Paul Bryant's Reviews > Operation Shylock: A Confession

There are some novels that seem to exist mainly to give the author the excuse to indulge in some classic rants, some hilarious – the wonderful “95 Theses 95” section in Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor and the various hair-raising direct addresses to the reader in How to Kidnap the Rich by Rahut Raina – and some horrific like the spinetingling Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov; I bet you can think of many more.

Philip Roth is rantmeister supreme, and Operation Shylock is stuffed full of them, some truly sublime in their utter offensiveness; in fact this novel is like he woke up and thought huh, I’ve become a safe cosy prize winning A list candidate for Greatest Living Novelist, I’ll show the bastards I can still rock, I’m gonna offend EVERYBODY! Just watch me!

So he starts off with the insane idea that one day, he, Philip Roth, gets a call from his cousin who lives in Jerusalem who says hey Philip, I didn’t know you were already here and he says what? No, I’m still in New York – and thus he discovers that a) there’s a lookalike running around in Jerusalem pretending to be Philip Roth; and b) this other Roth is holding a series of lectures on the exciting new concept of Diasporism.

This concept says : Jews why are you putting yourselves in danger by still living here in Israel? Now your enemies will always know where you are! Israel is the most dangerous place for you! Avoid a second Holocaust! Get back to the diaspora! Get back to Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine – they will welcome you with open arms, you’ll be so much safer there! They feel so guilty about the Holocaust!

As you can see, this is a serious jest, the irony is as thick as an elephant’s hide, you can hear Philip Roth chortling as he elaborates this lunatic idea of this lunatic double. The language he puts into the mouth of his crazy double is so inflammatory I can’t quote it.

But he is bent on being fair to everybody – all will get their chance to spew fort their hatreds! As the real Philip Roth arrives in Jerusalem to confront and denounce the fake Philip Roth, he runs into an old grad school chum George Ziad, a Palestinian American who relocated to the West Bank. George is chock full of the bile of daily life under the occupation and he gets a ten page rant in which Philip Roth allows himself to say the antisemitic Unsayable uninterrupted and at full volume. Here’s how Philip now describes his old friend :

As we drove, embittered analysis streamed forth unabated, of Jewish history, Jewish mythology, Jewish psychosis and sociology, each sentence delivered with an alarming air of intellectual wantonness, the whole a pungent ideological mulch of overstatement and lucidity, of insight and stupidity, of precise historical data and wilful historical ignorance; a loose array of observations as disjointed as it was coherent and as shallow as it was deep – the shrewd and vacuous diatribe of a man whose brain, once as good as anyone else’s, was now as much of a menace to him as the anger and loathing that, by 1988, after twenty years of the occupation and forty years of the Jewish state, had corroded everything moderate in him…by the time his ideas wormed their way through all that emotion, they had been so distorted and intensified as only barely to resemble human thought… despite the thin veneer of professorial brilliance, which gave even his most dubious and bungled ideas a certain intellectual gloss, now at the core of everything was hatred and the great disabling fantasy of revenge.

Naturally some chapters later we get the anti-antisemitic diatribe from another character :

There are antisemites who are like alcoholics who actually want to stop but don’t know how. …there are occasional antisemites who engage in nothing more than a little antisemitism as a social lubricant at parties and business lunches; moderate antisemites who can control their antisemitism and even keep it a secret when they have to; and then there are all-out antisemites, the real career haters…

I wanted to reread this in many ways appalling novel now, at this ghastly time. In some ways it’s so crazy, such a ripe slab of too-knowing too-smirky metafiction (the “real” Philip Roth gets to shag the “fake” Philip Roth’s sexy girlfriend) that many readers might perform the wall-hurl and scream No More, Please! This time round I was horrified and couldn’t look away at about half of it and thought the last third dribbled away in nonsense.

Four head-banging stars. I do not recommend this novel! It’s upsetting.