Diary of a Bad Year: Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which

I write down ideas, sometimes as titles, as they occur to me in preparation for this blog. What on earth was I thinking when I wrote “Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which?” Try as I might, I can’t remember. So I’m going to wing it and start writing free association about Philip and maybe my original thought will find its way to my frontal lobe and I’ll end up writing what I originally intended.

A few years ago Mark and I started a Philip Roth book club with Mark Rudd. He lives in Albuquerque and we live two hours away in El Valle so we conducted our conversation via e-mail. I can’t really remember (this is a recurring theme, obviously) what precipitated the formation of our club, but it didn’t last very long. We encouraged Mark R. to read the Zuckerman trilogy, Roth’s alter ego at his funniest, but before Mark got there he was turned off by the newer novels, like Exit Ghost, and then didn’t much like Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson either, so our club fizzled. Mark and I had trouble, too, with Exit Ghost, but I thought Roth’s struggle about telling the “truth” in one's fiction, which no longer has much meaning in the postmodern world of relativity, salvaged the book. He apologizes for railing about cell phones and about his audacity to still feel there is a right and wrong way to be in the world, which is certainly something I sympathize with. I guess his alter egos, who constantly struggle to get through all the bullshit to what is “real” (and the way he becomes the women who call him on his own bullshit), allow him to make the attempt while acknowledging that we all come to our analyses with our neuroses, prejudices, and unalterable histories. I went on and reread not only the Zuckerman books but Goodbye Columbus, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and Portnoy’s Complaint, but the Monkey bit was too much for me. Roth’s obsession with young women is his recurring theme; in the novels when he’s preadolescent or a young man himself, or even a middle-aged man who also appreciates middle-aged women, it’s OK. But when he’s an old man, as in the later novels, it becomes, as Mark R. put it, “embarrassing.”

But wait. I just made the obvious connection with death and Philip, whose mortality is staring him in the face (although I still don’t know why I said “I can’t decide which” in the title of my blog). He must be in his late seventies now (I just googled him; he’s 78). Olympia Dukakis goes around asking all the men she meets in Moonstuck for an explanation of why her husband, Vincent Gardenia, chases women. Finally she gets her answer from Danny Aiello: “Because he fears death?”

Mark died at 62, much too young, at least for those of us in the western world whose life expectancy is somewhere in the late 70s or 80s, to have to face one’s mortality. I now think a lot about my own. Even though I’m on life’s downhill side, the end of that slide wouldn’t be so much on my mind if it weren’t for Mark’s death and knowing so many others my age who also have cancer and other illnesses. As James Woods points out in his New Yorker article “Is That All There Is?”, even those who believe in immortality aren’t immune to fear and dread of death. He quotes Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher: “If your life is directed toward nurturing others who need your protection and guidance, and if, unluckily, you die before they are ready to cope without you, the fact that you will be restored—and maybe restored to them in some entirely different state—is immaterial. Your project, on which you have centered your existence, has still been compromised by premature death.” I don’t think I’m particularly fearful, but I dread leaving my kids behind.

If Mark had lived we would still be publishing La Jicarita News, working on books, traveling, gardening, cutting firewood, pretty much everything we’ve always done, but my life has changed irrevocably. While I don’t go around chasing young men, I’m less attached to my work and what my contribution to society has been. I feel that maybe I should be doing some things I haven’t been doing seeing as how I, too, could be gone tomorrow. I’m not sure what those things are, but I’m thinking about it.