What is Philip Roth doing? Now age 75, this is the third novel he has written in three years. He has written 29 books -- and his pace is accelerating.
He has already won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award (twice), the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the PEN/Faulkner Award (three times), the National Medal of Arts, and the Gold Medal in Fiction (previously awarded to William Faulkner and Saul Bellow). He is the only living American writer whose collected works are being published by the Library of America.
He could be relaxing. Instead, he has picked up the pace.
I think the reason may lie in a theme that underlies his last three books. The books may properly be understood not as separate novels, but as a trilogy. Let’s see if we can draw some connections.
“Indignation” (2008), like “Everyman” (2006) and “Exit Ghost” (2007), is a deceptively simple story. The narrator is the 19-year old son of a kosher butcher in New Jersey, who leaves home to escape the over-protective grasp of his parents and attend college in Ohio. It is 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, which looms ominously in the background. (An interesting video interview with Roth about the book is here).
The narrator describes himself as an ardent atheist, and he is indignant at – among other things – the religious requirements of the Midwest college. He lectures the Dean in his own office, using the words of Bertrand Russell’s famous polemic “Why I am Not a Christian.” He hires a kind of reverse Shabbes goy to attend the mandatory chapel services, with consequences that prove disastrous.
The book has moments of classic Rothian humor and sexual escapades that cannot be described in a family blog. But it is evident, 50 pages into the novel, that there is something serious lurking. The narrator tells us that he is dead -- and has been dead “for I don’t know how long.” It feels, he says, like a million years. This is obviously a first-person story that is going to end with the narrator’s death, but he is not dead, not exactly.
That reminds one of “Everyman,” which was a story that began with the lead character’s funeral and then circled back through his life for the rest of the book, ultimately ending with a two-sentence description of his death -- a literary device that suggested that death was of less importance than one might have assumed at the beginning of the novel.
The lead character of “Everyman” (like the narrator in “Indignation”) explicitly informed the reader that he has no belief in an afterlife. But the key to understanding “Everyman” is the “dry bones” vision of Ezekiel 37, to which there is an unmistakable allusion in the climactic last few pages of the novel. Just before the character’s death, he visits the cemetery where the bones of his dead parents lie, and Roth describes what happens in a paragraph that uses the word “bones” ten times:
The were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation . . . . For the next hour and a half, those bones were the thing that mattered most. . . . Once he was with those bones he could not leave them, couldn’t not talk to them, couldn’t but listen to them when they spoke. Between him and those bones there was a great deal going on, far more than now transpired between him and those still clad in their flesh. The flesh melts away but the bones endure. The bones were the only solace there was to one who put no stock in an afterlife and knew without a doubt that God was a fiction and this was the only life he’d have. . . . This was what was true, this intensity of connection with those bones.
The conversation the character has with the bones of his parents is the most touching scene in the novel. The character says aloud to them, “I’m seventy one. Your boy is seventy-one.” And the bones answer. His mother says, “Good. You lived” and his father says, “Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.” It is the message of the novel.
In “Exit Ghost,” a story of an old writer about to exit the stage, Roth uses as his inscription for the book two lines from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Find Meat on Bones” – a poem whose first line is “Find meat on bones that soon have none.”
The last two lines of the poem -- which form Roth’s inscription -- are “Before death takes you/O take back this” -- an injunction that needs to be read in the context of the concluding stanza of the poem (with emphasis added):
Black night still ministers the moon,
And the sky lays down her laws,
The sea speaks in a kingly voice,
Light and dark are no enemies
But one companion.
War on the spider and the wren!
War on the destiny of man!
Doom on the sun!
Before death takes you,
O take back this.
So we have one novel in which a conversation with dry bones is the climax of the book; a second in which the central message is “find meat on bones” before death takes you, and a third in which the bones themselves are the narrator: the narrator in “Indignation” is already dead, and is speaking from the afterlife.
Here is an excerpt from the passage in “Indignation” in which the narrator describes the “perpetual remembering” that is the essence of the afterlife:
As in life, I know only what is, and in death what is turns out to be what was. You are not just shackled to your life while living it, you continue to be stuck with it after you’re gone. . . . As a nonbeliever, I assumed that the afterlife was without a clock, a body, a brain, a soul, a god – without anything of any shape, form, or substance, decomposition absolute. I did not know that it was not only not without remembering but that remembering would be the everything. . . . It’s not memory that’s obliviated here -- it’s time. . . . here there is nothing to think about but the bygone life. . . . This is surely not the spacious heaven of the religious imagination, where all of us good people are together again, happy as can be because the sword of death is no longer hanging over our heads. . . . And the judgment is endless, though not because some deity judges you, but because your actions are naggingly being judged for all time by yourself.
So both the main character in “Everyman” and the narrator in “Indignation” expressly disavow the existence of an afterlife, but they may be unreliable narrators.
What an interesting theology Roth has created out of their stories. If the dry bones of the dead are still alive, and can instruct us how to live; if the central injunction of our life is to find meat on the bones to fight death (and simultaneously create the content of the life to come); if death can come unexpectedly, at either age 19 or 71, while one is still making plans -- certain conclusions follow: what we do here is more important than we thought; we can in fact create our own heaven; we can make the manna what we want it to be; and -- since we need to fill an eternity -- the effort can never stop. Even 29 books are not enough. You have to create more, since you’ll be re-reading them forever.
The likelihood of such an afterlife, like the probability of Ezekiel’s vision, may be a long shot. But like Pascal’s wager, it may be a wise bet to make.
