Red Pill (Hari Kunzru, 2020)

This book has been describes as “the Gen X Midlife-Crisis Novel in its purest form”, I discovered upon having finished it. I think it did a very fine job of commenting on changes in our cultural climate the past five years. I liked the opening paragraph:

I think it is possible to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition – physically, intellectually, socially, financially – is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness.

This rather bleak passage aside, I was happy to finally be reading some contemporary fiction, after almost exclusively reading books from the 20th century. Red Pill is a book of many parts, or multi-layered, as they say nowadays. Already in the title is an indication that it deals with contemporary themes, as “the red pill” is an expression popular in certain quarters of the newer right-wing movements, which is supposed to denote an informed mindset.

The story begins with the protagonist describing his arrival at a writer’s retreat in Germany. The other writers at the place are full of pretentious blather and the narrator doesn’t enjoy the management’s surveillance policy. He tries to write a book about poetry and is preoccupied with German romantic poet Novalis. One evening, he meets the writer of a TV show he likes, a police procedural. It turns out this TV-writer is also a public speaker on behalf of the “alt-right” movement. He becomes obsessed with this writer and loses his mind a little bit.

It is a initially a portrayal of the creative class and its ludicrous idiosyncrasies, and then turns to being more focused on the new right wing internet troll culture and the protagonist’s descent into madness. It includes scenes from a refugee asylum after the refugee crisis of 2015 and also comments on “cancel culture” and mental health issues. In the middle is a lengthy passage about a punk band in the East German Republic which doesn’t really fit into the rest of the narrative. Nevertheless, I am impressed with Kunzru’s ability to weave together all these strands into a coherent narrative, and to engage with other worldviews in a non-simplistic way.

The Odd Woman and the City (Vivian Gornick, 2015)

I thought this would be much more about walking the city than it was. It does include a few city anecdotes (mostly from Manhattan buses, curiously enough) but mostly it is a sort of meandering memoir-ish writing with thoughts and recollections from Gornick’s life. You could do worse than spend a few hours in Vivian Gornick’s meandering memories, because they often entertain and give pause for thought. A frame story is her ongoing friendship with a man called Leonard, and from there she comments on past zeitgeist, the New York of old, 2nd wave feminism, old lovers, and letting life slip out of your hands. The Odd Woman of the title comes from a passage on George Gissing. Gornick seems to have quite the interest in Victorian fiction, as it comes up again and again. She pontificates on Charles Dickens, Henry (and William) James, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, but also later writers like Edmund Gosse, Isabel Bolton and Seymour Krim (!). Gornick was born in 1935 and is still going strong, publishing her latest book earlier this year, a book of new readings of books she read and reassessed.

Operation Shylock (Philip Roth, 1993)

The impetus for my picking up this book was noticing a book in the philosophy section of my favorite bookstore. This book was At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora is Good for the Jews by sociologist Alan Wolfe. I knew about this line of argument, and sympathize with it in a lot of ways, but I didn’t buy the book. Instead I went home and started reading Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. I knew that part of the plot of Roth’s book is about a guy promoting his home-made ideology called “diasporism” (an idea espousing the view that Israeli jews should leave Israel and return to living in galut, outside of Israel) and I was curious how Roth portrayed it. Turns out, the character promoting diasporism is called Philip Roth, but he is not the narrator of the book. The narrator of the book, however, is also called Philip Roth and is a famous writer. The famous writer is increasingly annoyed that someone travels the world in his name, making political pronouncements. Taking his cues from Dostoevsky‘s 1846 novella the Double, Roth plays with the idea of doppelgangers with aplomb. But that is just one side of this deep-reaching novel. Roth must have been at his creative peak writing this – it’s hard to see how he could out-Roth himself with this prose (it should be noted that I am the kind of person who hasn’t read more than four books by Roth, and all of them were written before 1993, so I might have to retract these words as I keep reading his more recent efforts).

Operation Shylock picks up themes from his earlier novel Counterlife, which also heavily featured ideas of alternate identities mixed with thoughts on Israel. In it, the narrator goes to Israel to visit his brother who recently had made aliyah, moving into the contested territories as a settler. Operation Shylock expands on the Israeli ideas, now including spying, Mossad, palestinian activism, lunchtime interviews with Aharon Appelfeld and – of course – the trial of accused nazi death camp commandant John Demjanjuk in 1988.

In addition to the Demjanjuk trial, Roth includes several recent jewish affairs-related news items, like Leon Klinghoffer (a disabled cruise line guest who was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in 1985) or Mordechai Vanunu (nuclear whistleblower) and Jonathan Pollard. He talks about Yassir Arafat and goes on in length about Demjanjuk and his credulous son. This style reminds me of Bari Weiss’ recent book about antisemitism – with which this book deals too, in spades. Just as Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s breakthrough novel from 1969, was attacked for being jewish self-flaggelation, this book also got its fair share of similar critique. Roth also cunningly includes a lot of antisemitic tropes in certain characters, notably in the personage Wanda Possesski, in order to discuss and analyze its different aspects.

The last part of the book is a sharp, scathing analysis of the notion of Jewish loyalty, a theme that has haunted Roth ever since his early days. The main character is kidnapped by secret agents and is given a lecture on lashon hara, the evil tongue, and how it for a Jew is forbidden to speak ill of other Jews according to certain rabbis.

Reading this book actualized some dormant thoughts for me, as did another book it reminds me of – namely The Mandelbaum Gate by British writer Muriel Spark. Spark’s book is also a multifarious book about Israel, but as it was written in 1965 by a woman from Wales, it has many dissimilarities with Roth’s book (a review of The Mandelbaum Gate can be found here). One might also mention Saul Bellow‘s 1976 To Jerusalem and Back, for yet another take on Israel from an English-speaking writer.

This book was written during a time when there was a modicum of hope for the peace process in Israel, with the negotiations at Camp David and the coming of the Oslo accords. But only about a year or so later, all hope was lost when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir and things took a turn for unknown territory.