An American Type: A Novel - Hardcover

Roth, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393077756 ISBN 13: 9780393077759

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

The author of the greatest American immigrant novel, Call It Sleep, returns with this posthumous work.

Henry Roth’s final novel, An American Type, is nothing short of a miracle, a lyrical work of immense poignancy from a writer whose biographical story has no parallel in American literature. Roth, best known for his towering immigrant novel Call It Sleep, emerged from a literary hibernation of 60 years in 1994 with Mercy of a Rude Stream, a fictional quartet that would be hailed by as “a landmark of the American literary century.” In contrast to Roth’s previous novels, An American Type is a both a love story and a lamentation, the final fruit of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages that Roth composed in the last years of his life. The manuscript rested undisturbed in an office file for over a decade before it was sent to Willing Davidson, then a young assistant in the Fiction Department of The New Yorker, who with a “growing sense of discovery and elation,” recognized that this unpublished manuscript possessed “astonishing vigor.”

Set in the dire year of 1938, the novel reintroduces us to Roth’s alter-ego, Ira Stigman, a 32-year-old novelist, eager to assimilate but psychologically traumatized by the scars of his impoverished immigrant past. Restless with his older lover and literary mentor, the renowned English professor, Edith Welles, whose obsessive love has crippled him, Ira, a “slum-born Yiddle,” journeys to Yaddo, the famed writer’s colony, where he meets a blond, aristocratic pianist, whose inherent nobility and “calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance” engages him.

The ensuing romantic crisis, as well as the conflict between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon the comforts of his paramour’s Greenwich Village apartment. In his relentless search to become a writer, a husband and an American, Ira heads West with an illiterate, boorish Communist, on an illusory quest for the promise of the American West. Thumbing rides from gruff truckers, riding the rails with hobos through the Dust Bowl, Ira explores America’s inherent splendors and its Depression tragedies as he returns home, uncertain if he will marry M., questioning if he’ll ever be able to make anything of his lapidary prose.

Set against crumbling piers and glimmering skyscrapers in Manhattan, against seedy motor courts and tufted palm trees in sun-soaked Los Angeles, An American Type is not only, perhaps, the last first-hand testament of the Depression, but also a universal statement about the constant reinvention of American identity, and, with its lyrical ending, the transcendence of love. 3 photos

About this title

About the Authors

Henry Roth (1906–1995) spent his early years on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In 1914, the Roth family moved to Jewish Harlem. Roth died in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Willing Davidson is a fiction editor at The New Yorker.

From the Back Cover

Discovered in a stack of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages by a young New Yorker editor, this is the final novel by Henry Roth, whose Call It Sleep was published in 1934 and who “staged the literary comeback of the century” (Vanity Fair) with Mercy of a Rude Stream in 1994. Set in 1938, An American Type reintroduces us to Roth’s alter ego, Ira, who abandons his controlling lover, Edith, in favor of a blond, aristocratic pianist at Yaddo. The ensuing conflict between his Jewish ghetto roots and his high-flown, writerly aspirations forces Ira, temporarily, to abandon his family for the sun-soaked promise of the American West. Fast-paced but wrenching, set against a backdrop of crumbling piers, bedbug-infested SROs, and skyscrapers in glimmering Manhattan and seedy L.A., An American Type is not only, perhaps, the last firsthand testament of the Depression but also a universal statement about the constant reinvention of American identity and, with its lyrical ending, the transcendence of love. This posthumous work was edited by Willing Davidson, a fiction editor at The New Yorker.

Reviews

This posthumous work by the much lauded Roth (Call It Sleep), assembled by former New Yorker editor Davidson from nearly 2,000 manuscript pages, continues the story of Roth's alter ego, Ira Stigman. Ira, a Jewish writer, has already published his first novel to much acclaim and is struggling with the second (at Yaddo, no less) when he falls for M, a fetching Midwestern pianist, despite having Edith, his domineering mentor and lover, waiting back in New York City. Ira's search for artistic inspiration soon requires a change of scenery, so he and his latest muse, a fervent Communist, travel to L.A., but things get off to a rocky start: Ira's one contact is no longer in town and work is hard to come by, but to turn to Edith or M for help would compromise Ira's effort to stand on his own. The novel comes close to achieving its aspirations of being a sweeping portrait of 1930s America and the story of a writer struggling with art, love, and finding his own voice, but despite a strong start, the narrative loses resonance as it meanders toward an abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion. (June)
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*Starred Review* Roth made an astonishing comeback in 1994 with his first novel since Call It Sleep (1934), A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, which introduces New Yorker Ira Stigman, the high-strung son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Ira’s story quickly filled three subsequent novels to create the provoking and dramatic series Mercy of a Rude Stream. Now, 15 years after Roth’s death, we have the final book in the saga. America is in the grip of the Great Depression, and even though Ira has become a published novelist, his self-loathing goes unabated, due in part to his smothering relationship with Edith, his mentor, lover, and sugar mama. When Ira falls in love with a young composer, he decides the only way to end things with Edith is to journey cross-country with Bill, a Communist working-class hero he hopes to write about. So begins a gritty, surreal, and darkly comic on-the-road adventure through a tattered America of decrepit flophouses, grimy bars, and boxcars full of hobos. As Ira discovers Bill’s true nature and confronts bigots, crooks, and madmen, he searches for the key to transmuting raw experience into art, infatuation into sustaining love. A passionate, life-embracing conclusion to Roth’s bold and cathartic magnum opus. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393077756
• ISBN 13: 9780393077759
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Davidson Willing