“Call It Sleep” was an astonishing projection of the mind of a small boy, David Schearl, growing up in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side. Roth picks up his autobiographical hero (now called Ira Stigman) in 1914, when the family moved to the mixed Irish-Jewish enclave of Harlem, and takes him to 1920 when he is 14 years old. Ira is a youth of many “stigmas”–his anxiously burgeoning sexuality, which leads to a quasi-incestuous episode with his earthy mother, his rejection of his Jewishness amid the tauntings and beatings of the Gentile boys. “He was only a Jew because he had to be a Jew; he hated being a Jew.”
The Roth of “Call It Sleep” was a young writer on fire with the Promethean heat of high modernism –Eliot, Faulkner and especially James Joyce. In his new book, he rejects modernist virtuosity in favor of a nobly old-fashioned realism, studded with inversions (“a frenetic he was”). Roth intersperses his narrative with passages in which we see him in 1985 writing this novel at his word processors kind of literary conscience (he calls it Ecclesias) with whom he converses. In these exchanges–personally revealing but fictionally disruptive–Roth reflects on the travails of Israel, whose cause he adopted after a fling with communism. He also mounts a furious assault on his early master Joyce, whose “hermetic ego” he feels had seduced him into a sterile estheticism. Roth is even harder on his own earlier self as an “arrogant, egotistic…scapegrace,” who was saved by his saintly wife, M (Muriel, who died in 1990).
“Call It Sleep” was a thrilling work of art, an unabashed shot at the sublime. The new book (first of several projected volumes) is an absorbing, often stirring portrait of a vanished culture. But it’s less a fully formed novel than an urgent correction of what Roth sees as his esthetic, ideological and moral errors. He wants to dispose of the passionate, mystical artist he once was. But the passion is irreplaceable. The new book is best read as a poignant chapter in the lifedrama of a unique American writer.
