Roth’s Wars

Abstract

Roth’s Wars Stuart S. Miller (bio) James D. Bloom. Roth’s Wars: A Career in Conflict. Lexington, 2022. 173 pp. $95.00 hardback. James d. bloom introduces his new book with a chapter entitled “study War: An Overview.” Here he establishes Roth’s interest in war and compares his writing about the subject with that of other novelists (e.g., Fyodor Dostoevsky, J. D. Salinger). Bloom demonstrates Roth’s preoccupation with war, which goes beyond the battlefield and includes his description of children who make model war planes, adults who become bombers, or soldiers who may or, as in his own case or that of the Swede or Bucky Cantor, may not, experience actual combat. The subtitle to Bloom’s book reveals, however, that he is interested in much more than how Philip Roth writes with World War II, the Holocaust, Korea, and Vietnam in the background. The messiness of war and its consequences translated for Roth into the messiness of life and is expressed in conflicts of all types that imbue Roth’s literary imagination. Here I will attempt to convey a sense of what Bloom characterizes as “conflict” and where he sees its various manifestations emerge in Roth’s writings. Special attention will be given to Bloom’s novel contention that some of Roth’s struggles can be compared to those of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus. Bloom devotes the first half of his book (through chapter 4) to issues most directly related to war in Roth’s works. In Chapter 2, “Rescue, Refuge, Escape,” Bloom mines Roth’s oeuvre for examples of the author’s preoccupation with these themes. For example, The Ghost Writer (1979) has Anne Frank and even Kafka posthumously resurface after the war, when refugees would also find their way to Weequahic and from there flee to the suburbs. In “Eli, the Fanatic” (1959), Hasidim hoping to find refuge in the land of the free by settling in goyish Woodenton reexperience victimization and hatred, this time emanating from their very own people, who did not know war firsthand and are living comfortably among non-Jews. Those who attempt to “rescue” others from the ravages of war or subsequent conflicts include not only the transformed Eli, the Fanatic, but also Herman Roth. In The Plot Against America (2004), Herman attempts to save Seldon and, initially, his mom. Likewise, the Swede, in American Pastoral (1997), searches for his daughter Merry in the hope [End Page 97] of rescuing her from the war she has brought home to her country, her hometown, and her family. Roth seems to be saying that we cannot escape the conflicts surrounding us. In Chapter 3, “Don’t Count the Dead,” Bloom invokes Bob Dylan’s 1963 stinging “With God on Our Side,” which includes the lyric, “For you don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.” Bloom insists that Roth was haunted by death and in a sense his “entire career was an antidote to this heartless reassurance” (65). Soldiers face disaster, casualties mount, and devastation is the result. Paraphrasing Dylan, Bloom sees Roth’s American Trilogy as grappling with the question, “What happens when we realize ‘god [sic] isn’t on our side’ and we finally do stop—and start—to ‘count our dead?’” (67). Bloom perhaps could also have pointed to Dylan’s acerbic, concluding lyric: “If God is on our side, he will end the next war.” Much like early Dylan, Roth spends the post-Kennedy era struggling with patriotism and American exceptionalism. Bloom is especially effective in making this point. In Chapter 4, “Endless War (Pandora Unbound or the Promethean Daughter),” Bloom suggests that American Pastoral and Joan Didion’s Democracy (1984) belong to a yet unnamed subgenre defined by Martin Luther King’s assertion that Vietnam belonged to the “endless wars” that poison America’s soul. The end of the chapter situates Roth among such writers as George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Didion who attempted to answer the question, “Why Write?” In Roth’s instance, Orwell’s “historical impulse” (Bloom 79) might be partially responsible, but ultimately, Bloom asserts, “Roth set out to do battle with ‘the cliché of the...