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Melville's Later Novels by William B. Dillingham

1988; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.1988.0011

2158-415X

John Bryant,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Studies in American Fiction121 For better or worse, critics, Searles included, stilltalk about Roth and Updike in these terms. And while it is true that much of Searles' book is devoted to Roth and Updike seriatim, there are moments when he steps back to see them in tandem: The most truly significant difference between Roth and Updike is one of perspective. While Updike adopts a broad, almost sociological approach, Roth tends toward a more introspective handling of his material. His books are as much character studies of the protagonists as they are commentaries on the current scene. Accordingly, Roth's works are almost always written in the first person ("spoken," as it were, by their protagonists), while Updike's are usually in the form of third person. Members of a mistreated minority, Roth's characters are more concerned with personal survival than with the larger society that has excluded them. But for Updike's W.A.S.P.s, themselves integral components of the failed system, individual and society are more inextricably linked. In short, Roth's characters are in search of a sophisticated, existential self-knowledge that will enable them to function independently in a world where "the center cannot hold": Updike's people seem to be seeking an external rationale for a traditional "leap of faith" that will somehow restore a sense of stability and Christian community to that world (p. 6). There will, no doubt, be those who find such large pronouncements simplistic; others will likely regard them as occasions for quarrel. One thing, however, is clear: when a critic casts too wide a net, he is liable to drag in not only the writers being linked, but virtually every other writer as well. For example, Searles argues that "a major theme treated by both Roth and Updike is the difficulty of close interpersonal dealings, especially between parents and children." Thus was it ever, and thus does it remain. Indeed, the more interesting possibility might be to think of two novelists, contemporary or otherwise, who do not deal significantly with the "difficulty of close interpersonal dealings." In short, there were difficulties aplenty lurking behind the thesis of The Fiction ofPhilip Roth and John Updike. Put another way: Searles ran joyfully, and perhaps naively, into an area where wiser heads would fear to tread. But after one ticks off all the shortcomings, one is still left with something akin to admiration—for this is an extended comparison that links two important chroniclers of America's social fabric. By forcing us to see them as coming to the same material—albeit, from radically different traditions and, I would argue, radically different aesthetic criteria—Searles also forces us to raise questions that we would normally eschew. For me, that is quite enough to justify a book like The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike. Franklin and Marshall CollegeSanford Pinsker Dillingham, William B. Melville's Later Novels. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986. 430 pp. Cloth: $30.00. Since the 1920s Herman Melville scholarship has followed paths dictated largely by shifting critical trends and the particular orientations of Melville's early "revivalists." Raymond Weaver, for instance, virtually concludes his biography with Pierre (1852), relegating to darkness what we now call the "later works," the tales, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man. This last book Weaver dismissed as "a posthumous" novel, presumably the product of a dead mind. But, to be fair, the biographer's epithet was decidedly more charitable than an earlier critical 122Reviews assessment of The Confidence-Man as "an abortion." Subsequent scholars have labored mightily to correct Weaver's (and each other's) shortcomings, but studies by Charles Anderson, Luther Mansfield, Merrell Davis, William Gilman, and Howard Vincent focused almost exclusively on the early books up to Moby-Dick (1851), thus providing a tacit validation ofWeaver's neglect. Naturally drawn to that masterwork which sits at the midpoint of Melville's most productive period (1846-1856), scholars and critics have understandably paid more attention to Melville's development up to Moby-Dick; they have regarded the subsequent writings as examples of a faltering, frustrated, and even failed talent. Naturally drawn as well to those early years of intellectual...