China Superpower Vol. 1: Requisites for High Growth

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Henry Roth's literary reputation would be secure on the strength of his remarkable first novel, Call It Sleep , published in 1934 and but largely unknown until it appeared in paperback in 1964 and became an instant classic. Roth's silence in the intervening years has been broken only by a collection of his shorter pieces, Shifting Landscape . This novel, then, is a signal event, especially since its protagonist, Ira Stigman, is clearly the same young boy who served as Roth's fictional alter ego in the first book, and since it begins roughly where the earlier novel ended--in the teeming immigrant slums of New York City during the first decades of the 20th century, a time and place that Roth captures with pungent language and palpable immediacy. Roth's long struggle with this material is reflected in first-person passages interpolated into the narrative in which the now elderly Ira addresses his word processor (called Ecclesias), ruminates about the difficulties that stilled his pen, and makes references to an earlier version of this work, which he is rewriting as he goes along. He laments the crisis of identity, the ``loss of affirmation'' and the self-loathing that crippled his imaginative powers, events that he touches on in the third-person narrative. Again we encounter the violent, penny-pinching father, the supportive mother, the loutish relatives. Ira's memories range over family strife, his school days, the dangers of the street, the disruption of WW I, and they end--somewhat abruptly--after the book's best extended scenes, set in a fancy grocery store where the adolescent Ira works after high school. This is the most forceful part of the book, a sustained, controlled piece of writing that masterfully evokes the temper of the times--the advent of Prohibition, the casual bigotry and racism of blue-collar workers and veterans--in the process of limning a group of memorable character portraits. Since this is to be the first volume of six, the story ends ambiguously, after repeatedly hinting at but never getting to ``the disastrous impairment of the psyche'' and ``the accident . . . the terrible deformation that was its consequence.'' Thus it is reasonable to think that this novel may be more satisfying when read as part of the six-volume whole. BOMC and QPB selections. (Jan.)

Library Journal

After nearly six decades of silence, Roth, whose only previous novel, Call It Sleep (1934), has been hailed as one of the classics of 20th-century American literature, returns with proof that his earlier effort was no fluke. In this first of a projected six volumes to fall under the general rubric ``Mercy of a Rude Stream,'' 87-year-old Roth juxtaposes two stories: A young Ira Stigman grows up in Jewish Harlem during World War I (and on to 1920, when Ira turns 14); and Roth struggles to find his voice again. The theme that ultimately unites these potentially discordant elements is deracination--Ira's internal struggle to free himself from his ``Jewishness'' and Roth's realization that his own attempt to do just that resulted in his ``creative inanition.'' Because it reflects so well the struggles we all face in attempting to define who we are and where and how we fit into the bigger picture, the novel transcends both its vividly drawn, localized setting and the ethnicity of its characters. And it leaves one eagerly anticipating the next installment. Essential for academic collections and all but the smallest of public collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/93.-- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.

Booknews

Analyzes the economic achievements of the People's Republic since the opening of markets in 1979, and the various measures the government has taken to spur international trade, investment, and technology transfer. Looks at such factors as the mobility of labor and capital, the import of trade and technology, and foreign investment. Also weighs the prospects for continued growth and considers China's changing role in the world economy and politics. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Donna Seaman

In this third volume of Roth's now-posthumous magnum opus, "Mercy of a Rude Stream", tortured hero Ira Stigman is nearly 90 and hard at work on an unwieldy autobiographical novel. Alternating between Ira's fiction and his current state of mind, Roth offers a provocative exploration of the vagaries of memory. Novelist Ira picks up the story in the 1920s just as young Ira has unwittingly become the third wheel in a precarious love affair between his best college friend, Larry, and their intrepid English professor, Edith. While Larry struggles to satisfy his lover and his literary ambitions, Ira--deeply ashamed of his furtive couplings (described in earlier installments of the series) with his sister and his young cousin--finds some relief in the bohemian ambience of Greenwich Village and in reading James Joyce. Roth does go on rather tiresomely about matters Joycean, but nothing can dilute the power of this unsparing analysis of one man's seemingly endless battle with himself.

Kirkus Reviews

The third volume in the late Roth's ongoing autobiographical cycle, Mercy of a Rude Stream, is very much of a piece with its predecessors—A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994) and A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995).

It continues the story of Roth's alter ego, Ira Stigman, now seen wrestling with his artistic and sexual demons as he struggles toward manhood in 1920s Manhattan and also, some 60 years later, as the elderly Ira labors to make sense of missed opportunities and flawed life choices, carrying on an extended, fragmented "conversation" with his computer ("Ecclesias"). This latest novel fictionalizes Roth's longtime affair with NYU teacher and poet Eda Lou Walton (here: Edith Welles), and it's drenched in the kind of self-conscious literary talk that most writers indulge in, then dispense with, in their early work (though, to be fair, Roth does communicate effectively the beady excitement felt by young intellectuals sharing a contraband copy of Joyce's Ulysses, as well as the hopeful Ira's discovery, through reading Joyce, "that it was possible to commute the dross of the mundane and the sordid into literary treasure"). There are too many lengthy disquisitions on favored writers and writing, and—conversely—a plodding recounting of Ira's peregrinations from one unfulfilling day job to another. Still, Roth writes ferocious, flinty dialogue (the scenes between Ira and his younger sister, and former lover, Minnie are charged with an unforgettable admixture of erotic heat and guilty hatred) and pulls off some remarkable technical effects in balancing the young Ira's dreams of literary accomplishment against his aged self's resigned understanding that "performance with words was the only option open to him, the only tramway out of himself."

It's odd, and sad, to realize that Roth, who died last October, may eventually be better remembered for this deeply flawed final work than for his one incontestable masterpiece: Call It Sleep (1934), the book of his youth.