Norman Mailer and John Updike having gone to the Great Scriptorium in the Sky, we can play once more the game of who is the greatest living American writer of fiction.
Or, at least, we can enjoy shuffling the deck for the top five, which at this point would have to include Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and probably Toni Morrison, with Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Paul Auster in serious contention. It’s a silly game, but it’s fun.
And, as it happens, we have some evidence to ponder as we argue about the precise rankings. There are new novels by Roth, DeLillo and Auster just out or soon out in paperback (though Roth and Auster already have newer novels in hardcover). None of these books is long, so it’s relatively easy to stack them up, read them through and see if these acknowledged masters are living up to their star billings.
The Humbling (Vintage) is yet another in Roth’s recent series of short novels, a series that I take to have begun with The Dying Animal, a brilliant, coruscating, terrifying piece of work. That title, incidentally, could stand as an overall rubric for these books — Everyman, Indignation, Exit Ghost and, just this month, Nemesis all deal with ageing unto death or, as the blurb for Nemesis cheerfully puts it, the things that destroy us as people.
The Humbling is about a sixty-something actor, allegedly the greatest of his age (think a rational, hard-working Marlon Brando without the fat) who suddenly finds he’s lost his mojo. He’s no longer able to pretend convincingly on stage; he can’t believe in himself as a performer or, in an obvious link, as a person. That there is a sexual twist to this scenario is expected in a Roth book.
Simon Axler, the actor, is soon suicidal. He checks himself into a psychiatric ward, but after a bit he’s out and having to deal once more with the surprises and complexities of living rather than dying. For Roth, though, particularly in these late novellas, living is about dying, so there is no real escape. And, like the God of Job, Roth giveth and he taketh away.
Nowadays, he taketh away more than he giveth.
I found the book thin, and not just in the number of pages. There is too much in Axler’s ‘humbling”, and then his last desperate love affair (with an avowed lesbian), that we have to believe simply because the author insists it is the case. Little is fleshed out or displayed convincingly in terms of character and narrative. We have only the harsh, coiling, unrelenting sentences of the authorial voice to keep us in the story. It doesn’t feel like enough.
There isn’t enough, either, in Auster’s novel, The Invisible (Faber). Interestingly, the book reads like a slenderer version of Roth’s Operation Shylock and The Counterlife, in which key figures are presented in different voices and in contradictory stories. The question is: Who are they really? As readers, like some people within the novels, we are asked to ask: What is the truth of this character?
Auster handles this idea well enough in his portrayal(s) of the mysterious Rudolf Born (he has ‘the slightest hint of a foreign accent” –instant mystery), but he doesn’t go far enough. Certainly Auster doesn’t go the full Roth distance, and this is a rather Rothy novel. Auster has an adept way with metafictional tricks, though none so adept as in his earliest novels; in this later book such tricks are beginning to look somewhat rote.
By the end of such a tale, I think we readers should be wondering at the irreducible complexity of human character, at the impossibility of coming up with a neat summation of any one life and being. Auster’s four-part construction does this, but mostly in theory rather than in practice: it doesn’t feel particularly deeply felt and the contradictions in what we might call the Born identity are pretty schematic.
DeLillo’s Point Omega (Picador; paperback in March 2011) feels schematic, too, except one is unsure what the scheme might be. Since his monumental Underworld (1996), DeLillo’s novels have, like Roth’s Dying Animal series, been short. And they are moving, in the flowering of a tendency long present in DeLillo, towards the essayistic. That is, the characters, in their speech and actions, are working through the philosophical and moral questions they keep asking themselves and others. As such characters converse, and predictably fail to reach any firm conclusion, you have to ask whether DeLillo shouldn’t perhaps simply have written an essay.
But he’s committed to fiction, it appears, and to the ontological unreliability provided by the fictional frame; JM Coetzee does the same in his more recent books. There is some piquance and usefulness in this mode, but if we are reading fiction we still have to evaluate it as fiction, and Point Omega barely works as a novel or novella.
The different planes or panels of its storyline (to do with a filmmaker seeking answers from a retired, hermetic neoconservative ideologue) do not articulate with one another in any satisfying or intriguing way: they just seem arbitrary, accidental. That is ‘realistic”, I suppose, but it makes a hard read. Moreover, DeLillo’s prose is now at something like an omega point itself — it’s almost a private language, like someone muttering obsessively to himself.
As in Nadine Gordimer’s most recent fiction, the connective tissue is gone, leaving only shards of idiolect, cryptic notes towards a novel that was never quite filled out.
I’m a huge fan of DeLillo (‘America’s greatest living writer” — The Observer), but I found Omega Point virtually unreadable. This is a big disappointment, as are the Roth and Auster novels. Are these authors beyond the large, or at least substantial, works that contributed so much to their stellar reputations? Perhaps, despite its Jonathan Franzens and Denis Johnsons, its Corrections and Trees of Smoke, American literature is moving towards an aesthetic of what Samuel Beckett called ‘lessness”. If so, it must gain in sharpness and focus what it lacks in breadth and fullness. It’s that, or we have to readjust the top-five rankings.