Our court shall be a little academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.
You three – Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville –
Have sworn for three years’ term to live with me
My fellow scholars, and to keep those statutes
That are recorded in this schedule here.

The statutes themselves immediately prove tricky, especially a rule that forbids any contact with women for the full three-year term, and against which Berowne heartily argues, for both practical and selfish reasons. But the sense of Navarre’s little academic court being a haven of happy tranquillity does not diminish. Life will slow to a calmer pace, ‘the mind shall banquet’ on intellectual feasts, and philosophy shall replace the ‘baser’ lures of ‘love’ and ‘wealth’ and ‘pomp’. The setting also helps. Navarre has become a sort of pastoral idyll: the word ‘campus’ literally means field, of course, and the action of the play takes place exclusively in the ‘wide fields’ of the King’s great park. It was long before Shakespeare’s time, needless to say, that Horace first referred to the ‘groves of Academe’, but there is something in this depiction of Navarre that seems to foreshadow future instances of the academic genre. In many ways Love’s Labour’s Lost, however impossible it may sound, appears somehow already to have said just about everything there is to say about the campus novel.

The Arcadian campus owes its bucolic associations to more than just etymology (the word ‘academia’ comes from ancient Athens, the site of a sacred olive grove where Plato walked in his retirement). The pastoral reference is apt, because the pastoral regularly demonstrates the impossibility of escaping into the hyperbolic idylls it describes. Pastoral is an openly idealised construct saved from inanition by its covert thirst for realistic detail. That disclosure, that gap, is key to campus novels too. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the dream of the university lasts for about 50 lines before reality starts to thwart it; there is no way the four men can live up to its ideals. (‘O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep – / Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep.’)  The vision of the campus is too perfect to achieve: it is consciously, romantically, unrealistic.

However, some campuses are closer to the King of Navarre’s imagined idyll than others. The anonymous Cambridge college in C P Snow’s The Masters has all the monastic remove that Berowne so feared: there are no women amongst the dons, and the few fellows who are part of the wider community are viewed with suspicion, if not outright contempt. (There are no students in the novel either, except as background noise – ‘the streets trilled with cycle bells as young men rode off to games in the afternoon’ – but it is perhaps one of the defining features of campus novels that they focus on the academics rather than the transients.)  Instead, Snow’s college is a collection of comfortable, mostly middle-aged men, whose lives revolve around the daily rhythms of sherry in the Combination Room and claret at dinner in Hall; theirs is a charmed, cloistered existence, consciously emulating the lives of their predecessors. The Masters is technically one of the earliest campus novels – except that the term ‘campus’ arrives with modern, transatlantic, red-brick associations, alien to Cambridge. It was published in 1951, just a year before Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe and three years before Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, yet it feels for this reason like the product of a much earlier era, somewhat Trollopian in its fundamental respect for the college institution. Or even earlier: ‘A sixteenth-century member of the college, dropped in the first court now, would be instantaneously at home. And we felt it,’ writes Eliot, Snow’s narrator on campus. The university looks not unlike it might have looked in Shakespeare’s imagination.

As the novel opens, the tutors learn that the Master is terminally ill. When he dies, they will have to elect a replacement, preferably from among themselves. The novel consists pretty much entirely of their machinations about whom to choose – two rival factions soon emerge – and an almost never-ending series of small meetings in conclave, the tutors scuttling between each other’s rooms to scheme. Which quickly becomes repetitive. Soon you begin to question also why the Mastership merits this level of attention. The position isn’t even a particularly powerful one, merely prestigious. The endless manoeuvrings are a bore. But to the fellows of the college, whose comfortable lives are typically punctuated with nothing more exciting than a change in the dining hall menu –

‘Ah. How are you getting on, Chrystal?’ he said, looking up for a moment from his plate.
‘Have you had one of these lemon curd tarts?’
‘I have,’ said Chrystal. ‘I congratulate you,’ said Gay promptly.
– the upcoming change of Master constitutes a serious upheaval.

The Masters is richer certainly than it initially appears. The miniature shifts in the course of the election campaign, tipping the balance to and from the preferred candidate, very gradually reveal the terrible depth of his ambition. Quietly, the novel becomes a study in human failing. It exposes the loneliness in that desire for self-promotion, and the vanity of wishing, as the King of Navarre does, for a fame that might live on past death, safely etched on ‘brazen tombs’. It deftly sets apart the differing motivations of the thirteen college tutors, and it offers alongside its main plot a brilliantly sensitive portrayal of a struggle with depression, in the figure of Roy Calvert, the college’s brightest but inwardly troubled young don. (Meanwhile, incidentally, the rival factions in the campaign tend to coalesce around the poles of the Sciences and the Humanities, with the members of each side regularly expressing their suspicion of the other – a precursor perhaps to Snow’s famous 1959 Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures). So it is not that nothing happens in The Masters. But the pace of life in its cloisters is slow; its traditions have stayed unchanged for centuries, and there seems little threat that its tranquillity will be invaded. ‘I had the luck to live intimately among half a dozen different vocations,’ its narrator, Eliot, concludes in his retrospective appendix. ‘Of all those I had the chance to see, the college was the place where men lived the least anxious, the most comforting, the freest lives.’

The campus is, fundamentally, a place of safety, of shelter, of withdrawal. It is not in the world. This is why it is hospitable to comic treatment. No one need ever get hurt. It is a morally lenient topos – its issues are ‘academic’, when that word is used to mean ‘marginal’. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, when Costard the clown is caught ‘consorting’ with Jaquenetta, he should by rights be punished with a year’s imprisonment; the actual sentence he receives is to fast for a week on bran and water. The consequences of one’s actions on the campus are blunted.

In David Lodge’s Changing Places, for example, two academics cross the Atlantic and swap both jobs and wives, but when the two couples reconvene the main issue seems merely to be to work out who should share hotel rooms with whom.

This also explains why job security is such a prevalent theme – in all the campus novels discussed here, the threat of losing a job is always present, and often the actual driver of the plot. In Lucky Jim, Dixon’s fear is that he might not be kept on; in Pnin, the poor professor expects but is cruelly denied tenure; in both The Groves of Academe and The History Man, an academic threatened with being fired devises a wily scheme to protect his position. Even in The Masters the youngest tutor (whose place is not yet ‘permanent’ – the others have jobs for life) is warned that he will lose his fellowship if he does not switch allegiances, though this threat is apparently so monstrous and ‘shameful’ that the other members of that rival side soon put a stop to it. The campus is a sanctuary; the greatest danger is losing one’s place in it.

