Operation Shylock

OPERATION SHYLOCK (Philip Roth) - Two Stars

Jews.

Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews.

Jews?

Jews.

That pretty much sums up the book.

The first Philip Roth novel I read was Portnoy's Complaint, and I absolutely loved it. I loved the neurotic, tortured narrative voice. I loved the rapier wit and bluntly crass and adult language in the book. Completely naive to the autobiographical seasoning that flavors all of Roth's work, I laughed at Portnoy and his travails. I very nearly gave the novel five stars.

Then I moved on to American Pastoral. I had very high hopes, based equally on how much I had loved Portnoy and the fact that the book was in Time's Top 100 list. So I read about Swede Levov, and I read some more about Swede Levov, and I read some more about Swede Levov, and I said oh my god is he ever going to introduce a story in this book and then, after approximately 100 pages of nothing but literary fellatio on the main character, I threw the book across the room and gave it one star.

So it was with some trepidation that I finally moved on to Operation Shylock. Would it be as neurotically hilarious as Portnoy's Complaint? Or would it be as mind-numbingly self-involved as American Pastoral? The answer is a little of both, and neither at the same time. It's as neurotic as Portnoy without being as funny, and it's certainly self-involved, though not quite as much as Pastoral.

There isn't so much of a plot as there is a clothesline upon which to hang wacky hijinx and wacky hijinx. Briefly, the American Jewish author Philip Roth discovers that there is a person in Israel who is impersonating him in the name of Diasporism (which is the concept that the Jewish culture can only be saved by abandoning Israel and reintegrating back into Europe). Hilarity ensues.

Possibly my biggest problem with the book is that Roth provides nearly all the possible answers to every question he asks. At first it is entertaining to watch the looping, rambling logic of the neurotic narrator (Roth) talking himself into one thing and then out of another and then back again. But the trick gets stale fast because it's always the same, and eventually you realize that the story isn't going to progress more than three or four pages without him veering off on some rambling tangent. There are numerous pro-con arguments in the novel, most of them in the form of lengthy soliloquies from Roth or another character and, while it's great to read such a passioned argument from both sides of issue "X", I couldn't help but get the feeling that this was becoming a zero-sum novel. Almost everything said in it is cancelled out at some other point.

Then there are the characters: so many of them extraneous! So many of them simply present to further the plot along without serving real purpose or adding to the story; characters that are road signs instead of people. And the plot arc (or arcs): never lasting very long, and not a one that carries all the way through the story. The final confrontation with the Roth impersonator is over by page 238 (out of 400)! After that: more wacky hijinx, more "this is a fine mess you've gotten us into, Ollie!" But no overwhelming theme, no paramount point other than Jews, Jews, Jews. What it's like to be a Jew, anti-semitism, the barbarism of the Israeli state, etc.

Which is a shame, because Roth does make some good points and provides good insight into the "neurosis of being a Jew" (for lack of a better term) for us gentiles. And at the beginning of the book, when I thought for a moment he was going to take the whole thing seriously, Roth offers up some very powerful passages, like the one below about seeing accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk for the first time at trial.

In the end, the book came across as a rambling, unfocused work, drawn out way too long, with a few good passages stuck on a fairly silly plot.

There he was. There he was. Once upon a time, drove two, three hundred of them into a room barely big enough for fifty, wedged them in every which way, bolted the doors shut, and started up the engine. Pumped out carbon monoxide for half an hour, waited to hear the screams die down, then sent in the live ones to pry out the dead ones and clean up the place for the next big load. "Get that shit out of there," he told them. Back when the transports were really rolling, did this ten, fifteen times a day, sometimes sober, sometimes not, but always with plenty of gusto. Vigorous, healthy boy. Good worker. Never sick. Not even drink slowed him down. Just the opposite. Bludgeoned the bastards with an iron pipe, tore open the pregnant women with his sword, gouged out their eyes, whipped their flesh, drove nails through their ears, once took a drill and bored a hole right in someone's buttocks—felt like it that day, so he did it. Screaming in Ukrainian, shouting in Ukrainian, and when they didn't understand Ukrainian, shot them in the head. What a time! Nothing like it ever again! A mere twenty-two and he owned the place—could do to any of them whatever he wished. To wield a whip and a pistol and a sword and a club, to be young and healthy and strong and drunk and powerful, boundlessly powerful, like a god! Nearly a million of them, a million, and on every one a Jewish face in which he could read the terror. Of him. Of him! Of a peasant boy of twenty-two! In the history of the entire world, had the opportunity ever been given to anyone anywhere to kill so many people all by himself, one by one? What a job! A sensational blowout every day! One continuous party! Blood! Vodka! Women! Death! Power! And the screams! Those unending screams! And all of it work, good, hard work and yet wild, wild, untainted joy—the joy most people only get to dream of, nothing short of ecstasy! A year, year and a half of that is just about enough to satisfy a man forever; after that a man need never complain that life had passed him by...

The Sirens of Titan

THE SIRENS OF TITAN (Kurt Vonnegut) - Four Stars

The brilliance of Vonnegut, to me, was his mastery at writing very, very serious stories using an extremely casual, friendly, conversational narrative voice. It was evident in Slaughterhouse-Five, it was evident in Mother Night, and it's certainly evident in The Sirens of Titan.

Sirens... uses a common Vonnegut hook, in that the novel superficially appears to have a fantastical science-fiction plot. The richest, most depraved man on Earth is offered a trip into deep space with a beautiful woman. What he doesn't know is that his entire future has already been planned out, and he can only follow the path that his been set for him like a rat in a maze.

In reality, the book is a cynical condemnation at the ease with which human beings can be manipulated: by commercialism, the military, and (most importantly in the novel) religion. The book questions the very concept of free will, and poses the idea that maybe the entire purpose of the human race is to fulfill a minor task for a third party (one that is still unknown to humanity). (The influence of Vonnegut's idea can be found, most notably, in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, where the Earth was nothing more than a computer an alien race was using to solve a problem.) In addition, the book points out how readily human beings will sacrifice one another to make a point or achieve a goal.

And of course, Vonnegut wields a sharp, ironic blade. In the middle of a story about manipulation, the religion that gets founded on Earth is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent: a church that claims that God absolutely does not care in the least about the actions of man, and that most of man's efforts are inconsequential. And through this Vonnegut's humanist beliefs are exposed: if mankind weren't so worried about what happens after we die, we could probably be a lot more decent to each other while we're alive.