And where Bushes win shame. A simply brilliant book, about the great Pat Tillman and his amazing family, who stand up to the bullying Bush propaganda machine, which replaced a tragic and unnecessary killing of a brave, true American from friendly fire, with a bullshit tale of a football hero killed by the Taliban. He also goes into the Jessica Lynch bullshit story. Again a total propaganda fabrication of a real fuck up mission. This book ought to be compulsory reading at schools, to warn people of the depths to which Governments will sink when selling a war to the American people.

So good I read it twice. And I could re-read it again right now. Just read the opening sentences and you are right in. Zuckerman starting his literary career, and falling afoul of his father. He is letting down the Jews. And he encounters Anne Frank, who has survived (maybe). A story about the importance of telling the truth in writing, ignoring all the pressures of parents, society, religions etc. Zuckerman listens in on a great author and his young mistress, with whom he is staying overnight, and is shocked, disturbed and elated. “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life.” This after his father has submitted an unpublished story of his to a Judge who writes an hilariously funny letter to its author. Roth is as daring and as honest as any writer. He is also revealing of the imperious and dictatorial insistence of the writer…

Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman has now gained great fame from writing Carnovsky, but this has brought shame on his parents and shabby stalkers on the streets. So this is about the ambivalent side effects of literary fame on a literary lion.

For me it’s been a big Roth year, which began last year when I so much enjoyed The Human Stain. This latest tells the tale of a healthy protagonist, working at an inner city school during a terrible year of Polio, which kills some young healthy baseball kids. Encouraged by his girlfriend to escape this plague and abandon his city kids, he allows himself to be persuaded to join her at an upstate summer camp teaching kids and counsellors to dive. He becomes the unwitting bringer of polio to this idyllic backwater and then succumbs to it himself. But what marks the book is his grasping at failure. In the final chapter we learn from one of the polio victims who finds him in late middle age that to punish himself he renounced his fiancée who wished to live with him as a cripple. Self-hatred then becomes the motive. And guilt. There is something Job-like in all this, and something also of a Conrad move in the narrative.

Gay memoirs of New York in a very gay period. He writes well and finely.

Short stories of the war and its warriors in the South Pacific, the killer boredom of war, interspersed with moments of terror, and its occasional surprising violence (US troops raping US nurses? This sure didn’t make the musical…) This of course became the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, and I read these related tales because I was interested in seeing how they adapted the musical from this original source material. The stories are good and well told and it’s interesting to see how the adaptation took place. A nice first edition I picked up in Washington.