It is also an intimate arena, sequestered from the public sphere, as David Lodge’s character Philip Swallow explains:

We’re private people, aren’t we, our generation?  We make a clear distinction between private and public life; and the important things, the things that make us happy or unhappy, are private. Love is private. Property is private. Parts are private. […]  Our generation – we subscribe to the old liberal doctrine of the inviolate self. It’s the great tradition of realistic fiction, it’s what novels are all about.

This is true of campus novels, at the least. Some may profess to feel the hand of history on their shoulder – the Second World War looms over both The Masters and Pnin, the threat of McCarthyism underpins The Groves of Academe – but in the main the campus is a place for personal dramas, not historic ones. Changing Places makes this case strongly, not just in Philip Swallow’s conclusion above but in the knowing contrast it lights up between student politics and sexual politics, between outspoken ideologies and intimate flaws. And Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man is so named because it is doing something very similar. Its leading couple are ‘true citizens of the present’, consciously in the vanguard of social change – political activists consequently unaware of the real drama unfolding behind the closed doors of their marriage. The campus novel lives up to Philip Swallow’s summation: ‘the private life in the foreground, history a distant rumble of gunfire, somewhere offstage.’

There is another element common to these novels that highlights the personal as opposed to the historic. Campus time moves at different speeds. There is the rhythm of the institution – slow-moving, revolving, a product of its traditions – and that of the students, who alight only briefly on their way. To the faculty who people these stories, that difference is very clear. This is why few campus novels can resist describing the scenes at the beginning of term: even The Masters, usually so oblivious to the student population, is woken with a jolt by the noise of trunks being piled up in the college gateway and porters’ trolleys scraping across the cobblestones. Partly, of course, this is simply a useful frame – the natural cadence of the academic year can easily be fitted to the shape of a plot. But typically these scenes also highlight those different strands of time, and isolate the academic staff as uniquely placed to see both at once.

For some, like the dons in The Masters, this sense of time is a ‘profound comfort’, and much pleasure is drawn from the thought that little has changed in centuries. For most, though, it seems to signal something sadder. Don DeLillo’s White Noise opens with the procession of students returning for the new term: ‘The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus.’  It’s a fitting image for a novel that explores the fear of death: there is something funereal about the slow crawl of the station wagons and the professor looking on, in his dark glasses and black gown. It is like the increasingly unhappy starts to each term in The History Man (‘Now it is the autumn again… now it is the winter again…’), which plot the demise of the Kirks’ marriage, even as the academic calendar moves unfazedly on.

The safe, cloistered campus is also vulnerable to the invasion of darker narratives.

Shakespeare knew this, too: just as Love’s Labour’s Lost seems ready to deliver its requisite comic ending, a messenger arrives to announce a death; as Berowne says, ‘the scene begins to cloud’. The herald is a Monsieur Marcadé – who mars the Arcadian setting. The sense of the campus as a sanctuary is still there, but its fragility has been exposed. And the strand appears to get stronger as the campus novel develops – with White Noise, with J M Coetzee’s Disgrace, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, perhaps especially with The History Man. The urge behind most of these campus novels is still fundamentally comic but, more often than not, they appear to share a trait with that greatest of academics, Professor Pnin. They have ‘a shadow behind the heart’.

* * *

The campus novel cleaves naturally to satire. It operates on the fault-line between the ideal and the empiric. It can expose the flaws and failings of a community that is supposed to be clever and sophisticated: as David Lodge has said, in the ‘pastoral campus setting […] social and political behaviour can be amusingly observed in the interaction of characters whose high intellectual pretensions are often let down by their very human frailties.’ As ever, Shakespeare saw this first. ‘To teach a teacher ill beseemeth me,’ the Princess tells the King in Love’s Labour’s Lost. But as A D Nuttall has observed, this disclaimer is ‘the beginning of the educative process she conducts so skilfully’. It is the women who have much to teach the scholarly young men: the ‘educative process’, therefore, is anti-academic. Again and again the men’s much vaunted intellectualism is proved to be hollow:

King        What say you, lords? Why, this was quite forgot.
Berowne    So study evermore is overshot.

Sure enough, campus novels rarely pass on the opportunity to expose the folly of the academic crowd. Some of their characters may merely be slapstick figures, like ‘ideally bald’ Pnin in his ‘sloppy socks’ and ‘flamboyant goon tie’, or Professor Welch in his ridiculous fishing hat in Lucky Jim. None seem to be producing academic work of any significance, if they are working at all (although in this alone Pnin seems to escape without criticism). Howard Kirk in The History Man is just finishing writing a book, but his books are merely provocations, radical posturing, like his wife’s habit of shouting ‘Fuck’ at council meetings. In Changing Places, Philip Swallow has no ‘field’ of expertise, and his only skill is in marking exam papers (‘No one could award a delicate mark like B+/B+?+ with such confident aim, or justify it with such cogency and conviction’). His opposite number, Morris Zapp, is at the other extreme, but equally superfluous: he is at work on a series on Jane Austen, with the absurd ambition of examining the novels from so many critical angles (‘…mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist…’ etc) that when he finishes there will be ‘simply nothing further to say about the novel in question’.  Of course, that project has stalled.

Personal failings accompany the professional ones too: marital infidelities and indecorous power struggles abound. The campus community tends to make space for a host of absurd ancillary characters. Faculty meetings are a common stage for farce:

The tea-ladies come in to remove the cups. Trading on success, the student representatives propose that membership of the department meeting be further expanded, to include representation from the tea-ladies. […]  The meeting passes a recommendation urging Senate to change regulations in order to permit tea-ladies to serve on department meetings. The resolution and the preceding one are both ruled out of order from the chair, on the ground that neither refers to any item on the agenda of the meeting. A resolution that items not on the agenda of the meeting be allowed is proposed, but is ruled out of order on the grounds that it is not on the agenda of the meeting.

This absurd Catch-22 example, from The History Man, is extreme, but then that is the point: the campus is as far removed from reality as Howard Kirk. The History Man himself watches the proceedings of everyday life from what looks suspiciously like an ivory tower on his futuristic campus, ‘a still expanding dream in white concrete, glass, and architectural free form’. And with that separation from reality comes not just irrelevance, but also a certain silliness. ‘No truly great question had ever agitated the campus since the original days of the founder,’ writes Mary McCarthy in The Groves of Academe, ‘but the ordinary trivia of college life were here blown up, according to critics, out of all proportion.’

In Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis is more profoundly anti-academic, questioning the worth of an institution that so markedly fails to live up to its own sense of self-importance. The plot is propelled by a device common to many campus novels: Jim Dixon is on probation as a junior member of the faculty, and he needs to know, before it is too late to apply for other jobs, whether he will be kept on for the next academic year. His financial situation is precarious; being ‘let go’ would spell disaster. In common with other campus novels, too, Jim is not a very heroic leading man, but his personal failing, rather more exceptionally, is that he is too meek to flee from or stand up to the system the campus represents. He hates the intellectual pretensions of the place and the absurd middle-class rituals that surround it; most of all, though, he is unconvinced of the value of academic work. Merely recalling the title of an article he has written is enough to depress him deeply:

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallised the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or had begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance.

His response to these feelings, however, is acquiescence. He expresses his discontent by pulling sour faces when nobody is looking, and muttering streams of invective under his breath. It is the same strategy he uses when it comes to Margaret, the neurotic young woman who is the human version of the academic life Jim doesn’t want to lead. Though he has no desire or love for her, he feels that she is his lot: he is resigned to marrying her, just as he is resigned – provided he can hold on to the job – to a career on the campus staff.

This is why Jim’s epiphany, when it finally comes, is consciously anti-intellectual. The woman he has fallen in love with, Christine, is in many senses quite simply much nicer than Margaret. That is the word used. Jim’s sudden understanding – that ‘there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones’ – is a deliberately simplistic formulation, a rebuke to high-culture pretentiousness and to faux sophistication. And in many ways this is true of Amis’s style throughout. Acknowledging his debt to Lucky Jim, David Lodge has written that the style of the novel is ‘educated but classless… a style continually challenged and qualified by its own honesty’. Fundamentally, it is unpretentious, like Jim – which is why when Jim eventually finds his voice, and the words from his head are uttered aloud, the language is unceremonious: ‘“You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation,” he said.’

But Lucky Jim is the exception. For the most part, these novels are affectionate in their criticism; they reveal themselves to be not just academic novels (as the genre is sometimes called) but academics’ novels, born out of the campus itself. Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe is well aware, as we have seen, of the absurdities of college life, the frivolities that seem to agitate the campus. The plot has much in common with the other examples of the genre: an untenured professor seems set to lose his job, so he launches a campaign to keep himself employed, brilliantly exploiting (and thereby exposing) the political hyper-sensitivities of the academic world. Towards the end of the novel, a visiting poet is so appalled by the mess of in-fighting and worthless machinations that he simply runs away:

Within twenty hours, he perceived, they had succeeded in leading him up the garden path into one of their academic mazes, where a man could wander for eternity, meeting himself in mirrors. No, he repeated. Possibly they were all very nice, high-minded, scrupulous people, with only an occupational tendency toward backbiting and a nervous habit of self-correction, always emending, pencilling, erasing; but he did not care to catch the bug, which seemed to be endemic in these ivied haunts.

Tellingly, the poet is a ‘poet of the masses’. The Groves of Academe, on the other hand, reveals itself stylistically to be in league with the academic community it mocks. The text is full of sleeve-tugging literary allusions. One chapter is called ‘A Tygres Heart Wrapt in a Player’s Hyde’, a reference to Robert Greene, who in 1592 described the ‘upstart crow’ Shakespeare with those words (Greene was ironically adapting a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 3). Another is called ‘Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave’ – a reference to Walter Scott’s Marmion. A character who tries valiantly to rescue the leading man is called Alma Fortune – like Shakespeare’s ‘Fortune’s alms’ in both Lear and Othello. Another is a Russian expatriate named Domna Rejnev, a ‘smouldering anachronism’ who misses the old country she has left behind. Drop the final ‘v’, and her name, in Russian, means ‘House on the Rhine’ – and it turns out there is an old American broadside ballad called ‘Little Old House on the Rhine’, whose final lines are ‘Oh! I’d love to return to my old fatherland, / And that little old house on the Rhine.’

The point of which is really to say: it took a fair bit of research to discover those lyrics. It wasn’t unenjoyable, and nor was it irrelevant – after all, the allusion provides a gloss on the character, just as the Walter Scott reference with its unspoken second line (‘…when first we practise to deceive’) alerts us to the fraud behind the leading man’s campaign. But it is clear where Mary McCarthy’s allegiances lie. Like so many of the campus novelists, she may ably poke fun at the academic community, but she remains a complicit part of it. Domna Rejnev ultimately realises how silly their academic intrigues have been:

‘…we are all so concerned with trivialities… I have a new obsession. All the time, these days, I say to myself, “What would Tolstoy think?”’  […] Alma laughed. ‘What would he advise us to do, Domna?’ ‘Leave it alone,’ called Domna. ‘It’s all nonsense, like worrying about balldresses and fans.’

Fair enough. But what an academic argument against academics!  She sounds like Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, making all too clever, all too scholarly, an argument against scholarship. As the king laughs: ‘How well he’s read to reason against reading!’

Changing Places is likewise full of little literary in-jokes, but even more conscious of it; stylistically, it is almost a series of comments on different forms and genres. For instance, Philip Swallow’s wife sends him a book called Let’s Write a Novel:

What a funny little book it is. There’s a whole chapter on how to write an epistolary novel, but surely nobody’s done that since the eighteenth century?
Love from all of us here,
Hilary

This whole section of Lodge’s book is epistolary – elsewhere, he tries his hand at the screenplay, news clippings, and even turns lapel badges in to a new literary medium, ‘something between the classical epigram and the imagist lyric’. Partly this is just for the fun of it, partly because these forms fit in to what increasingly becomes an academic treatise on the state of the novel and the realist tradition. Morris Zapp, who is of course a fictional character, believes that the ‘root of all critical error’ is a ‘naïve confusion of literature with life’. This is the same sort of postmodern wink-and-nudge as we see in Bradbury’s note at the opening of The History Man:

[This book] is a total invention with delusory approximations to historical reality, just as is history itself. Not only does the University of Watermouth, which appears here, bear no relation to the real University of Watermouth (which does not exist) or to any other university; the year 1972, which also appears, bears no relation to the real 1972, which was a fiction anyway; and so on.

