Breathing Machine: Philip Roth’s Patrimony – Manuel Marrero
January 27, 2025
My friend told me to read this because I’ve been going through something similar. “You were spared it with your mother and she was spared it, too. With him, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be so easy.” We all arrive at this place where you figure maybe you had it easy, good even, spinning out on epiphanies, pictures of the 90s, an overwhelming sense of urgency to lead your life right. Each day feels wasted. A kernel of consolation that your appetite for conflict ebbs, relieving you of your warrior’s birthright to slay. There is paralysis—“I phoned to ask if he wanted to go for a ride. I kept imagining him in the apartment, sitting in the corner of the sofa, with the radio off and the shades drawn—and when I did, it simply made no sense for me to be strolling around New York” even though the loss of the father is universal and inevitable and “you can’t prevent your father from dying and you may not be able to prevent him from suffering.” Philip Roth was such a totemic force of charisma and fluency that the labor and dedication is hardly noticeable, a literary monk who would spend days on a paragraph or a sentence, real time in meticulous revisions, and desperately wanted the Nobel but swept up every other major prestigious prize instead, and the idiosyncrasies go hand in hand. A sometimes convoluted voice and ethnocentric tribalism are forgiven in a wash of granular attention to detail and staggering moral imperative—“You must not forget anything.” Theologically, suffering is “right.” Roth was “not religious,” and, as his father Herman Roth remarks, “Well, I’m not a music lover. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t beautiful.” There’s a nearly participatory effect to this memoir where the reader is invited to glimpse every genealogical and historical detail as a kind of ambient awareness, a music or vibrating coil of DNA. And the dignity of his people is handled with reverence and irreverence in equal part, for which Roth has been accused of antisemitism, his father feeling a primordial incumbency to defend him. With raw and shameless nerve and tenacity, he takes you through a viscerality rarely attempted in literature, burning at both ends and the middle to know better, kairotic and licit, with an unalloyed grandeur keeping it from being too weepy or dour, but this doesn’t soften anything with death, “brutally thwarted” Roth eats his own words one by one as “Half, or more, of life goes” with people who have known you forever and “You feel poorer.” Careful running athwart of your better nature. From an eternal Florida of the mind to where autochthonous buildings once stood, now vacancies and blacked out agencies, terminated enclaves. Roth was a world-class entertainer whose messy life as a sordid bard of New Jersey has been studied, and the book occasionally descends into rapid onset spiritual materialism. His father doesn’t get his “couple more years.” “The choice isn’t real, however. The alternative is unacceptable. The choice would be to jump out of the window.” I am realizing while writing this review a common truth. “Dying is work and he was a worker. Dying is horrible and my father was dying.” I feel like you don’t like me and I know what it is to be a man to know truth. Everything true is confusing. Me and my friends are wasting away while “the last thing he wants to do is die,” “It would be nice to have a few more years,” “To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory,” “It’s better to be concentrated on what has to be done. Though all the concentration isn’t so wonderful either. I can’t read, God knows I can’t write—I can’t even watch a stupid baseball game. I absolutely cannot think. I can’t do a thing.” Life did eventually resume that year at a normal enough clip that Roth completed a new novel. The price of eggs is nothing. My art father died recently. Mysterious ways. Gutted. The thing which will “finish me off” hopefully does so as an assassin. Death otherwise is sinewy and gristly, glaciation to be muscled through, “shrunken” and “crushed” of sentiment. “Spontaneous, unassuming virility and spirited decency” grows decrepit and “how deep deep can be” is a “merciless” “blind mass” in which “there’s an awful lot of life to cherish” in ministering to and shepherding your greatest teacher through indignities, “once you sidestep disgust and ignore nausea and plunge past those phobias that are fortified like taboos.” Understanding is the deepest knowledge. There’s no reward but life itself. “that was the patrimony,” “nothing less or more than the lived reality that it was.” Roth bargains with the consequences of a rousing whirlwind of pain plaintively like a duty. My father was born in 1934 and said this is the worst time he’s ever lived through. I’ve been waiting patiently on some of you to sober up to this. Nobody thinks the present day is better. The contrast between a real man and you should have something to do with what our fathers “broke their backs to give us.” People are so broken with a put on and I pray for all of them. The powers that be made us so obsessed with our safety, risk-averse and ungregarious, self-conscious and self-surveilling. We don’t have to live this way and you don’t know what you’re missing. Miss me with grating scenesters and hecklers. As the older generations go extinct, we’re going to miss them, and the sequela follows you, stalks you long in the tooth. Life extension is coming. As all sorts of structures that once organized life melt away, this book made me love the man Herman Roth, and I’ll never forget him.