Overpraised novel of Jewish immigrant life
David Schearl is a boy of about seven years old. He and his parents are Jewish immigrants from Austrian Galicia. They arrived at Ellis Island when David was a baby. The family lives in a tenement building in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. David spends most of his time at home with his mother or playing in the streets of his neighborhood while his father is at work. About halfway through the book he begins attending a cheder (Hebrew school) where a rabbi teaches him and other boys to read scriptures. David and his mother adore each other, while David is terrified of his father—a stern, violent, resentful man who is clearly the villain in this story. David’s immaculate view of his mother is disturbed, however, when he picks up inklings that she may be guilty of infidelity.
Although mostly written in the third person, Call It Sleep is told almost entirely through the eyes of David. The problem with that approach is that the story can only move as fast as this child’s mind can understand it. The reader constantly has to wait for the boy to catch up. The parents have an interesting story, but it’s lost in all the juvenile impressions and fears. So much of this book consists of children teasing and taunting each other, as children do, page after page and chapter after chapter. This relentless banter is interspersed with some of the worst stream-of-consciousness writing I’ve ever read, consisting largely of single words followed by exclamation points (Ow! Mama! No! Stop! Papa! Ain’t! Why? Crazy!). The preponderance of this interior monologue increases throughout the book until the final chapters devolve into gibberish. Then, after you’ve endured this slow-witted, whiny kid for so long, Roth wraps up the parents’ story in a stagey melodrama.
And if that isn’t enough, Roth indulges in paragraphs of ostentatiously artsy prose into which he’s clearly squeezed every last drop of juice from his thesaurus. These flowery passages only undermine the Depression-era urban realism of the story. Most of the characters, Mother excepted, speak like crass and vulgar oafs, but Roth feels the need to prove he’s a bard by waxing poetic to the extreme. Call It Sleep is a novel about salt-of-the-earth, working-class people that salt-of-the-earth, working-class people would never want to read. Instead, it reads as if it’s written for literary critics, who eat this kind of stuff up. I’m not inherently against modernism, when it’s done right. From the same time period and urban milieu, for example, I enjoyed the U.S.A. trilogy of John Dos Passos and Jean Toomer’s Harlem Renaissance novel Cane. When modernism is done wrong, however, it’s just a self-indulgent mess, as exemplified by Call It Sleep.
Overlooked in its day, Call It Sleep is now hailed as a masterpiece of Jewish-American literature. After reading it, I find that hard to believe. Because I’m not Jewish, perhaps I’m not fully qualified to review this book. As an outsider, however, I don’t feel like I learned much about the Jewish experience because the book spends way too much time inside a child’s mind. If you want to know about what life was like for Jewish immigrants in New York in the early 20th century, read Abraham Cahan’s far superior novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), or Will Eisner’s trilogy of graphic novels A Contract with God (1978), A Life Force (1988), and Dropsie Avenue (1995). Even Philp Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), though somewhat of a science fiction novel, offers a more enlightening view of Jewish American life (in Newark, New Jersey).
Just threw up from this pretentious suburb manifesto. The entire point is seeing David work through his adolescence. He comes to terms with a fear for darkness, a disdain for Luter, his mistrust in the world, it's gradual, often repetitive, but it’s connected to his understanding and scope of his world changing.
ReplyDeleteI was taken back to my own fear of the dark as a child, how I felt being around my mother & father at that age (and those distinct differences). How the natural comforts within my childhood would eventually be disrupted by life.
I also entirely disagree with your qualification of his stream of consciousness as gibberish. It’s manic, but a child’s thoughts are manic because they are entirely emotion based and have no reasoning abilities. The only way he knows how to deal with his emotions are what he sees in his father. He also writes his world with such precision, that I’m in for every word. For example, when David sees Luter about to enter his house then pushes a neighborhood kid to the ground (before running away). He later in the chapter in a bout of stream of consciousness describes ‘Don’t like luter… Wish he never comes, Never coming’ and you get the horrible churn in your stomach that his natural discomfort and disgust with Luter (seeded from the moment he watches David in the beginning of the novel, see below) is completely solidified. David’s natural instincts and observations are always rooted in the truth. The devastation is that despite being an inarticulate child, he has a correct outlook on his disposition.
“Luter shut the door.
Darkness was different without his mother near. People were different too.” - pg. 43 (just gorgeous)
I mean take an example as simple as the Sound and the Fury. Benjy coul be describe as complete gibberish, but it’s cut from the same cloth of his observations being indicative of his reality. Someone like Benjy being able to accurately discern his surroundings magnifies his families circumstance. I think your point there is bad literary criticism.
You also signal your inability to grapple with the material is becasue you aren’t Jewish. I suppose I also disagree with this. It’s likely you yourself aren’t an immigrant, nor were your parents, maybe not even your grandparents? Or if they were, that experience was never a large part of your upbringing. I’d expect if you have an immigrant background, you’d relate to the book quite a bit. I happen to be half Jewish, but when I read this book I think of my mother who immigrated from Korea. I think of growing up in Chinatown and my Father taking me to his work. I love my father very much but the horrible discomfort I felt around him as a child and wanting to only spend my time with my mother. I think of the smells of garbage and the comfort of home despite living in a place riddled with problems. This is the definitive novel of showing and not telling (you seem to need telling to understand this perspective). Yuck!
It’s also possible you grew up in a suburb (or spend much of your life there now) of which you would relate to none of this. Now, now, it’s past my bedtime. Time for sleep! I hope I don’t see you there!