And in the final pages of Changing Places, when Philip Swallow argues that the realistic tradition is about private, not public, lives, he goes on to conclude that ‘the novel is dying’; it is an unworthy medium for modern lives, because the younger generation ‘are living a film, not a novel’. As if to make his point, Lodge has by this stage switched to the screenplay form. Philip notes that a film can end at any point, however unexpectedly or inconclusively – and in the novel’s final line, ‘the camera stops, freezing him in mid-gesture.’  But at the same time, his comment that a novel is of course different, is prove to be true. Because, as Jane Austen pointed out in Northanger Abbey, the reader can feel from ‘the tell-tale compression of the pages’ when a novel is about to end. It can’t be unexpected. As David Lodge well knows, we can feel that Changing Places is already on its final page.

So though Lodge has moved to the screenplay, as if to grant that it has superseded prose; though he claims to be avoiding the happy ending that a traditional comic novel would require (we don’t know how the couples will resolve their predicament); the conclusion is nonetheless as ‘light and bright and sparkling’ as Jane Austen’s self-described tales. It is simply that the happiness of the ending is more concerned with books than with this group of characters. The marriages may or may not be salvageable, but the comedy is preserved: the strength of the novel as a form is reaffirmed, and there is much pleasure in the playfulness with which Lodge argues it.One risk with this style of campus fiction is the whiff of elitism that can accompany it, a sense of the exclusivity of academic life, as if its pleasures were reserved only for the initiated. Anybody can laugh at a pompous academic, but you may need to have been taught by one to appreciate the hilarious precision of ‘a delicate mark like B+/B+?+’. In Changing Places, Philip Swallow introduces a parlour game called Humiliation, in which you admit to never having read a well-known book and score points for however many others at the table have read it; a young English professor ends up losing his job after revealing he has never read Hamlet. There are times when campus novels can make you feel like that professor, forced to admit to your own lack of reading.

* * *

But there is a greater risk with this style of fiction, of which Shakespeare was again well aware. Many campus novels, as we have seen, disclose the gap between the idealised university and reality. Shakespeare does this too, of course: the earnest young men are given a much needed dose of the real world by the visiting women. But the writer who associates himself stylistically with the academy is therefore admitting to his own potential inconsequence. This was Shakespeare’s fear: that intellectual brilliance and toying with high style might be meaningless, far removed from reality, and from the things that matter. Hence Berowne’s promise to Rosalind that he will learn to express his love for her in simpler, more meaningful words:

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical; these summer-flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation:
I do forswear them; and I here protest,
By this white glove; – how white the hand, God knows! –
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.

The polarity here is between the affected style and the simple style. (Shakespeare never abjures appropriately elevated style.)  When he immediately slips back into ostentation – Rosalind picks him up on his use of the word ‘sans’ two lines later – Berowne admits that he still has something ‘of the old rage’; ‘Bear with me, I am sick’. The affected style is an affliction. And so Shakespeare (as A D Nuttall observed) ends his play with a pair of simple songs, richly poetic but ‘transparent’, like ‘a window opening to admit cold, fresh air’. ‘When icicles hang by the wall / and Dick the shepherd blows his nail…’  They are a tonic after the verbal fireworks of the play, just as Jim Dixon’s straight talking is an antidote to the empty intellectualism of Professor Welch. (And yet here too Shakespeare deploys cleverness and style. The owl’s cries – ‘tu-whit, tu-who’ – are surely a knowing pun: to wit is to woo, and the very fact that Shakespeare is playing this kind of verbal game in his unfussy final song is a confession of its allure.)

There is one campus novel, however, that, like Love’s Labour’s Lost, both appreciates this danger of style and displays its potential radiance. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin is no stranger to academic in-jokes, knowing quips, and games with narrative voice. In a brilliant introduction to the novel, David Lodge focused on Nabokov’s use of the postmodern, in a way that retrospectively seems predictable from the author of Changing Places – the techniques are very similar. Nabokov peppers his text with sly nudges as to the presence of an interfering narrator, who seems to be a version of Nabokov himself. As Lodge points out, this doesn’t really make sense:

How can the omniscient authorial narrator of Pnin, and the ‘I’ who reports his encounters with Pnin, and the real, historic individual Vladimir Nabokov, be one and the same person? If ‘I’ is a fictional character he cannot claim omniscience (which is a literary convention). If ‘I’ is not a fictional character, then neither is Pnin – Pnin must be as real as Nabokov. But in that case the ‘real Nabokov’ cannot claim omniscient knowledge of him (and indeed Pnin accuses the ‘I’ narrator of telling lies and making up stories about him.)  Nabokov teases us with this insoluble conundrum…

It sounds just like one of the ‘academic mazes’ the poet feared in The Groves of Academe, ‘where a man could wander for eternity, meeting himself in mirrors’. It isn’t logical. The novel exists as ‘reality’, a convincing representation of reality – and Nabokov chooses to confuse the two states, so that the illusion of reality is revealed by the contradiction.

Clearly, Lodge enjoys examining this ‘conundrum’ because it is much like the academic games he plays in Changing Places, with its meta-fictional references to its place in the novelistic tradition. But he fails to see where their paths diverge. In Changing Places, the characters get left behind; in Pnin, the ‘postmodern’ style speaks up for them.

Pnin doesn’t have an easy time. He is an exile from his treasured home country, another untenured lecturer who will shortly lose his job. He has lost two beloved women in his life – one to another man, one to a concentration camp. Most of all, though, and despite his unfailing good humour, he is forced to proceed through a series of humiliations by a narrator who dresses him in ‘flamboyant goon tie’, brilliantly transliterates his mispronunciations, and delights in the foreknowledge of his impending mishaps (‘Now a secret must be imparted. Professor Pnin was on the wrong train.’) Late in the novel, when visiting friends in the country, Pnin is triggered into a chain of sad memories about the death of his first love, Mira. He feels increasingly alone. And this is the scene that greets him:

On the distant crest of the knoll, at the exact spot where Gramineev’s easel had stood a few hours before, two dark figures in profile were silhouetted against the embered sky. They stood there closely, facing each other. One could not make out from the road whether it was the Poroshin girl and her beau, or Nina Bolotov and young Poroshin, or merely an emblematic couple placed with easy art on the last page of Pnin’s fading day.

