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Operation Shylock
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Operation Shylock-Phillip Roth
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3 stars
This is my fourth book by the author that I have read but unfortunately it is my least favorite. This book won The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1994.
“It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous.”
The first 25% of the book I really enjoyed by then it went off the rails for me. The ending chapter at least explained to me what the author was trying to do but I just didn’t get it.
It's got everything I hate about his weaker works (in my opinion): self centered focus, self insert (literally here), terrible writing of women characters that largely exist for him to have sex with. A young Phillip Roth was a character in Plot against America but I thought it worked there because in the context of a fascist 1930s America it's saying "a few small shifts in culture could have completely changed/endangered my life as a Jewish American". It services a bigger point. Here, the theme is identity and the self, and the way it's written the book just comes off incredibly self absorbed...and in bad taste (more on that below).
The plot of this one is that he's in Israel to observe the real life trial of John Demjanjuk who was falsely accused of being the notorious concentration camp guard "Ivan the terrible" in the 80s (he might have been a guard at another camp, but died before that trial in Germany was completed so was ruled technically innocent either way). There turns out to be a double of him going around using his fame to preach 'diasporism', a belief that Israeli Jews who emigrated after WWII and their descendants should now return to Europe since their culture is actually European and it's safer there now. Unwinding the truth of who the other Phillip Roth is, why the 'original' is actually there, and what's been going on the whole time gets complicated and paranoia is abound until things come together in the end.
I was going to give this book 2 stars due to the fact there are some interesting explorations in here about what the true self is in light of issues like cultural diasporism- in terms of both Israel as a country of amassed descendants of a diaspora, and from Roth as an American from a diaspora. BUT...
The other aspects of this book felt incredibly self serving and in bad taste to me. Roth frequently uses his adoring double to write dialogue about he is such an amazing writer whose critics were idiots not to give him more praise and awards for his masterpieces such as Portnoy's Complaint -_- (I hated Portnoy's complaint). Also in the mix up with his double that keeps happening it makes it seem like he's this massive deal everyone is dying to meet -_-. Honestly, his verbose diatribes about why he was interested in identity at this point in his career just seem like a smokescreen for him to write power fantasies about himself. hated it. He also kept up the 'is it true or not' gimmick of this book by claiming in interviews and at the end of the book he really was working for mossad, which whether true or not feels like someone boasting they worked with the CIA...which I don't love.
It also feels like bad taste in how the trial is used as backdrop for the book. This was a real incident where a man was almost executed on false charges because the US and Israeli governments intentionally suppressed evidence from the Soviets so they could have this trial for political clout. Even the guy's eye colour was wrong. Something that is conveniently left out of the book, when Roth tries to defend a faulty witness who claimed he could tell Demjanjuk was Ivan by looking into his eyes (?), after claiming in the 40s he saw Ivan get killed. Roth takes the angle of 'the prosecution was so wrong to come at him about this, clearly his original account was written from things he heard or wanted to be true why would they take him literally? I'm an author I understand better" -_- Bro, dare I say testimonies work differently than literary devices?
There's also a part where he starts assuming the internal monologue of everyone in the area and assumes any Palestinians present are thrilled a Nazi is getting freed and that's why they intentionally put their children out as sacrifices for their terrorist efforts because they'll do anything to make Jewish people look like villains -_- . I found that really disgusting (especially a reader in the 2020s), considering what the IDF's actions towards civilians and their households has been like, and the government's enabling of settler colonialism.
Yeah, I thought this book was selfish and gross. I have 2 Roth books left, so we'll see if they go high or low (or middle- I can't believe the book of his I have the least strong feelings about is the one about a sentient breast).