, quoting the painter Chuck Close. “The rest of us just get up and go to work.” Notwithstanding Alice Munro (81), William Trevor (84) and Nadine Gordimer  (89 today), it’s the kind of work that takes its toll, especially when, as D.G. Myers notes, Roth (79) didn’t simply write, he understood “the moral obligation to write well.”

Unburdening himself of that obligation must come as a relief. According to the Times story, Roth has a Post-It note on his computer reading: “The struggle with writing is over.”

Amazon is persisting with its Election Heat Map, which on November 5 showed Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama 59 percent to 41 percent based on the purchase of “red” books versus “blue” books (and which at last check has the post-election gap “narrowed” to 57-43).

D.G. Myers, in one of his last posts at Commentary (he was recently fired after sixteen months as its literary blogger but is still writing here), dismisses the books on both sides as “perishable,” then offers his own lists of acknowledged non-perishables—the authors of which are all dead, canonically white, and mostly male—from Plato’s Republic, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath on the blue side to Virgil’s Aeneid, More’s Utopia, and Kafka’s The Trial on the red. Why no contemporary writers? Because they’d fall predominantly into the blue category, he says, thanks to “leftist domination of humanities faculties” and the primacy of “self-regard” among those in the writing community. “Anyone who reads very much contemporary literature … knows there are not enough ‘red’ books for a short reading list,” he says, before claiming Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, and Ralph Ellison—all only recently deceased, relatively speaking—for today’s red team, along with Tom Wolfe.

The Daily Beast’s James McGirk also goes in search of serious literary fiction for Republicans. Among the works he proffers are Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Lame Shall Enter First,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy (“Republicans may enjoy Dos Passos as they watch 12 characters careen through history, each of them eventually wanting to settle down”), and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid.

McGirk’s list shares something with Myers’s, namely that most of the writers on it are no longer writing: “With the exception of Ellroy,” he notes, “the authors mentioned are all dead.” Yet rather than roll out shibboleths like “leftist domination” as an explanation for the preponderance of blue books by living authors, McGirk laments the mutation of a once-familiar political party:

The Republican Party is in a moment of crisis, and there is a difference between being conservative and being a member of today’s right wing. The right has been radicalized by a ridiculous ideology that would be outrageous if expressed in literature. By comparison the liberal left is in an elegiac mode and mourning for an America that used to at least try to include everyone. The Democrats are perhaps the true conservatives, the nostalgic ones. In the year 2012, Republican writers are not publishing much literary fiction of note, as the right has traded in sentimentality for fantasy, spirituality for fanaticism.

And empathy for apathy, if not cruelty: Pre-election polling consistently revealed the perception of an empathy gap between parties (one only slightly narrowed by Mitt Romney’s first debate performance), and even some on the right  have in their post-mortems cautiously ventured that characterizing large portions of the electorate as freeloaders or eventual self-deporters  doesn’t help win hearts or minds. (You can see reflections of the schism in how Myers apportions blue- and red-lit traits: Blue is “a literature of ideals with a strong nose for justice [and] a healthy suspicion of inherited position or class,” while red themes include “decline, responsibility… [and] a commitment to institutions.”)

Cultivating empathy, however, could be as easy as actually reading any of the books Myers and McGirk identify. As Kevin Dutton, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, notes:

Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we “mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative,” according to [researchers at Washington University]. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.

Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, “The Dreams of Readers,” “more alert to the inner lives of others.” We become… more empathic.

Old books, new books, it probably doesn’t matter. But if Myers is to be believed, then coming up to speed on contemporary representations of the inner lives of others will require red readers to reach across the literary aisle. The election’s big winner has shown a willingness to do so: In addition to the contemporary blues (Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Robinson’s Gilead) on his Facebook favorites list, Barack Obama includes Moby Dick, which Myers puts firmly in the red column.

