The Name of the Game

By R.Z. Shepard

During a recent session of Great American noodling, Philip Roth, part-time professor of literature and millionaire novelist, composed a self-interview in which he saw himself both as Henry James and Henny Youngman. James, the 19th century novelist with a mind like a surgical-steel tweezers, revealed the delicate attachments between social conventions and motivation. Youngman, a basic Jewish stand-up comic, is a hammer-and-tongs man who reduces his subjects to recognizable pulp.

Only in America could you fill The Golden Bowl with seltzer and sell it. Few writers have had the talent and self-awareness to exploit such a cultural aberration as well as Roth. He fizzed onto the scene in 1959 with the award-winning Goodbye, Columbus, a novella whose tartness and clarity showed precisely what it was like to be a young Jew from Newark, N.J., ashamed of his lower-middle-class background and humiliated by the pretensions of the suburban newly rich. There followed two grim and carefully worked novels in which Roth misplaced his fresh, astringent tone. Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967) were grim and blistering forced marches through America with full literary field pack.

Then came Portnoy's Complaint, the public flowering of the Henny Youngman Roth, the brilliant cocktail-party mimic, hilarious storyteller and improviser of ingenious bits. His university degrees were set aside for the lessons learned on Newark's front stoops, where wisecracks and putdowns were the comic antitoxins against WASP sting and the guilt that could result from calling chicken soup consomme.

A landmark in American comic writing, Portnoy is not the final assimilation of the American Jewish novel. It is a complete cannibalization of it into the American Jewish anti-novel. Isaac Singer may continue to write marvelous stories about immigrant Jews; Saul Bellow may continue to chant the prayer for the dead over our decaying cities. But it is doubtful that anyone can ever write about the American Jewish family again without having his work ruefully compared with Portnoy's grotesque shadow.

Going public with Portnoy turned Roth into a hot property and brought him the awareness that "being famous was like being a box of Oxydol." Our Gang, The Breast and now The Great American Novel (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $8.95) definitely have extra-literary dimensions. They are also packaging and merchandising problems. Our Gang, which began with ten pages of devastatingly accurate satire of Nixonian newspeak, quickly slid into labored collegiate humor. Grossly padded--including too many blank end papers and repetitive title pages--the book became a $5.95 hardback steppingstone to a profitable publishing venture. Ditto The Breast, whose 78 pages scarcely filled a training bra.

At nearly 400 pages, The Great American Novel is part of the same line. Ostensibly a baseball epic of the 1943 Ruppert Mundys, the book is to contemporary fiction what silicone injections are to topless dancing. It is an extravagant mockery of form, a freak show aggressively thrust at the public. "Read me big boy till I faint," Roth seems to be saying, in a paraphrasing of Portnoy's burlesque-queen fantasy. He seems to have cleaned his desk drawers of every party bit and wild turn. He has also researched his subject, spending hours at the baseball Hall of Fame and leaning heavily for inspiration on Larry Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, a collection of interviews with oldtime baseball greats.

The narrator of The G.A.N. is an 87-year-old retired sportswriter named Word Smith, a broad patch off Colonel John R. Stingo, the uninhibited prose stylist who wrote a column for the old New York Evening Enquirer. Smith, an inebriate of alliteration in a hounds-tooth overcoat, has dedicated his last years to resurrecting the national memory of the Patriot League. According to Smith, it was a third major league that has been made the American equivalent of a Soviet unperson through a conspiracy of silence. How this came about is Smith's story, so shaggy, discursive and bizarre that it defies synopsis. Suffice it to say that the Patriot League was discovered to be in the clutches of Communism. Some of its leading figures turn out to be Russian agents. The discovery that the national pastime is subversive is too shocking. The mess is hushed up, and the public gladly buries a chapter of sports history in unconsciousness.

Midget. Running through all this are the glories and disasters of the Ruppert Mundys of Port Ruppert, N.J. Smith recalls the Mundys' history, complete with scores from their games with such teams as the Kakoola Reapers, the Acedama Butchers and the Terra Incognita Rustlers. Anyone familiar with the 4-F players of wartime baseball will sympathize with the 1943 Mundys. Their roster of freaks and misfits includes a one-legged catcher; a 14-year-old second baseman; a midget pinch hitter, "a credit to his size," who is reminiscent of the one Bill Veeck fielded with the 1951 St. Louis Browns; and an ancient third baseman who naps between innings. There is also a one-armed right fielder who, unlike the Browns' Pete Gray, does not even have a stump under which to tuck his glove while throwing the ball. He puts the ball in his mouth while removing his glove. If it gets stuck there, the result can be as costly as "an inside-the-mouth grand-slam home run."

Like Henny Youngman, Roth keeps batting out giggles, averaging about .265. Like Richard Nixon, he must make everything perfectly clear. Roth distends everything beyond the operating limits of farce. He seems out to do nothing less than debunk every myth of American life. Top on his list is the notion of winning by fair play and sportsmanship. In a total inversion of those Boys Life inspirational stories, Roth tells of Gil Gamesh, a pitcher so great that he refuses to obey the rules.

Spoofing the ancient Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, about an arrogant semidivine king forced by the gods to wander vainly in search of immortality, Roth seems even intent on demythe-sizing mythology. Only Roth's Gil Gamesh returns from banishment as the coach of the last-place 1943 Mundys to preach a brutal truth. "You are scum," he tells the team, "because you do not hate your oppressors. You are slaves and fools and jellyfish because you do not loathe your enemies." It is another way of saying nice guys finish last.

This is a recurrent theme in Roth's work. David Kepesh, The Breast, decided to get back at the world by using his monstrousness for fame and profit. The Great American Novel, with its compulsive inventiveness, has the same sort of energy as Scoreboard sex, in which the flesh is in the grip of a tumescent will but the spirit is weak. It is an enormous self-indulgence, as Roth himself must realize. This may well have been on his mind when he recently told an old friend that he cut the manuscript--by changing all the 3 and 2 counts to 2 and 1.

sb R.Z. Sheppard

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