2 - The Many Myths of Henry Roth

Summary

Six decades have passed since Henry Roth's first and only novel appeared, but he has been far from silent during that time, talking and writing compulsively about his long block and his abortive attempts to break through it. Recently, Mario Materassi, an Italian critic, has gathered together under the title of Shifting Landscape all that Roth has to say on this subject – along with the fragmentary stories and essays he published during his presumably terminal silence, thus revealed as more mythic than real. In this, which amounts to a second book (ghostedited to be sure, if not quite ghostwritten), we learn that Roth has attempted three other long fictions since Call It Sleep.

The first, begun while he was still young, is written from the point of view of and in the language of a kind of super goy, a labor organizer. The second, started when he was already middle-aged, deals with the simultaneous expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the genocidal invasion of America by the Conquistadores. The third, not undertaken until he was old, is an odd mixture of reminiscence and invention, based on the unspectacular events of Roth's later life. The first two have long since been abandoned; but the last, rather disconcertingly, has developed into a multivolumed long fiction, Mercy of a Rude Stream, the first two volumes of which, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park and A Diving Rock on the Hudson, were published during the last two years as Roth approaches his ninetieth birthday.