Dawn Powell once remarked, “All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.” This quotation has been in my mind lately. Thanks to the presidential election, we’ve been hearing a lot about Ohio over the past few weeks. It has been declared the swing state of all swing states, the bellwether of all bellwethers. If President Obama maintains his slim but consistent lead in the state, then he’ll likely win a second term and secure the continued existence of things like Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Act. If Governor Romney battles back and takes the state, then he has a good shot of beating Obama in the Electoral College and, afterwards, repealing (and replacing, he claims, but with what he won’t quite say) both health care and financial reform. For a few more days, we are all Ohioans. Read the rest of this entry »

No-holds-barred mysticism rarely finds its way to the contemporary American stage. But this fall, the Folger Theatre, in Washington, D.C., is musing on humanity’s thirst for the divine. Through Nov. 25, the Folger is presenting award-winning director Aaron Posner’s production of “The Conference of the Birds,” a dramatization of a 12th-century Persian poem that draws on the tradition of Sufism, a mystical strain in Islam.

Written by Farid Uddi Attar, who was born around 1145 in what is now Iran, “The Conference of the Birds” chronicles the quest of the earth’s bird population to find a mysterious and all-powerful king. The play version, written by the legendary director Peter Brook in collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière, centers on the character of the Hoopoe, a wry visionary who’s given to challenging his avian peers with vivid, unsettling and sometimes funny parables. The Hoopoe urges other feathered folk to join him in his quest to meet the Simorgh, an elusive, transcendent ruler. Many birds are reluctant to set off on the grueling journey, preferring to nurse their earthly vanities, preoccupations and fears. But the Hoopoe knows that the birds will find true fulfillment and peace only in the presence of the Simorgh.

“The Simorgh is hidden behind a veil,” the Hoopoe explains. “When he appears outside the veil, even for an instant, his face is as radiant as the sun….As no one can look him in the face, he made a mirror, so that all can see his reflection.”

“What is this mirror?” the Dove asks.

“It’s your heart,” the Hoopoe answers.

As a stage piece, “Conference of the Birds” dates back to 1971, when Brook, who has been interested in creating theater that transcends cultural boundaries, took a group of improvising actors, and a dedication to Attar’s text, on tour through Saharan Africa. (Brook’s cast at the time included the 26-year-old Helen Mirren, who, according to journalist John Heilpern, the tour’s chronicler, had cast her lot with Brook because “she couldn’t decide whether to be a classical actress or a Hollywood movie star.”)

A later incarnation of “Conference of the Birds” opened at the Avignon Festival in France in 1979. (Six years later, Avignon would see the premiere of Brook’s celebrated nine-hour version of the ancient Indian epic “The Mahabharata.”) Since then, the adaptation of Attar’s poem has not exactly been a staple of the Anglo-American stage.

But Posner, who has won multiple Helen Hayes Awards (the D.C.-area equivalent of the Tony Awards) for his directing in recent years, has long been fascinated by the colorful but enigmatic piece.

“I find it beautiful, provocative and genuinely wise,” he observed last week in a phone interview. “And I have never fully understood it and still don’t,” he adds, suggesting that the play’s inscrutability only adds to its appeal.

He first learned about “Conference of the Birds” during high school, when he developed an obsession with the art and theories of Peter Brook. Posner went on to stage the play at The University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, but that experience didn’t exhaust his enthusiasm for the Hoopoe’s quest.

“This is one of the most collaborative things I’ve ever done,” he says. So, “if I were to do it again next week, in a different place, with different people, it would be a different play.” (Among the collaborators he has assembled for the Folger production is composer-performer Tom Teasley, renowned in D.C. for creating and performing—live—breathtakingly resonant and exotic soundscapes for stage productions.)

While religiously inclined people may be drawn to “Conference of the Birds” as spiritual allegory, Posner believes the piece speaks on a variety of levels.

“All of us are on a journey toward some kind of distant goal—love, success, self-knowledge, enlightenment, or any goal, spiritual, practical or aesthetic,” he points out. So, since “Conference of the Birds” is “a core journey story,” he says, “people can relate to it in a lot of different ways— meaningful ways.”