I finally finished The Human Stain, which I picked up from one of those library exchange boxes in front of a very nice house in San Francisco. I never really had any interest in Phillip Roth until I talked to Ger at the strike afterparty, who studied him as part of his ph.d. There were a lot of good options in the box, but I figured that if Roth sustains the intellectual life of a deeply literate Irish guy, there had to be something in there for me.

What I found alien was the way that the narrator (I have since learned that this Zuckerman fellow appears in many of Roth’s books as an authorial stand-in) conjures up these insane stories as to why people do things. It’s only particularly annoying when the narrator decides that Delphine Roux, embroiled in a grudge match with Coleman Silk, is actually performing her hate because she secretly loves him sooo much.

The rapid fire interrogation of every little word spoken or twitch of the mouth is just not how I interact with others, which is also why it was so fascinating. There’s something very 2000’s crime show about it all, where you can decrpyt strange behavior using the power of your ginormous, impressive wit.

I was hyped to see Shogun win a million awards last night, which I finished before THS. I thought of the show while writing this post - it's another work of art interested in knowing the other, who, just by being in a different flesh sack, is an unknowable being. The unknowable is more exaggerated in Shogun, given the East vs West setup, but I liked how Mariko and John exhibit a healthy respect for their ocean of differences. There isn’t this constant mental excavation underlying everything.

I did eventually really come to like THS, especially when it becomes clear that the whole thing is the narrator’s desperate attempt to reclaim the narrative of his disgraced best friend. He’s confused, and so he impatiently invents stories about the whole goddamn world. I get that. Personally, I will wait for the world to speak to me.