Books: Two Serious Comic Writers

A PHILIP ROTH READER Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 483 pages; $17.50

STANLEY ELKIN’S GREATEST HITS Dutton; 290 pages; $10.95

Considering the number of books issued in the U.S. (roughly 40,000 per year), some weird coincidences are bound to occur. Here is one of them. Almost simultaneously, two different publishers are releasing anthologies of past work by two living, still productive authors. Such recycling is uncommon in hard-cover publishing, although paperbacks and mass entertainment in general have thrived on it for years. On TV, reruns increasingly perpetuate the forgettable. Record companies expect people to pay good money for slapped-together albums offering the best, say, of Donny and Marie, and they are rarely disappointed.

But why should anyone buy books filled with fiction that has already appeared in other books? As any number of Philip Roth or Stanley Elkin characters might say, why not? Even those who happen to own all the 18 volumes that Roth and Elkin have written over the past 20 years are likely to find these two collections of golden oldies a sound investment, a way of consolidating large past pleasures into compact present ones. New readers have a different and equally worthwhile treat in store: the happy discovery of two serious comic writers.

The breed is rare. Aside from Roth, Elkin and Thomas Pynchon, it is hard to think of many other contemporaries who consistently qualify. Humorists go strictly for laughs, and more power to them. Roth and Elkin take a different direction; they pretend that they would gladly stick to brass tacks and the big issues if only the world were not so loony. The hero of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Roth’s most celebrated novel, cries out to his psychiatrist: “Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke — only it ain’t no joke!” If not, though, then why is the book so funny?

Similarly, Elkin squeezes out comedy from lost causes, the tickling sensation that comes when backs rub against the wall. An old peddler named Isidore Feldman fetches up in Illinois. He tells his new neighbors that he is “in the last phase of the Diaspora. I have come to the end of the trail in your cornfields.” And he gives his son some good advice: “Travel light. Because there will come catastrophe. Every night expect the flood, the earthquake, the fire, and think of the stock.”

Some variation of this philosophy rests behind most of Roth’s and Elkin’s best work: The worst is yet to be, so watch out. The disasters that befall Roth heroes are chiefly sexual; well-educated, pampered men, they try to be moral and high-minded while writhing as passion’s play things. Expecting life to resemble “high art,” they are constantly outraged to find themselves crawling through “low actuality.” A scene from the marriage of Maureen and Peter Tarnopol in My Life as a Man is screamingly typical: “Then, on hands and knees, she crawled into the living room with my Gillette razor in her hand, waiting “patiently for me to finish talking with my undergraduate harlot and come on home so that she could get on with the job of almost killing herself.” An apotheosis of erotic obsession is achieved by a character named David Kepesh, who is transformed into a 155-lb. female breast.

A few Elkin characters have sexual problems too. One, for example, must cope with a large female Kamchatkan brown bear, in heat. In The Dick Gib son Show (1971) a druggist tells how knowing the secret medical problems of his women customers gradually unhinged him: “My mind was like the waiting room of a brothel.” More often, though, passion is the least Elkin’s people have to worry about. Ben Flesh, the hero of The Franchiser (1976), learns in Rapid City, S. Dak., that he has multiple sclerosis. He worries about this and the effect of a current heat wave on his local business: “The Mister Softees are all melted. The Lord has beaten the Mister Softees back into yogurt cultures.” And Elkin has been traveling progressively farther out; The Living End (1979) offers a knee-slapping look at death and eternal damnation.

For all the miscues and misfortune that these books portray, they nonetheless inspire elation, the thrill of watching craftsmen work with words. Roth and Elkin are both superb monologists, comic sprinters, which is one reason why excerpts from their longer works still seem satisfyingly self-contained. Roth describes himself as a child with “one foot in col lege, the other in the Catskills,” and the Borscht Belt routine is what his first-person narrators constantly imitate, no matter how much they want to sound like Chekhov or Henry James. Elkin’s characters are prone to bursts of speechmaking, and their creator is also fond of the short set piece. Here is a Cadillac that has been sitting in the heat too long: “Whatever was plastic in the car . . . had begun to bubble, boil, the glue melting and the car’s great load of padding rising yeastlike, separating, creating seams he’d been unaware of before, like the perforations on Saltines.”

Much more can be hoped for from Roth, 47, and Elkin, 50. Questions remain: Come on, Roth, will guys ever cope with sex and guilt successfully? Hey, Elkin, is there life after the Apocalypse? For now, these two books offer splendid ways to pass the time while waiting for the answers, and the end.

— Paul Gray

Excerpts

“‘Maureen, listen to me: I want to marry you. I don’t care whether you’re pregnant or not . . . I want to marry you.’ I sounded to myself about as convincing as the romantic lead in a high school play. I think it may have been in that moment that my face became the piece of stone I was to carry around on my neck for years thereafter. ‘Let’s get married,’ I said, as if saying it yet again, another way, would fool anyone about my real feelings. Yet it fooled Maureen. I could have proposed in Pig Latin and fooled Marueen”

—A Philip Roth Reader

“‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes. All the coastlines, bays, sounds, capes and peninsulas, the world’s beaches scribbled round all the countries and continents and islands. All the Cannes and Hamptons yet to be. Shores in Norway like a golden lovely dust. Spain’s wild hairline, Portugal’s long face like an impression on coins. The nubbed antlers of Scandinavia and the great South American porterhouse . . . Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘God, I love the world.’

‘There’s no place like it.'”

—Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits