According to Leonardo da Vinci, the proper distance from which to judge a building aesthetically has to be equal in length to the building's height. A structure that is very high, then, to be properly judged must be seen from quite far off. It this judgment is correct - and it seems to be - then can it apply to the proper judgment of a book? Should such a work be read from close up, or from a perspective that can range over works of the past that may be comparable to it in form?
I raise this question in connection with the recently published novel by Philip Roth, The Counterlife, and I raise it because the comments made about the book in the press so far - in the Sunday and weekday New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine - largely favorable judgments of the work, all seem to me inadequate when not misleading. Rather than looking at this new novel of Roth's from any point in past time, the reviewers looked at it from up close, without, apparently, considering any other way of looking at it. For my part, I shall try to look at the novel both ways, for I find it to be a book of too much quality to be judged without having placed it in the context of past - and comparable - works. Having located it in its own time, I shall try to set it alongside other novels of times past, which is one way of looking at a book from far off.
Review of the Reviews
But first, about the reviews I have read: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in his New York Times (weekday) review, found that he could not decide what actually happens in the novel, and from this he concluded that Philip Roth has very little new to say. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, William Gass declared the novel marvelous, explaining its difficulty as instancing the difficulty contemporary philosophers find in cognitive experience as such: If we look at one thing in one way, we have narrowed our gaze and missed much that is important to what that one thing we are looking at is; on the other hand, if we look at that one thing in different ways and from many angles, we will find finally that we have been looking at different things, and not at one thing as we had thought. Gass thinks that Philip Roth's novel is marvelous because in the multiple versions it gives of a similar set of events, it gives dramatic instance to the difficulties of modern cognitive thought.
Richard Locke, in the Wall Street Journal, views the novel from so up close that he is unable to give even an accurate account of it. (If you do not stand some way back from the façade of Chartres, you may miss the fact that the cathedral has two different spires.) According to Locke, two versions of events are presented in Roth's novel. Now I myself counted three versions, and there may in fact be four. In the first, Henry Zuckerman, a dentist, has a bypass operation, intending to resume sexual relations with his dental assistant, and dies on the operating table. His brother Nathan, a famous novelist, attends the funeral, but does not give the required eulogy. He hears this given by Henry's wife, Carol, who interprets her husband's action as intended to keep his marriage with her sexually alive. Nathan regards her remarks as a piece of "domestic fiction."
So much for version number one. In version number two, Henry has the operation, survives it, and flies to Israel, where he becomes a fanatical Zionist, falling under the influence of one Mordecai Lippman, whose ideas are about as close
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