Babe Roth strikes out

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33514, 20 April 1974, Page 10

Babe Roth strikes out

The Great American Novel. By Philip Roth. Jonathan Cape. 382 pp.

Tn the last four years Philip Roth has written novels about Jewish mothers, Richard Nixon, and a man who turns into a giant breast. This tendency to write lightweight, funny novels at the expense of great American institutions is continued in his fourth recent novel, modestly entitled “The Great American Novel," which is about baseball. Bernard Malamud proved that it was possible to write a serious work of art about this sport a few years ago in “The Natural,” and Philip Roth now proves that it is not. “The Great American Novel” seems to have all the initial weight and substance that heralds major fiction. The title, for example, might put some of Roth’s colleagues out of work. The narrator is “Word” Smith, a baseball writer, and he begins the novel with a titanic deluge of verbiage which lasts nearly 50 pages and sports enough, unnecessary alliteration for an unemployed former Vice-President turned to writing. Smith’s basic unit is the alphabet (which he prints in full on page eight, to refresh our memories), and with this he incessantly announces the desire to write the story of the Ruppert Mundys, a supposedly “Patriot League” baseball team of the 1940’5.

Is baseball, then, a metaphor for the condition of modern man? No: in Smith’s hysterical glare, everything is a metaphor for baseball. He proves, for example, that Chaucer’s pilgrims were off to play baseball (his translation is a little free); that Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” records the invention of the Ruppert Mundys’ lettered uniform; that Nigger Jim in “Huckleberry Finn” was actually a coloured baseball player: and that Melville’s Ahab is Leo Durocher. Imbedded in all this is a metaphor on which the rest of the book relies: an equation between Roth’s Ruppert Mundys and the kind of experience, the sort of special life which American writers have attempted to put down in their novels. All of Roth’s fiction has gambled in this way, equating radically disparate categories in the hope that a special truth might be caught, a flavour distilled. The method does not quite work here. The Ruppert Mundys are overloaded with symbolism: they are the outcasts of baseball, home-ground-less, doomed to wander in eternal exile playing eternal away fixtures, eminently beatable, a sort of Lost Tribe and Flying Dutchman rolled into one. Their second baseman has one leg; an outfielder has one arm (he catches the ball in his mouth); one player is a young boy while others are stiff old men. Their only victory in years is against a team from a lunatic

asylum: they have never recovered from the loss of a laser-armed pitcher named Gil Gamesh, banished for rupturing an umpire's voice box with a speedy throw. Does Roth really want his novel to succeed as serious fiction? One suspects not. The irony of the title bespeaks a cavalier attitude, and his natural tone is too frivolous and farcical for the implications of his basic metaphor. As a result, his book — like his others — tends to be static, examining the- possibilities of a single situation; here, he is often extremely funny and inventive but is unable to make his themes develop themselves.

A description of a disastrous, fumbling, floodlit baseball match quickiv moves into a dissertation on an exponent of the “spitball” who so liberally douses the sphere that each batter is nearly drowned with a spray of saliva; the Mundys’ one-armed outfielder lies choking on his back while his team-mates desperately try to dislodge the ball from his throat in time to run an opponent out; in a strange town, players visit a brothel in which motherly young women spoon-feed them baby food, powder them and apply nappies, and place them in cots (lullabies extra). Not since Thomas Pynchon wrote about a toilet-ship has there been so much sheer inventiveness in a novel. But by the end of it all one feels that Roth has quite happily waved farewell to the briginal insight of the novel. In a way, most of his writing is like this, able to hint at certain important connections but without the stamina to develop them. In the case of “The Great American Novel” this is sad, because for a while he certainly seems to be on to something valuable.