Call It Sleep.

I’ve said before that I don’t really get Jewish-American literature, and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep – on the TIME 100 and #67 on The Novel 100 – now joins that list. It is apparently considered one of the best, if not the best, depictions of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. There was, somewhere, a central theme or concept in this book that flew right over my head, which left me with a slow, difficult-to-read novel with very little plot until the very end of the book.

The protagonist is David Schearl, a perpetually terrified boy who, after arriving as an infant in the prologue, is eight years old at the start of the first section and eleven at the end. He has a vivid imagination, usually for the worse, is afraid of everything, and engages in incoherent internal monologues whose style I imagine is ripped straight from Ulysses. (They were reminiscent of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which supposedly took the technique from Joyce’s novel.) His father is a violent man who can’t keep a job because he does things like attack co-workers with an axe. His mother coddles him and tries to protect him from his father. His aunt comes to live with them for a few months, runs her mouth (not without justification), and ends up feuding with David’s father.

I look for a consistent plot to carry me through any novel, but Call It Sleep offers the thinnest of threads. In the final 60-70 pages, Roth finally gives us a story, a question about David’s parentage and the true pasts of both of his parents, leading to a confrontation and an accident that may have had some deeper symbolic meaning, but again, it was lost on me. While we’re waiting for something to happen, we have chapter upon chapter of David’s time in Hebrew school, or hanging around the other Jewish kids in his neighborhood. As a slice of life in a short story, it would be interesting, but as a novel, it’s a weak foundation. It might be that my own life experiences are too far away from those of the protagonists in novels like Call It Sleep, Herzog, or Portnoy’s Complaint for me to relate to them and to understand the central themes, but then again, I’ve had no problem with African-American classics, and I doubt that I am more in tune with Milkman Dead or Bigger Thomas than I am with David Schearl or Alexander Portnoy.

Next up: I’m halfway through Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity!, a reader suggestion from probably a year ago.