The Great American Novel by Philip Roth.

I’ve read quite a lot off Roth over the years. Besides American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and Exit Ghost, which I read recently enough to be included in my Reading List of every book I’ve read since July, 2020 (when I started writing up every book I read as a COVID project), I’ve also read Roth’s The Plot Against America, The Human Stain, Sabbath’s Theater, Operation Shylock, The Counterlife, The Ghost Writer, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Goodbye Columbus. You can see I like this author. Even that list, though, is fewer than half of Roth’s thirty novels. I wasn’t particularly intending to read this one next, but I was scanning the shelf at the library looking for a book to bring with me on a trip to visit Jim’s mother in Mexico and the title caught my eye.

The Great American Novel was published in 1973. It’s early Roth. Prior to Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969, which made his career, he had published the short story collection, Goodbye Columbus (1959) and two novels, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967). During this period, Roth experimented with literary models. He had yet to introduce the character of Nathan Zuckerman, the writer stand-in for Roth himself, who would first appear in The Ghost Writer (1979) and seemed to set his mature style, returning in his next four novels (Zuckerman Unbound – 1981, The Anatomy Lesson – 1983, The Prague Orgy – 1985, and The Counterlife – 1986), and later in four more novels. During the years of the late 1960s through the mid-seventies, as “Pop” visual artists (Warhol, Lichtenstein) and hi-brow pop music (Beatles, Beach Boys, etc.) begin to blur the lines between high and low culture, Roth wrote a series of novels riffing on popular literary genres: the porn novel: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), political satire: Our Gang (1971), a kafkaesque fantasy: The Breast (1972), and finally the baseball novel: The Great American Novel (1973).

The literary baseball novel was an established genre and ripe for satire by the time Roth got to it. I re-read Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952). I recently learned about Mark Harris’ tetralogy of baseball novels that includes Bang the Drum Slowly (1953 – the second of the four). Roth himself writes about reading John Tunis’ The Kid From Tomkinsville (1940) in both I Married a Communist and American Pastoral. Roth’s own baseball novel, though, is neither reverent nor heroic. It’s ribald, offensive, sometimes funny, unhinged.

Nor is baseball Roth’s only target. The Great American Novel is a satiric critique of America itself, letting baseball represent, as it often does, our national character, values, and goals. Yet one more target, in this overloaded novel, is the one in the title, equally apt whether read with the emphasis on the last word, or the word before. The Great American Novel is both about a novel whose subject is America told through the great American pastime, baseball, and a novel about that perennial chimera of a work of literature written by an American author worthy to be compared with the great European authors of the nineteenth century.

Roth names several of the likely candidates for the “great American novel” in his book of that title and brings them in for satire, too. His novel begins, for instance, with a long, self-conscious “Prologue” like the one that begins The Scarlet Letter explaining how the narrator of the novel in the present-day happened to come across the story he’s about to tell. In this case, the narrator is Word Smith, a baseball journalist who used to write a column called, “One Man’s Opinion.” He tells us that his purpose, in 1971, when he’s writing, is to preserve the suppressed history of a third major league of professional baseball, the Patriot League, and specifically the story of their last few seasons, 1941 to 1943, and what brought about their banishment from official memory. Thus, like The Plot Against America from two decades later, Roth is writing an alternate American history of the mid-twentieth century.

This prologue also includes a long sequence with Word Smith and Hemingway fishing for marlins in 1936 and having a discussion on the boat with a Vassar girl about the great American novel. She names: The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl. Hemingway dismisses them all, and then adds:

“What about Red Badge of Courage! What about Winesburg, Ohio! The Last of the Mohicans! Sister Carrie! McTeague! My Antonia! The Rise of Silas Lapham! Two Years Before the Mast! Ethan Frome! Barren Ground! What about Booth Tarkington and Sarah Orne Jewett, while you’re at it? What about our minor poet Francis Scott Fitzwhat’shisname? What about Wolfe and Dos and Faulkner? What about The Sound and the Fury, Vassar! A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing–how’s that for the Great American Novel! (p. 31).

At one point the Vassar girls responds to Hemingway’s harangue by saying, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so” (p. 33), the famous last line of Hemingway’s own novel The Sun Also Rises. Such throwaway references to great American novels occur winkingly throughout the text.

