Book Report

After the novelist Philip Roth died last spring, I told myself it was time to read more Roth.  Either I was wrong, or I picked the wrong book to start with.  Roth’s The Great American Novel is nothing short of a disaster. This isn’t a story about baseball so much as it is an exercise in clever self-indulgence.

 

The novel details the disappearance of professional baseball’s third league, the Patriot League, due to a WWII-era scandal with Communist overtones; maybe I should note here that the book was published in 1973, as the Cold War continued to play out.  The problem with this Novel is that, after 400 pages, you don’t care that the league folded and was erased from public memory.  You might have if Roth had bothered to throw in a sympathetic character or two, but he didn’t.  Everyone from Word Smith (yes, a sports’ columnist, one famous for his powers of alliteration) to one-legged catcher Hothead Ptah—not to be confused with one-armed outfielder Bud Parusha—is portrayed without the least bit of empathy.  And virtually every female character is referred to as a “slit.”  Enough said.

 

If Roth was taking aim at Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, he missed; that book succeeds because Roy Hobbs is truly a flawed hero.  There are no heroes in The Great American Novel, just a bunch of clowns, dopes and caricatures of historic figures; even the midgets come off poorly.  In Novel, Roth shows himself to be a gifted writer with prose that gleams like a new car.  Only who wants to drive anything from the 1970s? 

 

Roth’s story has more the feel of Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., published in 1968.  Where Roth writes about a league gone missing, Coover tells the story about a league and universe at first imaginary, then real, maybe, depending on the state of the protagonist’s mind.  J. Henry Waugh’s sanity hangs by a thread; the richness of his imaginary baseball world makes you care.

With Philip Roth, by the end I couldn't have cared less.