The Century's Marginal Spaces
Marco Roth, The Scientists: A Family Romance
Union Books, 196pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781908526205
reviewed by Dan Barrow
In a 1929 essay, Walter Benjamin writes that ‘the nineteenth century did not reveal itself to Zola or Anatole France, but to the young Proust, the insignificant snob, the playboy and socialite who snatched in passing the most astounding confidences from a declining age... It took Proust to make the nineteenth century ripe for memoirs.’ The reigning peace and ignorance of the aristocratic and bourgeois interiors of the 19th century – the condition, sketched by Benjamin four years later in 'Poverty and Experience', of rooms in which the lumbering furniture and paternal presence dampens any speech or noise into repressive silence – is not the only factor that made the lived experience of that period intractable to biography. It was the work of the real abstractions of capital, Benjamin writes, to sap from lived experience the ‘historical weight’ it had possessed in pre-industrial societies in which ‘it was handed down in short form to sons and grandsons.’ The production of significance within the existential framework of the biography or memoir had become intensely fraught.
There's a secondary problem: what happens when the model of a coherent life that belongs with and structures a class identity begins to dissolve? A quarter of the way through Marco Roth's The Scientists, the author-narrator has a confrontation with his father, weak with ‘full-blown AIDS’, about the reserve option he has kept open of not transferring to Columbia University, his father's alma mater. His father recounts how ‘I'd always messed up everything through clumsiness or inattention, or perhaps was evil’; his precisely remembered ‘minor transgression[s]’ had ‘grown from slips into systematic failings of my flawed character’; he threatens to cut off Marco's inheritance. He obeys his father's wish: ‘to take the handout is to become part of a story that's never entirely yours... You take on the customs of your class, as my father had when he performed the thoroughly ritualized theater of my disinheritance, and as I would too, someday.’ Much of the narrative drive of The Scientists comes out of the ways in which this mechanism, well tuned over centuries, of class reproduction, comes unstuck and biographical meaning dissipates into the meandering attempt to assert or discover the minor markers that demarcate a distinct identity.
For even during Marco's childhood, the culture of the class fraction in which his family was embedded was already beginning to dissolve. Roth's father is a doctor and medical researcher, his mother a sometime pianist and concert promoter; they belong to that socio-cultural peculiarity of New York, Jewish, liberal, cultured in literature and classical music, comfortably off but uninterested in too much comfort, describing themselves as ‘middle class’. This phrase ‘explained why my parents voted Democrat, why my father drove four-door Japanese compact cars’ and why they lived in the Upper West Side, ‘still considered edgy’ when his parents moved in. Roth is particularly vivid in his evocation of this now-lost world, a constellation of frozen objects and tableaux of New York landscapes that appear like studio sets. The young Roth (existing as a recollection of the older, bruised Roth) stared at ‘the maze of interconnected honeycomb moldings on the ceiling’ and ‘idly trace the arabesques of the Persian rug with my toe’:
When no one was around, the living room was a lost continent, an America I could enter only by swimming across an expanse of open parquet... I'd lie on the carpet underneath my mother's Steinway B. It was a warm place. If my mother came in to play a Scarlatti sonata, for instance, or the accompaniment for a Schubert song, I'd listen while feeling the vibrations of chords and the thump of the pedals push through me. Cadences and phrases flowed and mingled somehow with the patterns of the carpets ... They were as eternal to me as meadows, and they were my meadows.
Accompanying this closed childhood idyll is the striking, raw sense of awkwardness that being out of it, in the ‘real world’, entails, a condition I have hardly seen described better than here, and one which too often feed, as in Roth's narrative, into adult failure. (The assumption, reinforced by teen dramas, that nerdy, precocious or unworldly children ‘find their niche’ and prosper, in art school or higher education, is more laughable than ever in the age of £9,000-a-year university fees.) There is a quite proper hint of self-loathing to Roth's descriptions of how his teenage self ‘spent hours on push-ups and sit-ups in front of the mirror, attempting to will myself into some alternate body that someone might look at with something other than revulsion’, or made furtive glances ‘at the legs of the Dominican and Puerto Rican girls in Catholic school uniforms.’ The developmental narrative adopted by liberal-bourgeois parents, burnished by psychoanalysis but essentially not differing from their ancestors', in which a loved child becomes a personally and sexually successful and normal adult, fails almost as soon as it gets started, and not just because of the cataclysmic secret of Marco's father's disease.
