My Life with Philip Roth

My introduction to the incomparable world of Philip Roth came as a primal nineteen year old at the University of Maryland in the fall of 2002. A junior, I along with the entire region had endured a month-long siege due to the Beltway Sniper. To boot, we were hearing loud whispers out of Washington that Bush wanted to invade Iraq. Times were tense. I refer to this period as primal for a few reasons. The first in reference to my incipience in life, at the cusp of infinite learning and knowledge. The second being that I matched a long unkempt hairstyle with a permanent bowler hat, an explicit homage to my favourite director and my favourite film at the time A Clockwork Orange, and to cap it off, I did not own any clothes that fit me. 

My roommate and childhood friend Scott burst home one day in an electrified state, "Have you read Portnoy's Complaint?" Scott had signed up for a Jewish Literature course which I inexplicably hadn't known existed. With excited haste, I heard such phrases as "fucking awesome" and "by Philip Roth" that, as an English major taking almost exclusively literature courses, and, as a Jew who beyond foolishly had convinced myself that I knew all the great Jewish writers, I began to feel a great resentment and embarrassment over such a blatant blind spot.

Killington, 2003

My literary oversight was rectified later that week, or more accurately, within the next 48 hours, because I was reading it at every free moment I had, at work, at school, walking to class, in class. People often talk about the thunderbolt they feel when first listening to The Beatles, or first reading The Great Gatsby or Slaughterhouse-Five, which I have all experienced, but reading Roth for the first time was different. It superseded thunderbolts, it was a full body paroxysm. I simply could not believe my eyes the words I was reading on the page. The transfixation began from the opening sentence, "She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise." The outrageous frankness and hilarious vulgarity with which Roth explores Jewish and Jewish-American identity and giddy subversion of parental and cultural influence while unbridled sexuality oozes from every pore befuddled me. How can genius this monumental truly exist?

With life's progression came my gradual embracement of the master's oeuvre. At first I gravitated towards his shorter novels and novellas, telling myself that Roth packed a more powerful punch in concentrated doses. The Breast, The Dying Animal, and The Ghost Writer, were an intense glimpse into the life of a renowned and virile public intellectual. But the deeper truth is that his longer novels are such monumentally challenging and intellectually ambitious works that I didn't have the reserve of mental fortitude to tackle them head on. Only in recent years—with a certain world weariness and wisdom that I suspect only age can provide—have I unearthed the treasures of magnum opuses such as Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral. 

What Philip Roth unleashed upon the world with shocking efficacy and humour is through passionate intellectualization of perversion between consenting adults, he showed us that it can be a glorious part of the human experience. My literary friends came up with a nickname for him: The Beast. His writing is that uncompromisingly urgent. For Roth, sexuality is not just a part of our lives, it is fundamental, both a generator and extension of our joys, fears, anxieties, and triumphs.

Years ago, a close friend unironically remarked, "You're like a walking Philip Roth novel." I took it as a great compliment even though I'm fairly certain Ilya didn't necessarily mean it as one. In a 1974 essay for the New York Review of Books, Roth wrote, "Going wild in public is the last thing a Jew is expected to do." Even today, after all these years, Philip Roth still striking me like a thunderbolt: I only now finally understand all my mother's admonishments.

Death of Stalin

Years after the Good Doctor of Gonzo Journalism Hunter S. Thompson famously covered George McGovern's doomed 1972 Presidential campaign, Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern's campaign manager quipped that Thompson's exhaustive book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, was the "least factual, most accurate account" of the election.
 

Armando Iannucci's Death Of Stalin is a devastating satire replete with the Good Doctor's defiant spirit. When reality is too brutal to grasp head on, we turn to comedy to tell the story with veracity. The film's banishment in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, attests to both Iannuci's success and to the film's unmistakable quality. Russians aren't known for their lack of sense of humour, unless it's about themselves. Despite Stalin's unprecedented death tally, the Russian authorities still consider him above outright reproach and certainly far above ridicule.

Luckily for us, Armando Iannucci has no such qualms. Iannucci masterfully pits Stalin's inner circle as a claque of incompetent vultures angling to inherit Stalin's infinite power. Imagine a Marx Brothers comedy set in Stalinist Russia, complete with an outrageous running gag involving firing squads.

Deputy Secretary Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) is Stalin's favourite to succeed him, although no one knows why considering he can't avoid mentioning former party members Stalin has long since executed ("How am I supposed to remember who's alive and who's dead?"). Moscow Party Head Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) is full of uproariously vulgar war stories that keep the Boss jolly, but when a joke about farmers meets with a lukewarm reception, his wife admonishes him, "No more farmer jokes!" Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov's (Michael Palin) devotion to Stalin is unyielding, and only increases after Stalin sends his wife to the gulag. But the most vicious satire is reserved for none other than NKVD Head Lavrenty Beria (Simon Russell Beale), who undoubtedly distinguishes himself as one of the most repulsive psychopaths in history, and has an ignominious end to match.

The incendiary script burns so hot half the jokes fly by at sputnik speed, but its farcical mania captures the incomprehensible absurdity of the depths of Stalinism and its pernicious effect on the psychology of an entire country and its long suffering people. Condemned men and women shouting "Long Live Stalin!" just as they get a bullet in the skull. It would be a lot funnier if it weren't grounded in truth.