Operation Shylock

Well, Philip Roth certainly can write.  I just wish he had chosen to write about something I could find remotely interesting.  Don't get me wrong - this story had a great set up and lots of potential.  A writer named Philip Roth discovers that another man - also named Philip Roth - has been impersonating him on a speaking tour in Israel.  But the impostor has the exact same birth date as the writer, and looks exactly like him.  And the writer is recovering from an addiction to a sleeping pill that left him out of touch with reality.  What is really going on here?  The writer travels to Israel to confront the impostor:

Could it be, I asked myself while he pedantically continued on in this vein, that the history he's most intent on erasing happens to be his own?  Is he mentally so damaged that he truly believes that my history is his; is he some psychotic, some amnesiac, who isn't pretending at all?  If every word he speaks he means, if the only person pretending here is me....But whether that made things better or worse I couldn't begin to know.

Action in Israel is set against the backdrop of a trial of John Demjanjuk, a suspected Nazi, who has been living as a suburban American for decades under an assumed name.  Whether the man really is Demjanjuk is at the heart of the trial.

I wondered if it was while at the Demjanjuk trial that the impostor had first got the idea to pretend to be me, emboldened by the identity issue at the heart of the case, or if he had deliberately selected the trial for his performance because of the opportunitites for publicity provided by the extensive media coverage.

Interesting so far, right?   Unfortunately, the interesting mistaken identity plot stops there.  The impostor has a political agenda of anti-Zionism - getting Jews to leave Israel en masse to repopulate Europe.  And the writer is ambivalent at best to this attitude.  The plot then devolves into a philosophical discourse on the modern Jewish experience and the significance and meaning of Israel.  Perhaps in part because I could not discern Philip Roth the Author's own position on these issues, I found these dissertations, and in fact the whole novel, miserably boring.  I had to force myself  to slog through the end of the book, hoping for some sort of interesting resolution, or at least a moral of the story, and was sorely disappointed.  

This is despite the fact that there are occasional moments of brilliant prose.  I loved this gem, for example:

And I wanted to hear her talk because of the beguilingly ambiguous timbre of her voice, which was harmonically a puzzle to me.  The voice was like something you've gotten out of the freezer that's taking its own sweet time the thaw: moist and spongy enough at the edges to eat, otherwise off-puttingly refrigerated down to its deep-frozen core.

But these moments were too few, and unconnected to any story of interest.  I don't say this often, but this book was a complete waste of my time.

I finished this book on May 27, 2012