From "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth.
That's very close to the end of the book, which I have now finished reading... in case you're wondering how many times is Althouse going to blog quotes from this book. I'm done... unless something else I'm blogging reminds me of something that fits right into the stream of consciousness....
Actually, no. I'm going to give you one more: "The excitement in marriage is the fidelity. If that idea doesn’t excite you, you have no business being married."
Both quotes are said by a character, and not the first-person character who represents Philip Roth or the main character who in some ways represents Roth (because he's married to a beautiful actress who betrays him by writing a memoir about their marriage). These quotes are both said by another character who tells much of the story (so that there are 2 main first-person voices, the Roth character who's usually just there listening and this other guy who's doing most of the talking).
So — does Roth want us to believe these 2 fascinatingly challenging statements? Do we all cling above all to the idea of our own goodness, and is it a delusion? How exciting is sexual fidelity and is that particular form of excitement the sine qua non of marriage?
The novelist, by using the voices of multiple characters, has so much freedom to express exciting ideas. Perhaps the excitement in fiction is the infidelity to a single point of view and if that infidelity doesn’t excite you, you have no business being a novelist.
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3 comments:
A reader named Chris writes
A recurring theme in the Bible is the delusion of human goodness that Roth speaks of.
Once I had a tiny epiphany while reading Romans 2. I realized that according to St Paul there is no moral high ground, for anyone anywhere. Moral high ground is an illusion.
The Bible fuels religious delusion as well as devotion. But it also tells us the truth about ourselves.
Nancy writes: "I can believe the Christian Bible says goodness is a delusion, but not the Jewish Bible. Christians believe AFAIK that man is inherently sinful. Jews believe that sin is simply "missing the mark". "
Joseph writes:
Dear Ms. Althouse,
Sorry I'm a little tardy on this, but I was traveling when I read your comments on I Married a Communist. I noticed one of your readers linked to an article, I think it was on Front Page Mag or the Weekly Standard, that praised Ann Coulter book that, in turn, praised Joe McCarthy for ferreting out communists in government. The number of holdouts defending McCarthy is now as few in number as lefties who still insist Hiss was innocent. Here's a more reliable source for findings by HUAC and others about actual communists and, more important, actual spies. You may need a subscription.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/05/11/the-plot-thickens/?printpage=true
I like the Roth book, although it's of a piece with Roth's "she done me wrong" books (When She Was Good; My Life as a Man). For me, the best Roth is the Professor of Desire, the first Zuckerman books (gathered as Zuckerman Bound), American Pastoral, and the Human Stain. I'm probably missing others, and I haven't gotten to a few. One thing about him, in contrast to the similarly "discredited" Woody Allen, is that Roth never hid his faults. He presented himself accurately in his books.
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