高分跪求文学评论

发布网友发布时间：2022-04-30 13:40

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热心网友时间：2022-06-24 14:37

Philip Roth has written a terrific political novel, though in a style his readers might never have predicted — a fable of an alternative universe, in which America has gone fascist and ordinary life has been flattened under a steamroller of national politics and mass hatreds. Hitler's allies rule the White House. Anti-Semitic mobs roam the streets. The lower-middle-class Jews of Weequahic, in Newark, N.J., cower in a second-floor apartment, trying to figure out how to use a gun to defend themselves. (''You pulla the trig,'' a kindly neighbor explains.) The novel is sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible.

Roth seems to be taunting, ''You think swastikas are only for other countries?'' And you turn the pages, astonished and frightened.

There is a solid tradition in American letters of novels like this, phantasmagoric pictures of a United States whose every promise has been turned upside down — jeremiads about America's ability to transmute overnight into a fascist monstrosity. Jack London wrote the earliest example that anyone still reads today, I think — ''The Iron Heel,'' in 1908, from the period before the word ''fascism'' even existed (though fascism was plainly what London had in mind, in the form of a plutocratic-Republicantrade union dictatorship). Nearly 30 years later, Nathanael West proced a variation of his own called ''A Cool Million,'' which the Library of America resurrected not long ago — a freaky picture of an America taken over by murderous right-wing screwballs. But the classic of classics has always been Sinclair Lewis's ''It Can't Happen Here'' from 1935. The very title of Lewis's novel entered long ago into the American language, a sardonic phrase, mocking the sweet naïfs who persist in believing that evil dwells anywhere but at home.

It is a bit odd to think of Philip Roth as a descendant of Sinclair Lewis, but when I reflect on some recent appreciative essays on Lewis by John Updike and Gore Vidal, it occurs to me that half the writers in America may be Lewis's descendants. For what has Roth been doing ring these past 45 years, except fulminating against the conformist oppressions and hypocrisies of bourgeois life, writing Lewis's ''Babbitt'' in versions all his own — sexual, generational, comic, anti-McCarthyite, anti- P.C., antipuritanical, academic, East Coast, Middle Western and Jewish? One of Roth's characters in ''The Human Stain,'' fuming over America's prissiness and the impeachment of Bill Clinton, wonders how the stupid public could have learned so little about human nature over the years. For hasn't anyone read ''Babbitt''? And so, having dwelled over ''Babbitt'' for long enough, Roth has evidently decided to dwell over ''It Can't Happen Here,'' and has even found a clever way of setting his own tale of America-goes-fascist in the post-1935 era, exactly as Sinclair Lewis did — quite as if ''The Plot Against America'' and ''It Can't Happen Here,'' not to mention ''A Cool Million,'' were, all of them, contemporaries: nervous novels from the Age of Roosevelt. And there is a reason for this.