Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

soaring hawks & wobbling seesaws

“The derogatory, joking nonsense name that translates literally to Moses Bellybutton and that probably connoted something slightly different to every Jewish family on our block — the little guy who wants to be a big shot, the kid who pisses in his pants, the someone who is a bit ridiculous, a bit funny, a bit childish, the comical shadow alongside whom we had all grown up, the little folkloric fall guy whose surname designated the thing that for most children was neither here not there, neither a part nor an orifice, somehow a concavity and a convexity both, something neither upper nor lower, neither lewd nor entirely respectable either, a short enough distance from the genitals to make it suspiciously intriguing and yet, despite this teasing proximity, this conspicuously puzzling centrality, as meaningless as it was without function — the sole archaeological evidence of the fairy tale of one’s origins, the lasting imprint of the fetus who was somehow oneself without actually being anyone at all, just about the silliest, blankest, stupidest watermark that could have been devised for a species with a brain like ours.”

If, before Philip Roth died, I’d been invited to Stockholm (flown overnight in a private jet, accompanied by unsmiling suited agents) to argue on his behalf before the Nobel Committee, I would have packed light. You don’t need, or even necessarily want, whole books to demonstrate Roth’s greatness. With a handful of exceptions (The Ghost Writer, Patrimony, Sabbath’s Theater) Roth’s books are uneven trays carrying morsels of brilliance. I think I could have gotten by with a single sentence.

That sentence, from Operation Shylock, is a doozy, and what you need to know by way of setup is that the book is about a doppelgänger. Another man, claiming to be Philip Roth, who happens also to look and sound exactly like the author, has been gallivanting around Israel, propounding outrageous ideas on the author’s behalf. The real Philip Roth flies off to Israel to set things straight, and hilarity — of a particularly crazed and involuted sort  — ensues.

Operation Shylock is not, I should say, among my favorite Roth novels. Within the canon of his Clinton-era literary nervous breakdowns, I much prefer Sabbath’s Theater, in which the deranging agent is not a double but a particularly potent admixture of sex and death. But this one sentence, in which the real Roth finally settles on what to call his doppelgänger, seems to me unimprovable:

The derogatory, joking nonsense name that translates literally to Moses Bellybutton and that probably connoted something slightly different to every Jewish family on our block — the little guy who wants to be a big shot, the kid who pisses in his pants, the someone who is a bit ridiculous, a bit funny, a bit childish, the comical shadow alongside whom we had all grown up, the little folkloric fall guy whose surname designated the thing that for most children was neither here not there, neither a part nor an orifice, somehow a concavity and a convexity both, something neither upper nor lower, neither lewd nor entirely respectable either, a short enough distance from the genitals to make it suspiciously intriguing and yet, despite this teasing proximity, this conspicuously puzzling centrality, as meaningless as it was without function — the sole archaeological evidence of the fairy tale of one’s origins, the lasting imprint of the fetus who was somehow oneself without actually being anyone at all, just about the silliest, blankest, stupidest watermark that could have been devised for a species with a brain like ours.

Has there ever been anything better written about the bellybutton? Could there ever be anything better written about it? Philip Roth would have made a terrific stand-up comedian (he’s said to have considered Woody Allen a lousy knockoff), and part of the joy of this sentence is in hearing him simply riff. There’s a certain savage pleasure in watching a comic corner a subject (Seinfeld on traffic signs, John Mulaney on Back to the Future) and then rip every ounce of flesh from its bones.

As a piece of writing the greatness of the sentence resides in its central section — everything between that italicized thing and the em-dash after function. In these lines Roth sets six seesaws going at once (neither here nor there, neither a part nor an orifice) and then stands back gleefully watching them wobble. The seesaw — the statement of something’s being neither this nor that, or both this and that, or caught somehow exactly on the precipice between this-ness and that-ness — is, rhythmically, intellectually, and morally, the quintessential Roth-ian device. Swede Levov was a living god and he was a pitiable wretch. Alexander Portnoy was an upstanding son and he was an unrepentant deviant. Roth was never happier than when he was standing with his two feet straddling a border.

But what I love best about the sentence is not its content but its mode of delivery. There’s been a lot said — most famously by The Artist’s Way and its descendants — about how the purpose of writing is not to produce pages but to get into the state in which pages are produced. The point is to become an open valve; the words that flow out are merely a byproduct.

There’s a lot of value in this way of thinking, for a writer — but less discussed is how much value there is in it for a reader. It’s exhilarating, in the way of watching a hawk soar or a sea lion swim, seeing a creature fulfill its purpose — its funktionslust — as unmistakably as Roth is doing in this sentence. The feeling is like witnessing a particularly sustained and audacious verse of free-style rap — you shift, as the seconds and words accumulate, from a kind of vicarious anxiety (can he possibly keep this up?) into a sort of incredulous joy, accompanied by the realization that he isn’t really rapping at all; he is being rapped; he will, after his gorgeously unassuming mic drop (a species with a brain like ours), come off the stage sweating, beaming, with no memory of what he just said except that it was perfect. The judges will be stunned into silence.