David Lodge picks up on that final clause, calling it a ‘typical postmodernist move’. It is an admission that the illusion of reality in the novel is just that – an illusion created by artistic choices. For David Lodge, it calls attention to ‘the irreducible gap between even the most eloquent literary language and real human pain’. But there is no gap in Nabokov. Pnin’s victimisation at the hand of his detached narrator is what brings the pathos to the novel, and what makes him the most dearly remembered of all the campus protagonists. The novel is knowingly cruel, effortlessly victimising its hero: Nabokov sets himself up as a version of Jack Cockerell, another professor on campus, who to the great pleasure of his colleagues peddles comic imitations of Pnin. At the same time, it is clear that Nabokov himself, as opposed to Nabokov the ‘narrator’, extends every imaginative sympathy to his protagonist. Pnin is ridiculous and Pnin is cherished. Pnin touches its readers so piercingly because Nabokov resists all sentimental false-accounting. Like Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, Nabokov shows us that the plain, the over-looked, the marginal – people like Fanny Price – live interior lives of great richness.

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis, Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0-141-18259-9
The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury, Picador, ISBN 978-0-330-39031-6
Changing Places, David Lodge, Penguin, ISBN 978-0-140-04656-4
The Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy, Harvest Books, ISBN 978-0-156-02787-8
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov, Everyman’s Library, ISBN 1-85715-272-7
The Masters, C P Snow, House of Stratus, ISBN 1-84232-423-3

Shakespeare The Thinker, A D Nuttall, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-11928-2

In fact, the corpse in Sabbath’s Theatre’s defiled grave, once a plump Yugoslavian woman named Drenka with an apparently inexhaustible sex life, manages to entice no less than three of her former lovers to visit her tomb in the middle of the night and ejaculate over her plot. But it is our eponymous lead Mickey Sabbath, a libidinous puppeteer, of all things, who makes a habit of these moonlit flirtations with necrophilia. ‘He came on her grave many nights’, Roth delights in telling us, just as some 30 years before the young Alexander Portnoy provided countless examples of his own self-styled depravity, and infamously violated a purple hunk of raw liver – found in his mother’s pantry and then served up, hours later, for the family dinner.

Does this mean that little has changed? Have 30 years of continuous writing offered nothing but a shift in location, a move from kitchen to cemetery?

No. The shift from liver to grave represents everything, in Roth, that has changed.

* * * * *

The Great American Novel. A cliché, a hope. A phrase that has long meant not an example but an ideal, not a history but a promise. Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn – the inevitable beginning of an incantation, a list of literary greatness. And as a list therefore an assurance that subsequent cases are coming. Readers and critics, keenly, capriciously, have devoted themselves to the quest. The Great American Novelist: the staple of literary reviews. And somewhere in the midst of them, Philip Roth has clung to the title.

It helps, perhaps, that Roth produced a prompt many years ago, his own subtly-named The Great American Novel. It helps too that critics like Sean O’Hagan in The Observer will offhandedly credit him with the triumph: ‘While newer talents like Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen have been praised for their attempts to create the Great American Novel for our times, Roth, without fuss or fanfare, has written four of them in the last decade.’

There has been fanfare, though. Roth has now won the Pulitzer, the National Medal of Arts, the Gold Medal in Fiction (the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as the covers of his recent novels are eager to explain). He has twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He will soon become the third living American writer to be published in full by the Library of America. With the backing of this – rather exhaustive – fanfare, the blurb on his most recent offering confidently equates him with William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.

Time itself has helped, of course. Sean O’Hagan above, perhaps unconsciously, dismissed ‘newer talents’ like DeLillo and Franzen, as if age were the prerequisite of greatness. But then much of Roth’s image for all his fawning critics is intimately concerned with longevity. With Bellow ailing, he is, undisputedly, the elder statesman of American literature – established, renowned, prolific, balding. And it is the very decades at his keyboard, the long italicised lists headed ‘By the same author’ in the opening pages of his books, that have apparently earned him the acclaim. Somewhere, somehow, Philip Roth came to the stage where Blake Morrison could end a review with the dumbfounded, rhetorical entreaty – ‘Isn’t it time they gave him the Nobel?’

* * * * *

What is the difference between a liver and a grave? The clue is Roth’s treatment, his motives, his tone. Even two miniature extracts, placed side by side, show the impact of Roth’s 30 years.

‘I believe that I have already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast of it, Your Holiness. That – she – it – wasn’t my first piece. My first piece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty – and then had again on the end of a fork at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.

Five months after her death, a damp, warm April night with a full moon canonizing itself above the tree line, effortlessly floating – luminously blessed – toward the throne of God, Sabbath stretched out on the ground that covered her coffin and said, “You filthy, wonderful Drenka cunt! Marry me! Marry me!”‘

The tone is the real distinction between the two passages, of course. Portnoy’s Complaint is uproarious, mischievous, deceptively mature. There is an enchanting mild chutzpah in the false confession, an honest matter-of-factness in the opening line, a charming self-disgust in that brilliant zeugma of the last. Even the frenzied grappling with pronouns – ‘that – she – it’ – is graced with the fretful humour of the whole. This is magnetic writing. Sex with a liver is a joke.

In Sabbath’s Theatre, in the second of the extracts, the prose is charmless. Roth is more concerned with the irreverent juxtaposition of his character’s coarse words and his narrative’s ‘throne of God’. The intimations of necrophilia – aiming at provocation, designed to be offensive – are offensive only in their laboriousness. Roth’s advocates would argue, I suppose, that Sabbath’s nocturnal trysts with a corpse allude to the fearful burden of mortality. Or they would argue that the humour remains, but that it is drier and that I have missed it. But what is there in Roth’s ‘damp, warm April night with a full moon canonizing itself’ to acquit him from the charge of taking himself too seriously? Where is the humour in ‘luminously blessed’? The tone, alas, is no longer ironic. Sex with a grave is no joke.

There is one, laboured, self-indulgent reason why Roth chose to have his character violate a tomb.

What does a grave have that a piece of liver hasn’t? Solemnity. Weightiness. Gravitas.

* * * * *

Philip Roth’s most recent novel, The Plot Against America, has quickly enjoyed the usual success. The New York Times has lavished it with devoted, almost parental attention. Even more cautious reviewers – few enough of those – have been loath to dismiss Roth. The Daily Telegraph, though wary, unsure, nonetheless had the grace to concede: ‘Roth’s lesser works are better than many others’ masterpieces.’

