Grumpy Old Men

For readers who believe that literature and politics should be separate, this hasn't been a good summer. Novels by two of the country's most prominent writers, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, are explicitly embroiled in politics throughout their plots.

Both are narrated by elderly men, with elderly men as their protagonists--Roth and Bellow themselves are senior citizens at 67 and 86 years old, respectively. Both novels depict characters who think they've been wronged by life or society and are fighting back with a vengeance. Unfortunately, both fail to show their authors at their best.

In The Human Stain, Roth concludes the trilogy he started in American Pastoral and continued in So I Married a Communist. The year is 1998-the title refers to Clinton's stain on Monica's dress, as well as the stain of race relations. The narrator is Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who tells the biography of one Coleman Silk. 71-year-old Silk is angry for a variety of reasons. He has taken early retirement from the college where he worked as a Classics professor and dean for 30 years because he was accused of racism. Subsequently, his wife has passed away, a former colleague has threatened to expose his new relationship with an illiterate college custodian and the woman's ex-husband is threatening to kill the two. Silk is also hiding a number of secrets about his past and identity that don't exactly contribute to his peace of mind.

On one level, The Human Stain reads like a novelistic indictment of political correctness in academia-Silk can't understand why he is accused of racism and his departmental nemesis, a young French woman, refuses to comprehend his humanistic background. On another level, it seems that the book accuses American society of abandoning those who have brought it to its present greatness, accepting flashy new theories (in academia, politics and entertainment) over the trusted humanistic ideas of the past.

Bellow's Ravelstein is a barely-fictionalized biography of the last days of cultural critic Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, who died in 1992 of AIDS. The novel has little plot, jumping back and forth between the present of the narration, the past of Ravelstein's dying, and the deep past of the friendship between the biographer and his subject.

As described by Chick, Bellow's narrator and alter ego as well as Ravelstein's friend and confidant, Ravelstein comes across as an energetic, impatient, boisterous, arrogant, intelligent, ungraceful giant of a man. With very few exceptions, he is dismissive of his students, colleagues and society in general. He believes that society is vulgar, dumb and unable to appreciate him, but is quite willing to accept the fame, notoriety and money it bestows. Ravelstein seems more a force of nature than a character, living and dying according to rules others cannot comprehend.

Both The Human Stain and Ravelstein are pessimistic books, lamenting the decline of American culture and trying to pin the blame on politics of either the academic or governmental sort. Unfortunately, neither Roth nor Bellow seem able to summon much sympathy for their protagonists-Silk and Ravelstein have too many negative characteristics to allow the reader any kind of identification. For that reason, the reader finds it difficult to endorse these attacks on American culture-they seem motivated more by pet peeves than serious argument.

In the end, the books fail because their depictions of characters and society are too one-dimensional, and because their authors offer no alternatives. Neither protagonist really comes alive, and neither narrator can make a connection to his friends or the reader. Another problem is that this time around, Bellow and Roth's novels both lack convincing female characters. These are books by, about and for grumpy old men.