Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist
masterpiece, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth, a retired waterfowl farmer
already in his late eighties, shocked the literary world with the
announcement that he had written a second novel. It was called, he
reported, Mercy of a Rude Stream, the title inspired by
Shakespeare, and it followed the travails of one Ira Stigman, whose
family had just moved to New York s Jewish Harlem in that "ominous
summer of 1914."
"It is like hearing that J. D. Salinger is preparing a sequel to
The Catcher in the Rye," the New York Times Book Review pronounced,
while Vanity Fair extolled Roth's new work as "the literary
comeback of the century." Even more astonishing was that Roth had
not just written a second novel but a total of four chronologically
linked works, all part of Mercy of a Rude Stream. Dying in 1995 at
the age of eighty-nine, Roth would not live to see the final two
volumes of this tetralogy published, yet the reappearance of Mercy
of a Rude Stream, a fulfillment of Roth's wish that these
installments appear as one complete volume, allows for a
twenty-first-century public to reappraise this late-in-life
masterpiece, just as Call it Sleep was rediscovered by a new
generation in 1964.
As the story unfolds, we follow the turbulent odyssey of Ira,
along with his extended Jewish family, friends, and lovers, from
the outbreak of World War I through his fateful decision to move
into the Greenwich Village apartment of his muse and older lover,
the seductive but ultimately tragic NYU professor Edith Welles. Set
in both the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and the bohemian
maelstrom of the Village, Mercy of a Rude Stream echoes Nabokov in
its portrayal of sexual deviance, and offers a harrowing and
relentless family drama amid a grand panorama of New York City in
the 1910s and Roaring 20s.
Yet in spite of a plot that is fraught with depictions of
menace, violence, and intense self-loathing, Mercy of a Rude Stream
also contains a cathartic, even redemptive, overlay as "provocative
as anything in the chapters of St. Augustine" (Los Angeles Times),
in which an elder Ira, haunted by the sins of his youth, communes
with his computer, Ecclesias, as he recalls how his family's
traditional piety became corrupted by the inexorable forces of
modernity. As Ira finally decides to get "the hell out of Harlem,"
his Proustian act of recollection frees him from the ravages of old
age, and suddenly he is in his prime again, the entire telling of
Mercy his final pronouncement.
Mercy of a Rude Stream is that rare work of fiction that
creates, through its style and narration, a new form of art.
Indeed, the two juxtaposed voices one of the "little boys swimming
in a sea of glory," the other of one of those same boys "in old age
being rudely swept to sea" creates a counterpoint, jarring yet
oddly harmonious, that makes this prophetic American work such an
lasting statement on the frailties of memory and the essence of
human consciousness.
Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels includes A Star
Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, From
Bondage, and Requiem for Harlem."
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