The Plot Against America rewrites American history. It is a fiction in the guise of a history. Charles A Lindbergh, renowned solo airman and probable anti-Semite, famous across the globe for completing the first solo transatlantic flight in May 1927 on the Spirit of St Louis, enters Roth’s fictional world with a surprise bid for the Republican candidacy in the presidential elections of 1940. In real life, Lindbergh wrote of Hitler as ‘a great man’, of the need to guard America against ‘the infiltration of inferior blood’, of his concern that too many Jews in one country ‘create chaos. And we are getting too many’. In Roth, Lindbergh campaigns across America with a strong anti-war message, flies a folksy solo tour of the nation in the iconic Spirit of St Louis, and in November defeats Roosevelt to become the president of the United States. The novel, which flits recurrently to ‘historical’ updates on the political climate, centres on the domestic drama of a family living in Newark, New Jersey – a family of four with the name of Roth, and a narrator in the form of a seven-year-old boy, who grandly introduces himself, a few pages in, with the words – ‘I, Philip, wasn’t yet born…’

This is, then, a fictionalised autobiography, a story with genuine people in its foreground and historical figures looming behind. It is Roth’s personal take on the old motif of ‘What if it happened here?’ The relatively few critics with reservations about The Plot Against America have tended to focus on the immediate plausibility, worried that Roth has failed to make us suspend disbelief and forget that Roosevelt ever won his third term. This – almost the lone criticism – is not a valid qualm. To Roth’s credit, his interest is more in the domestic, in the difficulties of a family strained by the political atmosphere, than in creating the credible origins of that atmosphere. It is hardly important that Lindbergh’s flying tours of America would clearly not be enough to secure a presidential campaign. The focus – at least, Roth’s intended focus – is on the dynamic called family.

There are, however, two rather fundamental flaws in The Plot Against America, lasting blemishes apparently unnoticed by the deluge of eager reviewers. Both spring from Roth’s treatment of history, and the first is chiefly stylistic. Michiko Kakutani, the famously acerbic critic at The New York Times, described the novel as ‘provocative but lumpy’, as if the ‘lumpy’ prose were only a secondary problem, and provocation per se were both positive and redeeming. To my mind, lumpiness is a flaw. In The Plot Against America, the need to combine the two narratives – the one domestic, the other ‘historical’ – seems to have forced Roth’s struggling prose into flatness, a lack of colour, and his monochrome writing suffers from trying to relate too much information with no apparent point and with little apparent charisma. It is as if in his keenness to play the ‘historian’ he has remembered nothing but documentation. Too often his prose simply descends into lists – so that he will spend pages, inexplicably, naming all the important guests at a wedding, and in agonisingly repetitive clauses: ‘To begin with, there were… Representing the city were… Among the distinguished educators attending the wedding were… Present as well were… From the State Assembly there was… From the District Court…’ – and then even, crushingly, ‘Absent…was…’ This is hardly even prose. These are minutes.

The Plot Against America has too great a deal of ‘history’, and too little literature.

There are touches of literature in The Plot Against America, but they are fleeting, ephemeral to the point of elusiveness. At one stage little Philip, whose cousin has lost a leg and is dangerously underweight, attempts to find out how heavy the leg itself might have been, ‘without success’, by weighing his own on the bathroom scale. Elsewhere, a young neighbour – who has just lost his father and whom Philip finds too clingy – prompts this dry reaction: ‘Since his father’s suicide, my aversion to him had grown stronger…’ In neither case is the writing incomparable, but these are moments of genuine conviction, outré but plausible insights from a perceptive author that we are grateful to have had put into words. And Roth’s humour is still there too: not the uproarious, hysterical humour of Portnoy’s Complaint but indeed something altogether drier, quiet and even sometimes poignant. So the Roth family visits Washington, DC, and stands reverentially in front of the Lincoln Memorial: ‘Gravely my father said, “And they shot him, the dirty dogs.”’ Roth adds the ironical inflection that the family awe springs as much from the architecture as from the fate of Lincoln, the man and statesman.

In fact, the Washington episode is the most successful part of the book. It comes early in the novel, with Lindbergh already in the White House but with only a vague threat of active anti-Semitism to tarnish the peaceful air. The burden of that fear is constantly overhead – literally, even, since the President takes a daily ‘little spin along the Potomac’ in one of his fighter planes, and a host of enthusiasts gaze up and and a chorus of cheers is raised at the sight of the great Charles Lindbergh, pilot and president and pal of Adolf Hitler.

But it is only in this episode that The Plot Against America works. And it works because the palpable dread the Roths suffer in Washington arises from a threat and perhaps not a reality, because the instances of genuine hostility need not necessarily mean a national trend. The tension is credible and interesting because the focus is still on the family. It is the family’s fear, and thus the family’s drama. But this brief flirtation with literature lasts no longer than a few days in Washington. Misguidedly, Roth moves away from this cusp of outright anti-Semitism, relinquishes that menacing threshold of persecution and descends, leadenly, into the architecture of persecution itself. The Jews of the north-east are forcibly relocated to Christian strongholds in the mid-west or deep south. Joseph Goebbels is guest of honour at the White House. And ultimately, in an almost farcically rapid, whirlwind of a finale, Lindbergh conveniently disappears from the sky and within a fortnight Roosevelt has been arrested, pogroms have broken out all over America, and even war-battered Churchill pities the nation that is now suffering the beginnings of mass civil war. In the space of five or six pages, it is the Kristallnacht of the Atlantic coast. Suddenly, Roth has rewritten himself as the Anne Frank of Newark, NJ.

The real problem with this conclusion is not the speed, nor the scale, nor the general implausibility of this grossly re-packaged history. It is the crudeness. And it is crudeness in the sense not of vulgarity or offensiveness – though the transplantation of a real human tragedy to the suburban America of Roth’s nostalgia might seem somewhat offensive – but in the sense that it is blunt, laboured, ham-fisted. This endgame, not the inception, is where the critics who took issue with Roth’s plausibility would have been right. The Plot Against America does not have the plot to justify its ends. The frantic climax to the Lindbergh administration is breathlessly dispatched, summarised in diary form (supposedly ‘drawn from’ newsreel footage) so as to remove the need for anything but a continuous stream of events. Roth never manages to reconcile his insistence on providing exhausting, static, even stagnant, ‘historical’ detail with the fact that he is fundamentally unconcerned about the path, the direction of his ‘history’.

