Though not of the caliber of his masterpieces, Roth still manages to sting and resonate post mortem. The painful part is that even his unfinished, unintended work is worth reading. ( )

AN AMERICAN TYPE by Henry Roth

Having grown up in a Jewish family and seeing the 1964 paperback edition of CALL IT SLEEP prominently displayed I have a long deep appreciation for Henry Roth as a writer and depicter of the Jewish experience in New York City and America That Call It Sleep is a masterpiece is a well accepted fact. THe story of David Schearl is one that remains in memory and thoughts long after one has read the book.

Unfortunately this latest, posthumously edited and published book, entitled An American Type is a great disappointment to this reader. I approached this book with genuine interest and great anticipation and was sadly disappointed that it lacked the deep, rich layering and characters that appeared in Roth’s earlier masterpiece.

This book tells the story (autobiographical) of a young novelist trying to make it with a second book or by driving to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. He falls in love with a pianist at the famous Yaddo artists retreat in upstate NY and decides to leave the nurturing guidance of his older lover who helped guide him to his earlier success.
This could be a good metaphor for this book. Roth’s words are dull and the story is ultimately boring. Perhaps it is time to end the quest for his 2nd masterpiece and to celebrate the marvelous Call It Sleep in its own right. ( )

Ira Stigman is near the end of his life. His wife has recently died. Naturally, he finds himself in a mood to reflect on the past, particularly the time when he met his wife-- “M”--and was trying to “find himself” on a tiresome, navel-gazing cross-country quest. That time was during the Great Depression and the beginning of the Nazi era in Germany. Ira was a Jew who did not practice his religion, a Communist who seemed to lack any commitment to the cause, a writer who didn’t write. In fact, he seemed to have no passion for anything, including the women in his life, who could steer him around, but never really led him anywhere. There is little to like about this character and not much to capture this reader’s interest in his tale. Perhaps a familiarity with other Roth novels would have helped. Perhaps if Roth had lived to finalize this story himself, rather than leaving it to a posthumous editor to turn “batch 2” of an enormous manuscript into a novel, there might have been more zest to it. The essence of my reaction to Ira and to An American Type was well-expressed by the author himself, in the form of a letter to Ira from his lover/benefactress Edith after he left her in New York to drive to California with a comrade: “You are first and foremost a completely self-engrossed individualist, to whom communism, the proletariat, or your friends and intimates have meant nothing, except what you could feed on. You have no emotional imagination about anyone on earth but yourself…I’m very tired of your rationalizations based on society, or your own pain, or your need to grow to maturity.” Atta girl, Edith. But I wouldn’t have enclosed that check. ( )

Henry Roth's editor's "last" book, an "autobiographical" "novel" that skips over the years of composition and publication of Call It Sleep and picks up Ira Stigman's story ten years after the conclusion of Mercy of a Rude Stream, is a must for completists, of which I technically cannot be one since An American Type is the first Roth book I've had the pleasure of reading cover to cover.

Like Mercy, An American Type alternates between the past events of the story and the present-day, in which the newly-widowed narrator recalls the events that led to his marriage. After meeting M, his future wife, at a residency at Yaddo financed by his current lover, Edith, Ira joins up with his working-class hero, Bill Loem, for a trip to California in Ira's car. It doesn't take long for Ira to become disillusioned with Bill and with communism. After a humiliating attempt to sell his novel to some movie producers, Ira returns to New York, riding the rails and thumbing rides--the most evocative of these scenes was excerpted in The New Yorker last year. Some of them recall On the Road sans Dean Moriarty.

Like his protagonist, Roth had turned to communism after losing his faith in literary modernism--he had begun to feel alienated from the Greenwich Village crowd of which Edith was a member. Many critics point to Roth's incest (with a cousin and with his sister) as the dark secret that led to his fifty-year writer's block, but this double disillusionment, first with the avant-garde and then with socialist realism, probably had at least an equal effect. It's hard enough for a writer to renounce his previous work once. To do so twice, especially for a perennial outsider like Roth, must be exponentially more paralyzing. Mario Materassi has described Roth's great theme as "the anguished [story] of a man who, throughout his life, has contradicted each of his previously held positions and beliefs." Of course, it could be that Roth's succession of intellectual positions were but ineffectual shields from his personal demons.

The text has been much altered by Willing Davidson from the 1900-page "batch 2" left among Roth's papers, and is probably in a much more conventionally chronological order than the author might have settled on. Some episodes, like Ira's dinner at a German restaurant with his prospective in-laws, don't come to much of anything, and probably would have been rewritten or cut were Roth still around to be consulted. ( )

Ira has one successful novel and a controlling lover and benefactor. After finding love at a nature retreat, he leaves his former lover and sets out for California to make a life for himself and his new love. For a semi-autobiographical novel, Ira is not a particularly likeable character – neurotic and simultaneously selfish and lacking self-esteem. However, he is not dislikeable either and I found that dichotomy interesting.

It is a very bleak plot, emotionally in particular, for example: “The earth having been dug away from around its roots, the tree in the adjoining yard outside Ira’s window lay on the ground. His dandruff fell glimmering from his fingers clawing through his hair. Now, with rhythmic rip and scrape, crosscut saw with a man at each end, bit into the tree trunk. Eucalyptus logs are tawny in hue…” and “They had no right to pluck Ira out like a radish, like a beet, like a scallion, like a parsnip from among his own. And force him to grow hydroponically, a root crop like him…” There was a really delightful bit about riding the rails

An American Type was published posthumously and edited down from some two thousand pages. It suffers from what you would expect in such a work – disjointed bits of narrative in particular. However, there is some beautiful writing. I never found myself annoyed or bored while reading. Only when I finished did I feel like the whole thing didn’t gel for me. There were several interesting episodes – a delightful bit about riding the rails for instance – which perhaps would have worked better as short stories.

Note: I received this through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. ( )