Word Smith’s story of the demise of the Patriot League centers on the league’s formerly great but now worst team, the Mundys of Port Ruppert, New Jersey. The story unfolds as a series of short stories, some excellent, some excruciating. The first one is the best. This is a showdown between a sensational rookie pitcher named Gil Gamesh, from Babylon, no less, and the Umpire Mike “the Mouth” Masterson, whose scrupulous attention to duty spoils Gamesh’s perfect season and Gamesh’s act of revenge results in him being banned for life. During this opening chapter, “Home Sweet Home” we also learn the 1941 fate of the Mundys which is to lose their home ballpark when it’s leased to the military as a staging area for soldiers being shipped to Europe, forcing the Mundys to play their entire season on the road.

The war requires the services of nearly all of America’s able-bodied men, so the Mundys, like all baseball teams, lose their star athletes and are forced to recruit from the leftovers. But the new owners of the Mundys, more interested in profits than the sport, deliberately scrape the bottom of the plate. The line-up is introduced in chapter two, “The Visitor’s Line-Up.” The players include a one-armed outfielder, a first baseman who never hit a home run sober, a fourteen year old boy, a fifty-two year old man, and one actually excellent player, Roland Agni, age nineteen, who is being forced by his parents to play for the worst team in baseball in order to teach him a lesson in humility. As baseball is the religion of America, all of the players share last names with gods and demigods from around the world (Astarte, Damur, Rama, Heket, Agni, etc.) Word Smith is writing his history from a care home called “Valhalla.” The first baseman, named John Baal, has a father named Spit and a grandfather named Base, showing the low-brow level of the book’s humor, though I confess to a guilty chuckle at some of it.

Chapter Three, “In the Wilderness” contains two lengthy stories. One, has Big John Baal, taking the fourteen-year-old Nickname Dafur to the Kakoola, Wisconsin “pink and blue district” where homesick young men get serviced by surrogate mothers. The other is an exhibition game between the Mundys and the inmates of an asylum, where the Mundys finally get a win. I found the first of these stories distasteful and the second unfunny.

Chapter Four, “Every Inch a Man” includes another unfunny and offensive story. This one is about a midget named Bob Yamm, hired by the Reapers as a pinch hitter, the idea being that the strike zone for a man only 40 inches tall is so small that if he simply stands at the plate without swinging his bat he will be guaranteed a walk every time. This idea was not original to Phillip Roth, by the way. It had been floating around baseball for years, and I even remember first reading about it in a book I read as a young boy called Freddy the Pig and the Baseball Team from Mars (pub. 1955 by Walter R. Brooks, number 23 in the Freddy the Pig series). When Bob Hamm becomes an unexpected national hero, the club owner then hires a second midget, even shorter, as a pitcher, and the two start a rivalry. The story ends with Bob Hamm resigning, giving a moving “farewell address” a la Lou Gehrig’s sign-off from the Yankees, and the even shorter man being traded to the Mundys in exchange for the one-armed outfielder.

Chapter Five, “The Temptation of Roland Agni” picks up the story of the ace nineteen year-old and his frustration playing on the worst team of the Majors: the Mundys. Roland approaches Angela Whittling Trust, the owner of the best team in the Patriot League, the Tri-City Tycoons, begging her to let him play for her. She refuses to help Roland leave the Mundys for the reason that she has information that the Reds (not the ones from Cincinnati but the ones from Russia) are trying to destroy America by destroying baseball. They’ve already managed to infiltrate the Kakoola Reapers where the owner is turning the team into a joke vis a vis the previous story with the midget players. Roland Agni is the only reason the Mundys, too, aren’t a complete embarrassment. Angela Trust tells Roland it’s his duty to baseball, and to America that he continue to play for the Mundys, or be a traitor to his country.

Chapter Six, “The Temptation of Roland Agni (continued)” finds Roland, frustrated by Angela Trust’s rejection, working to persuade the owner of the other Tri-City team, the Greenbacks, to take him on. When the Mundys demand an outrageous amount for him, Agni is forced to return to his losing team. The story this time, though, is that the genius son of the Greenback’s owner, Isaac Ellis, has invented a kind of super-wheaties, that when fed to ballplayers makes them unbeatable. Roland agrees to feed the super wheaties to his teammates. Isaac will make a fortune betting on the team that no one believes can win a game and when he’s earned enough money, Isaac will buy Roland for the Greenbacks. The Mundys launch a miracle winning streak. A second story in this chapter concerns the Manager of the Mundys, Mister Fairsmith, a baseball missionary of sorts who has absented himself this season with the aim of introducing baseball to Africa. The African scene iincludes jungles and cannibal savages. References to Herman Melville’s south seas novels Omoo and Typee come in, and the episode ends with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (not a great American novel, Conrad being Polish and British).

Chapter Seven’s title, “The Return of Gil Gamesh; or, the Mission from Moscow” says it all. Gamesh has spent the years of his banishment in Moscow. He returns as a communist agent and takes over the management of the Mundys. By accusing players throughout the Patriot League of being communist sympathizers and forcing them to appear before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, Gamesh succeeds in the Russian plot of destroying the Patriot League. Mike “the Mouth” Masterson also reappears in the role of an assassin who wounds Gil Gamesh but shoots poor Roland Agni to death just as he’s about to reveal the plot. The Patriot League teams fold in disgrace, and even their host cities change their names to obscure their tainted history.

The novel concludes with a very short epilogue, returning to Word Smith and the present day as he attempts to get his astonishing manuscript published. I detected a final great American novel reference in this epilogue as Word Smith claims to have written a series of pleading letters:

“to Walter Cronkite, to William Buckley, to David Susskind, to Senator Kennedy, to Ralph Nader, to the Human Rights Commission of the UN, to renowned American authors, to Ivy League professors, to columnists, to political cartoonists, to candidates for public office looking for an “issue” (p. 397).

And finally a letter he reproduces in full to “my dear Chairman Mao”, which ends the novel. No doubt a reader in 1973 would be reminded of Saul Bellow’s great American novel Herzog from 1964 whose title character writes letters to a similar list of folks.

Roth’s The Great American Novel is certainly not the great American novel. It’s a farce: ludicrous, stupid, and gross. But it’s also great in spots (the opening story of the battle between Gil Gamesh the pitcher and Mike Masterson the umpire). It’s smart, but a little too knowing in accumulating references that don’t really amount to anything. As a model for writing, I admire Roth’s willingness to be audacious. He just puts any fool thing on the page and sometimes it works, but too often not. Certainly not my favorite novel of his, but I’m glad to have read it.

I’ve been tracking lately how homosexuality appears in books by 20th century American heterosexual male authors so I want to include a bit from chapter three. The Kakoola Reapers host a “Ladies Day” and one of the ladies who had been admitted free is discovered to be a man when she makes a brilliant one-handed catch of a foul ball. The man then jumps on to the field and causes a scene before diving into the Mundys’ dugout and escaping through the locker room. The crowd wonders what will happen next:

“But all that happened next was that the game was resumed, an 0 and 2 count on Johnny Baal and the Mundys down by six… and the folks in the stands feverish with speculation. You should have heard the ideas they came up with. Some even began to wonder if maybe a real live homo hadn’t got loose on the ball field. “Yep,” said the old-timers out in the center-field bleachers, the boys with the green eyeshades who had been predicting the downfall of the game ever since the introduction of the lively ball, “I tole you–you start foolin’ with this here thing, and you start in foolin’ with that one, and next thing you know, you got the cupcakes on your hands. You wait, you see–‘Ladies Day’ is only the beginnin’. They’ll be havin’ ‘Fairy Day’ around the league before this thing is over. Yessir, every la-dee-da window-dresser in town will be out here in his girdle, and they’ll be givin’ away free nail polish to them fellers, so-called, at the door. Oh, it’s acomin’, every last damn thing you can think of that’s rotten and dumb, on account they just could not leave the damn ball alone like it was!” (p. 147).

It’s a baseball novel, after all. Roth’s account of baseball games, and baseball’ obsession with statistics, and baseball fans, are excellent. And that, in the end, it’s just a game, played by adult men, as entertainment, says something about the game of fiction, too.