The Plot Against America only ever has one objective in mind. Roth wants to pretend that America suffered the persecution of Nazi Europe. He wants to recast Newark as 1930s Berlin.

Roth wouldn’t have written this 30 years ago. In fact, he has effectively admitted so himself. The Ghost Writer, composed in the late 70s, was the first novel to feature Roth’s alter ego, the clone-like Nathan Zuckerman, and it contains the following lines of dialogue. Zuckerman is talking to his mother, who speaks first in this extract.

‘He only meant that what happened to the Jews – ’

‘In Europe – not in Newark! We are not the wretched of Belsen! We were not the victims of that crime!’

‘But we could be – in their places, we would be. Nathan, violence is nothing new to Jews, you know that!’

‘Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed.’

Something of a volte-face, then, has taken place in the interim. Roth seems to have forgotten Zuckerman’s righteous – and right – indignation. Unwittingly, he has anticipated and articulated, decades in advance, the very cry his newest novel ought to raise: ‘In Europe – not in Newark!’ Zuckerman’s exasperated shriek is staggered by the silliness of the idea: the word ‘Newark’ has the tone of an astounded, dismissive sneer. Who would ever try to equate Belsen with New Jersey?

And why does this author now make this the story of a young boy named Philip Roth?

The answer to this last question is the reason why Roth cannot reconcile his verbosity as ‘historian’ with his lack of interest in ‘history’. It is the cause of his novel’s two fundamental flaws. It is the difference between livers and graves. There is a point in The Plot Against America when one of Philip’s teachers suggests he has been suffering from ‘delusions of grandeur’. Roth’s disavowal is swift:

‘Not so. I wasn’t at all like Sandy [his brother], in whom opportunity had quickened the desire to be a boy on the grand scale, riding the crest of history. I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible. I wanted to be an orphan.’

The one feature in these sentences that might be correct is the use of the perfect tense. Because whether or not the young Philip ‘wanted nothing to do with history’, the real Philip, retrospectively, wants everything to do with it. The denial, in other words, may not be ‘deluded’, but it certainly is grand. Even that haughty opening – ‘Not so’ – betrays the ‘grand scale’ on which Roth sees himself. Even that insistent string of pronouns – ‘I…I…I…I…’ – reveals Roth’s focus, his priority. The Plot Against America is an exercise, a vehicle for placing the author in the midst of an illustrious history, and so the tone, register, style, even syntax, are all unfailingly grandiose. ‘I, Philip’ is the subject of the novel. ‘I, Philip’ is its primary concern. For God’s sake, that tripled ‘I wanted’ is almost a Ciceronian tricolon crescendo.

The Plot Against America is not so much a fictionalised autobiography as a glamorised one. Its flaws, whether in style or in story, spring from its being laboured, contrived, moulded clumsily into a history that Roth sees as heroic – into a childhood not of leafy streets and high school football, but of persecution and fear. This, the latter, is supposedly the central emotion of The Plot Against America. ‘Fear’ is its first word. The phrase ‘perpetual fear’ crops up in its opening sentence and titles its closing chapter. But the problem is that this is a sort of glamorised paranoia – unnatural, forced, and fundamentally self-indulgent. It is not realistic. Philip has nightmares that his beloved stamp collection has been covered with the symbols of Nazism, that the name of George Washington has been replaced by the name of Hitler. But Philip is supposed to be seven. Implausibly, the horror of fascism has filtered through to his young mind, because for Roth the paranoia is noble, this terror is grand. As his prose reveals. When Roth trills on his epic crescendo, building towards his laboured climax, he clinches the end of sentence and chapter with the weighty sledgehammer of solemnity.

‘…and across the face of each, across the cliffs, the woods, the rivers, the peaks, the geyser, the gorges, the granite coastline, across the deep blue water and the high waterfalls, across everything in America that was the bluest and the greenest and the whitest and to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika.’

He takes his ‘history’ very seriously in this novel, not because of an interest in history per se, but because the centre of the history is Roth himself. Seriousness is the self-portrait he wishes to paint. Hence the finale to his nightmare. Like a grave, a swastika has gravitas. Like the moon, Roth canonises himself.

* * * * *

There are several recurrent themes in Roth’s recent fiction. There is history – an awareness of the grand scheme of time; a focus on memory, on biography, on the slightly melancholy sensation of dominant nostalgia. There is America – at once a nation and a concept, an identity and a home – a word with the weight of an epic behind it. And there is writing – a consciousness of the task of the author and of his place in the sequence called the literary canon.

History, in Roth, is not only the appropriation and repackaging of an era that explicitly constitutes The Plot Against America. It is also the sheer sense of the past, reminiscence, the gravity of nostalgia. In American Pastoral, for example, the whole novel is approached from this backward-looking perspective, as Zuckerman attempts to piece together the history of his subject: ‘He wants something recorded. That’s why he’s turned to me: to record what might otherwise be forgotten. Omitted and forgotten. What could it be?’ The early chapters of the book centre around the author’s high school reunion, such that the long opening sequence of the novel is a fictional exercise in recollection. And moreover, as Roth has astutely noticed, ‘Everyone’s narcissism is strong at a reunion’.

The Human Stain again enacts, again through Zuckerman, the retrospective approach to the tale, though it also places itself in a sort of contemporary historical scheme, attaching itself to the meanderings of a genuine, known chronology:

‘Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine … in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism – which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security – was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot…’

And even in Sabbath’s Theatre, apparently free from the narrowing precision of a recognisable history, the narrative is often retrospective; the tense is overbearingly the pluperfect. Why the preoccupation with the retrospective? Perhaps a focus on the past is to some extent inevitable in an author well advanced in his career. But Roth’s concern for history seems always intimately connected with some sort of autobiography. The Plot Against America may be the most obvious example, but all the recent novels enact a form of fictionalised memoir – even the narrative of Sabbath’s Theatre cannot resist appropriating the prose and slipping into the first person. As Roth himself has written – and written, of course, rather grandly: ‘I was a biography in perpetual motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.’ History, in Roth, is forever a high school reunion. His narcissism is perpetually strong.

