Call It Wonderful

I have enjoyed almost every book that I have read for this project. Some books I had read before and were excited to re-read. Some books I had heard of before and always wanted to read. Some books were brand new to me. Call It Sleep falls into this last category. I had never heard of Call It Sleep, and I had never heard of Henry Roth. And the experience I had reading this book is exactly the experience I was seeking when Ann and I started this project. It is a wonderful, striking, compelling, beautifully written work of fiction that has been rolling around in the recesses of my mind since I began it a few weeks ago.

As Ann has undergone her journey as a novelist over the past couple of years, I have had the opportunity to reflect on what I love most in the books I read and in the writing I enjoy. The one thing I keep telling Ann that she does to perfection is to be profound without being pompous, to be meaningful without being heavy-handed, to be rich without being baroque. A real piece of art strikes you intellectually and emotionally while at the same time just being interesting and compelling. Henry Roth does what Ann does so well and creates real art here.

The story of David Schearl simultaneously feels like an extended character piece (what Alfred Kazin calls The Portrait of an Artist as a Child) and a plot-driven story about David’s world. The plot is mortar-tight, but you never see it coming. At times the story feels like it wanders and introduces characters because they interest David. It is not until later that the pieces click into place and come into focus as the foundation they always were. That is a very difficult feat to create in any story.

The symbolism and meaning that infuses the novel was at first off-putting for me. The meaning of the Cellar as a place of dark human/animal desires and sexuality is so Freudian, that while I read the first section of the novel I thought to myself, “Oh, this is why the book was so popular in the 60s, the height of Freudian interpretations in literature.” The Oedipal issues that David has with Dad, his relationship with his mother, the dark underpinnings of sexuality, can all be packaged up and dismissed, were it not for Roth’s deeper characterization. David’s relationship with his mother is more than some Freudian desire; there is a real relationship here, complex and touching. David’s problems with his Dad isn’t just a war over Mother, it is a struggle with a man who suffers from paranoia and other personal problems. Albert is both frightening and pathetic, a terror and a struggling immigrant. Roth lets these larger structures and systems fall like a cloak over the characters, scenes, and situations, but he keeps everything alive by having the characters move and tussle beneath the cloak, struggle and strive to resist any such reduction.

Kazin’s comparison of Call It Sleep to Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist seems very fitting to me. This is high literature like Joyce’s work, only Roth manages to achieve Joyce’s level of profundity while still allowing the plot and character’s motives to be simple and comprehensible. The only point of confusion for me is the penultimate chapter, when David burns himself on the third rail. But because this is the ultimate climax and David’s at a fevered pitch, it all seems fitting. I do not mind the confusion, and I feel like I could parse it out and untangle the connection between David’s search for the pure light that once made him unafraid and confident and the grownup inhabitants of the Lower East Side discussing sex from an adult perspective not seen in the book up to this point.

It is a joy to get the highs with the lows in this amazing novel.