Requiem for Harlem: Mercy of a Rude Stream, Vol. 4

Published posthumously, this fourth volume and the conclusion of Mercy of a Rude Stream continues the story of Ira Stigman, who must chose between his college poetry professor and his cousin, and decide whether he can finally leave Harlem for Greenwich Village. 25,000 first printing.

The fourth?and final?volume of Roth's astonishing, largely autobiographical bildungsroman, Mercy of a Rude Stream, retains the brilliant insight of the previous volumes with only a fraction of their suspense. The story picks up in 1927, six months after volume three, From Bondage, left off. Still living in the Harlem slums with his parents and young sister, City College senior Ira Stigman is on fire with Milton's poetry and wracked by guilt over his sexual relations with his 16-year-old cousin Stella. Although the reader has known since volume three that Ira's eventual deliverer and muse will be his NYU English instructor (and the mistress of his best friend), Roth delays the inception of this affair until the novel's conclusion and meanwhile dwells on what seem red herrings: Stella's pregnancy scare and her grandfather's apparent discovery of her trysts with Ira. Roth, who died in 1995 (leaving two more novels, which will be published separately), covers little new ground here, although the writing displays its usual nuance and technical virtuosity. The novel's most interesting revelations concern the mental illness of Ira's mother's and Ira's ruthlessness in getting the "hell out of Harlem," even if it means betraying his best friend or brutalizing Stella. This is a chilling portrait of selfishness struggling through art towards justification.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The powerful conclusion to an amazing series of autobiographical novels (From Bondage, 1996, etc.), written in old age and completed shortly before the author's death in 1995. As in the three previous installments, the story of the young manhood of Ira Stigman, Roth's identifiable alter ego, is told from two perspectives: as events occur, in and near East Harlem's Jewish neighborhood in the 1920s, and in retrospect (as italicized interludes), by the elderly Ira looking backward and holding ``conversations'' with his computer (mockingly nicknamed ``Ecclesias''). The earlier year is 1927, and Ira, a 21-year-old student at CCNY, remains absorbed in a respectful and loving relationship with his literature teacher and mentor Edith Welles (obviously modeled on leftish intellectual Eda Lou Walton) and also racked with guilt over a past incestuous liaison with his sister Minnie and a continuing exploitation of his ``easy'' younger cousin Stella. Little happens in Requiem for Harlem. Edith reveals that she's pregnant by her married lover, and Ira dutifully tends to her during the trauma following her abortion. Stella confides that she's ``four days overdue,'' but when a relieved Ira learns she's not pregnant after all, he takes shameful advantage of her again, in the balcony of a movie theater (in a remarkably tense and erotic scene). And Ira finds himself caught up in the abusive and painfully comic quarrels of his parents, Leah and Chaim, a pair of Olympian kvetchers whose furious incompatibility contrasts strikingly with Ira's yearning to lose himself in the elevated and consolatory pages of his beloved Milton. This brilliantly talky story ends with Ira's escape from home, possessed by what he persuades himself is ``a vibrant new vision . . . of liberation, of independence.'' An editorial endnote promises two more novels, different in style and spirit, that will carry Ira's story forward and will be published ``eventually.'' Whatever more we're fated to learn of Ira Stigman and Henry Roth, in finished form or not, will be well worth waiting for. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

As he hurries down Lenox Avenue at the conclusion of the final volume of Roth's unnerving tour de force, the quartet Mercy of a Rude Stream, Ira Stigman, Roth's ravening hero, tells himself that he's "protean, he was capable of anything, he wasn't sure of anything." This perception of the mutability of the self is intrinsic to Roth's complex saga, but it emerges full force in Requiem for Harlem, the most clarion and metaphysical of the four novels. Having made it to his senior year of college, Ira recognizes both his limitations and his potential, acknowledging that his rough upbringing has made him uncouth, that his incestuous relationship with his sister and furtive couplings with his cousin have precluded any romantic inclinations, and that his abject poverty on the one hand, and love of literature on the other, make pride irrelevant, a surrender that induces him to allow Edith, his unshockable mentor and first adult lover, to support him. As Roth traces the traumatic events that instigate Ira's departure from his parents' Harlem tenement for Edith's book-filled Greenwich Village apartment, he elevates the mean facts of his hero's existence to the plane of classical tragedy, depicting the storm of Ira's mind and the "labyrinthian implications" of his predicaments in prose that roars, roils, and foams within the confines of the page like rapids surging against a riverbank. Roth's seething re-creation of Jewish life in New York City circa 1920 is nothing less than a grappling with the elusive nature of time and consciousness, and his quartet will be recognized as a magnificent, if troubling achievement. Donna Seaman

This last installment of Roth's massive fictional memoir (From Bondage, LJ 6/15/96) finds his alter ego, Ira Stigman, about to leave childhood and Harlem forever behind as he begins an affair with Edith, a refined NYU English professor. Roth portrays his youthful self severely here, dwelling on the guilt and self-hatred resulting from an incestuous relationship with his sister and an affair with a young cousin. While this novel may resemble Remembrance of Things Past in size and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in purpose, it isn't the equal of either. Still, it's a powerfully evocative, if idiosyncratic, depiction of a young writer's coming of age in the lost world of immigrant Jewish New York. Libraries owning the previous volumes will want this one also.
-?Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.