America, the word itself, is everywhere in Roth’s fiction. He is keen to remind us, whatever his guise, that he was ‘an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.’ With its jarring over-emphasis, the clause reads like a microcosm of all Roth’s recent fiction, a constant pounding reiteration that his is an American drama. Because, for Roth, the word means much more than a nation. In his language, it is solemn, vaulting, significant somehow, even with no elaboration beyond its four short syllables. ‘America’, for Roth, has the proportions of an epic, and he seems to think its mere invocation is always enough to rekindle his gravitas: ‘All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore… Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began.’ And so not only is America a sort of deity in Roth, cited to impart to his prose an effortlessly weighty register, it is also closely connected to his own sense of identity, and an identity therefore characterised by this same gravitas. In The Plot Against America, for example, much is made of the fact that the real victims of the plot are ‘American citizens who happened to be Jews’, to emphasise that being Jewish is an identity, but being American is the primary one. Hence the banging insistence of the lines quoted above (the ‘American child of American parents…’). And yet Roth’s identity is never really primarily American – although he rarely stops mentioning it – just as he claims here it is not primarily Jewish. His identity is rather his own sense of self. Why else does Roth ally himself so fervently to ‘American’ – the word he believes has significance? He may have wanted to write a book about being American or being Jewish or being scared. But he has written a book about being Philip Roth.

Roth’s recent fiction always has a writer-figure at its core, for the same reason it tends to delve into history or allude to America. The literary personae at the centre of all Roth’s recent novels are kept at a slight remove from the real writer himself. As with autobiography, as with identity, the gap affords Roth the chance to turn the ‘author’ into a subject. It gives him the opportunity to illustrate himself.

Consciousness of the feat of writing is prevalent in his fiction. This is more than the inevitable natural awareness of the act of writing: in Roth, there is always an active literary persona at his novels’ vocal centre, always, at some slight remove from Roth, a writer-figure controlling the narrative. In The Plot Against America, obviously, the narrator shares the name on the cover of the book, but since it is patently a fiction (the cover feels the need to proclaim it ‘a novel’) this is only a strange version of the real Philip Roth. In American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and I Married A Communist, the narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, who is deliberately crafted to be the almost indistinguishable twin of Roth – the same past, same present, same style – and who yet has a different name and a host of different stories to tell. Even Sabbath’s Theatre, in which the narrative is third-person and the voice propounding it unidentified, has an eponymous main character with an acute awareness of literature and a self-conscious control of his text. Mickey Sabbath speaks regularly in quotation – ‘Uncircumcised dog! Smite him thus!’; he compares all of his lovers to Shakespearean heroines, contrasting Ophelia with Miranda with Rosalind; he tries at times to be something of a critic – ‘V Woolf…an overbred English parody of a borzoi, effortlessly superior, as only the English can be, to all her inferiors, who never took her clothes off in her life’. He even finds, apparently, titillation in literary text: ‘I was reading Conrad. A guy on board had given me the books. I was reading all that stuff and jerking myself off over it. Dostoevsky… Rascal Knockoff.’ Sabbath casts himself – glamorises himself – as Lear: he traipses along the Manhattan grid reciting ‘I am a very foolish fond old man’. Sabbath is often aloof, bombastic, glib – like Roth. One of his lovers despairs, ‘Of course you outsmart me, you outsmart everyone, outtalk every–’ which Sabbath, of course, immediately interrupts. Mickey Sabbath is not quite Roth. But only not quite.

Famously, funnily, in Portnoy’s Complaint, our hero utters a memorable shriek: ‘Doctor, my doctor, what do you say, LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!’ But again, in The Plot Against America, Roth seems to have forgotten the advice of his erstwhile incarnations. His fiction has too little id. It has all been hijacked by ego.

* * * * *

Egotism, needless to say, is not a literary crime. Arrogance to some degree is probably almost inevitable: there is nothing inherently modest in the act of writing books. But the problem with Roth’s ego is that it tarnishes his prose. Story and style are commandeered to paint the gloss onto its author.

‘I, Philip’ has the register of an epic. It is a sort of self-invocation; it seems to preface a soaring address, like ‘I, Caesar’ or ‘I, Zeus’ – or ‘I, Claudius’. This is the weakness of Philip Roth’s writing. It is a hunger to paint his self-portrait with the brushes of seriousness, gravitas, solemnity, sheer magnitude. It is the constant attempt to recast himself within an epic mould.

The consequence of ‘I, Philip’ is a mockery of the sentence. Roth’s efforts to reach the elevation of epic simply force every other clause into a farce of crescendo or climax or length. There are sentences in the recent novels with well over two hundred words between full stops. Most tend to read like the vaulting peroration of a final climax, the emotional close of a novel, perhaps – and yet they are here in every paragraph, pieced heavy-handedly together from a great mass of sub-clauses with a liberal spray of punctuation. They are sentences that suffocate with the volume of their words:

‘”Oh, cookie,” he said, and at just the moment when he had understood that the summer’s mutual, seemingly harmless playacting – the two of them nibbling at an intimacy too enjoyable to swear off and yet not in any way to be taken seriously, to be much concerned with, to be given an excessive significance, something utterly uncarnal that would fade away once the vacation was over and she was in school all day and he had returned to work, nothing that they couldn’t easily find their way back from – just when he had come to understand that the summer romance required some readjusting all around, he lost his vaunted sense of proportion, drew her to him with one arm, and kissed her stammering mouth with the passion that she had been asking him for all month long while knowing only obscurely what she was asking for.’ (American Pastoral)

All of Roth’s recent fiction often sounds like this. Sabbath’s Theatre, ironically, mocks both Woolf and Joyce, but both are writers who can ably tame a long and fluent line (consider the fourth sentence of To The Lighthouse). Roth cannot manage this length. He cannot control the undulation, the breathlessness or the tone, so he simply piles one clause on top of another, performing a sort of exercise of apposition, a game with the limits of punctuation. This is the portrait painted by gravitas. This is Roth’s self-canonisation.

‘The disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s getting smarter – smarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations before – out of each new generation’s breaking away from the parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go to the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals.’

Yet this is a sentence that is easy to write – even for a writer whose understanding of seriousness is that it is equivalent to length, that seriousness is best conveyed through quantity of words, through volume of prose, through bulkiness of text, that it in fact is ideally imparted through the greatest possible number of clauses, clauses simply fumbled together with a multitude of commas and a minimum of grace – and a mention perhaps of America, just name-dropped for good measure – clauses, indeed, hanging onto each other with nothing but lumbering repetition, repetition that catches its reader after each comma and every dash, catches him just as there was hope for his saviour, the full stop – yes, easy to write, for any writer, but always harshly inelegant.

The Great American Novel?

The grating American novel.