words | R E V I E W

by Paul McLeary

What writers such as Holocaust survivors Primo Levy and Aharon Appelfeld, and Czech dissidents Ivan Klima (who also survived the Holocaust) and Milan Kundera, have to say on the matter of art in a time of crisis is invaluable. These men are not public officials who have to speak in terms of realpolitik or national consensus; they have no need to soften the edges. Rather, they offer the intimate testimony of those who have lived to tell the tale, using language suffused with hard-won experience.

"Reality, as you know, is always stronger than the human imagination. Not only that, reality can permit itself to be unbelievable, inexplicable, all out of proportion. The created work, to my regret, cannot permit itself all that," the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld — who spent part of his childhood wandering the forests of Ukraine alone after having lost his parents during the Holocaust — told Roth in 1988, speaking to the difficulty of producing art after experiencing the unthinkable.

Many of Roth’s questions are more akin to mini-essays that somehow manage to segue into something that might require a response (some shorter than the questions). What ties all the interviews and essays in this volume together is Roth’s constant return to certain subjects, including Kafka, censorship, the joys and freedoms offered by absurdist literature and the tie between personal freedom and creativity; one gets the impression that Roth is making sure to expose all of his own views while asking, in a roundabout way, the opinion of his subjects.

Fortunately, the responses are often fascinating. For writers such as Klima and Kundera, who had to contend with censorship and repression under a totalitarian regime, the answer to the question of how to create art under tyranny lies in crafting an intensely personal yet political satire of the individual’s place in the state machine. Absurdity (and with it a healthy dose of black humor) as a response to postmodern life is a recurring theme in the book. The writers often refer to Kafka (with Roth leading the witness in some cases) and Kafka’s ability, through the dreamlike intensity of his work, to predict the plight of the individual in an ever more alienating world.

Of Kafka, Klima says: "His fiction keeps insisting that what seems to be unimaginable hallucination and hopeless paradox is precisely what constitutes one’s reality." In some ways, the same could be said for the more interesting, experimental and challenging aspects of some of Roth’s own work.

Given the weighty subject matter in which Roth chooses to clothe his conversations, the book also exposes the Rothian ego in all its self-referential glory. Choosing to remain true to habit and ignoring his feminist critics, eight of the 10 sections of the book concern men. Of the two featuring women — a conversation with Irish writer Edna O’Brien and an exchange with Mary McCarthy — the latter comes off as a grossly self-serving argument for the strengths of Roth’s The Counterlife.

After publication of The Counterlife, Roth sent a copy of the novel to McCarthy, who rightly took issue with certain religious and gender themes in the work. But instead of offering an enlightening exchange between two intellectuals, Roth includes only McCarthy’s initial comments and his retort to them, effectively ending the argument before it picks up any steam and thereby making the piece sound one-sided and somewhat defensive.

Two of the latter sections of the book are essays devoted to major Rothian influences, Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, Roth’s predecessors in the Jewish-American literary canon. Roth’s essay on Malamud is just as much an emotional story about a friend’s struggle with old age as it is a study of Malamud’s work, while the musings on Bellow calls for the writer’s inclusion among the great American novelist-regionalists of the 20th century.

There is one very interesting and subtle twist to the book that deserves special note. Oddly enough, it occurs in the bibliography listed at the beginning of the book. Either Roth himself or his publisher has decided to newly (and rather neatly) assign Roth’s life’s work into five broad categories: “The Zuckerman Books,” “The Roth Books,” “The Kepesh Books,” the rather generic “Other Books’ and “Miscellany” (into which Shop Talk is placed, joining Roth’s last book of criticism, Reading Myself and Others).

One wonders if this book, and the new categorization of Roth’s works, are the product of an aging author’s desire to get his house in order for posterity. A nice little package with his titles neatly categorized, his views and his influences readily available, and a critic’s objections answered, serves as the beginning to a tidy little bookend to a legendary career — the first installation, perhaps, of an extremely self-conscious American writer’s victory lap.

Although still a new book, Shop Talk hasn’t received much press and might end up joining the ranks of one of those side-note treasures, like Henry Miller’s The Time of the Assassins, which, by the sheer force of the author’s will, defines a specific time in literary history. As some contemporary writers are just now beginning to come out of the woodwork to express their take on the new world we live in, Shop Talk can serve as something of a guide to those who will create their works in the weeks, months and years to come.

Related Sites
Here are reviews of Roth’s previous works from The New York Times, as well as articles about and by Roth.

To purchase Shop Talk, click below.