The Scientists effectively joins a contemporary genre of fictions of middle-class abjection, the historic failure of neoliberalism to reproduce the classical bourgeoisie, with its layer of bohemian flotsam – finding its early ancestor in Douglas Coupland's Generation X (1991), and exemplified by Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture (2010) and Girls (2012-), Greta Gerwig and Noah Baum Bach’s Frances Ha (2013), Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2012), Sam Lipsyte's The Ask (2011) and Bravo's unerringly depressing Gallery Girls (2012). The protagonists of these fictions want to become artists, 'creativity' being the contemporary image of Aristotle's ‘good life’, but wind up in successive internships, temp jobs and frustrating relationships. But if these fictions tend to resort to what Raymond Williams called the ‘magical solutions’ of ideology – the part-time admin job that saves Frances in Frances Ha, the mysteriously sudden success of Hannah in season 3 of Girls – to break the deadlocks of narrative that real social contradiction imposes, The Scientists is bleakly clear-sighted about the reality of personal failure, which is always also class failure, a failure at ‘that very American thing, “becoming an individual.”’ In the last two chapters of the book, after Roth has been through Yale and marriage, he is living, aged 38, alone in Philadelphia (‘city of dead ends and vacant lots, all like an allegory of my failures’), away from family, friends and his N+1 colleagues (he is a senior editor at the magazine). He has long since failed to finish the study of father-son relationships in 19th-century fiction he started at Yale as a guiltily orthodox distraction from the adventure of Theory. The Scientists appears as an attempt to think through that deformation of a way of life, that dead end, as much as it is an outgrowth of the earlier project he conceived as a response to his father's death. It absorbs the knowledge of that failure formally: each stage in Marco's 'progress' is an attempt at knowledge or self-definition that is always one step forward and one step back, partly because knowledge and self-definition are not the same thing – the more Roth feels compelled to find out about his father, himself the ever-curious scientist who instilled such an instinct in the boy, the more he feels caught up in his father's legacy and the less he might become, as his parents remind him, ‘my own person’. Study at Columbia, at Yale, in Paris with Derrida, a visit to Morocco, the feverish readings of Ivan Gorchakov’s Oblomov, Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. All these attempts to produce meaning, or the selfhood that would guarantee it, find themselves circling back into the doubtful material of the past, undoing whatever narrative progression they might produce. Recalling the moment he learned of his father's illness, he details three different versions of the memory: ‘In the latest version, my father tells it as a bedtime story, as if I were a small child.’ The prologue takes place before Marco leaves for college, the narrative moving back to his childhood; Roth's father dies less than a third of the way into the book, but the mystery of his life, and his son's, occupies all of the rest of the memoir.
Which brings us to the oddest and thorniest part of The Scientists. The young Marco is told that his father contracted HIV through accidental contact with contaminated blood at the Bronx hospital where he worked. Just over halfway through the book, Roth directs us to a memoir written by his maternal aunt, Anne Roiphe: she implicitly suggests that Marco's father was gay and contracted the disease from a partner. Intriguingly, as Roth quotes the passages, Roiphe traces this suggestion through the young Eugene Roth's cultural affectations and social ineptitude – he listened to opera, read Proust and Mann, was ‘awkward or indifferent around girls’ –as the narrator uses to mark out the contours of young Marco's angst and alterity. The narrative drive to uncover the reality – the very thing that, in the deconstructive theories Roth studies at Yale, should most have scare-quotes around it – coalesces and kicks up a gear. This leads to some rather odd moments: Marco's attention to male friends in relationships with women he fancies; his worries over his aunt's attitude to his protestations about her suggestion (‘wouldn't she think I was too complacent, and maybe also covering up something?’); his reaction to being propositioned during a trip to Morocco (‘I tried to imagine what the strange boy might have felt like, the smooth pectorals of his bared chest, the coarseness of his coppery black hair under my fondling hand’). It is here, rather than in the somewhat slight analyses of 19th-century fiction (texts that Marco's father introduced him to), that Roth's interest in narrative, sexuality and failure intersect: desire and its frustration appear as a kind of warping secret within the material of the past, forcing its reassessment, as in the gothic novel (cf. the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre, which Jenny Diski invoked in her review of The Scientists). One is inevitably reminded of the narrator's interest in Baron de Charlus' circle in In Search of Lost Time: though the narrator is attracted to women, his strenuous peeping, his vicarious satisfaction in the tryst of the opening scene of Sodom and Gomorrah, is more eloquent about what desire structures the narrative. The possibilities are left curiously hanging even as Marco goes on to (not very successful) marriage and fatherhood. The unpleasant subtext, of course, is that queerness is a condition one falls into because of a lack of masculinity, or a consolation prize of (fixed, meaningful) identity one receives for being unsuccessful at heterosexuality.
It is never quite clear what caused the dissolution of the idyllic micro-culture of Roth's childhood, although the things that afflict Roth's generation, and my own – gentrification (absurdly advanced in New York since the period of Giuliani), disappearing employment (particularly in the arts), the tightening thumbscrews of governmental austerity – are good candidates, reducing as they do liberal politics to impotent apologism for state violence. AIDS appears in this constellation as both symptom and metonym: the first major neoliberal assaults on New York – financial deregulation, gentrification, the abandonment of federal and state housing to drugs and poverty – was simultaneous with the city's collapse as the queer paradise of the eastern seaboard. (Sarah Schulman's recent memoir, The Gentrification of the Mind, records the part AIDS played in the social cleansing of the Lower East Side: landlords sold the properties of the dead and dying, marked-up, to the white and straight, chucking out the bereaved in the process.) As much as I appreciate Roth's boldness in telescoping together the personal and the social through this figure, a little more care and precision would be welcome – after all, the history of AIDS is not just that of his family. But it is here one senses again the shadow presence of Proust: the reality of historical class decomposition finds itself recollected in the slowly unwinding prose of the layabout son of the middle classes, not only failing at but uninterested in the bourgeois pursuit of industry, wasting his substance in riotous living, haunting the century's marginal spaces – the salon, the brothel, the cork-lined bedroom, the closet. The temps perdu of historical actuality finds itself again in what we might call the queer temporality of recollection: the unproductive fugue of memory, obsession, waiting for the brief moments of happiness to arrive again involuntarily. (Think of that other hurt child, Charles Foster Kane, mirrored by the ever-increasing piles of commodities – frozen memories – in the interior of Xanadu, the Kane family cabin writ large.) The Scientists accepts the darkness and difficulty of this pact with memory more than almost any memoir of recent years, and the acuity of its perception of how difficult and compromised it is too outside the bourgeois interior raises it above most contemporary literary fiction.
There's a secondary problem: what happens when the model of a coherent life that belongs with and structures a class identity begins to dissolve? A quarter of the way through Marco Roth's The Scientists, the author-narrator has a confrontation with his father, weak with ‘full-blown AIDS’, about the reserve option he has kept open of not transferring to Columbia University, his father's alma mater. His father recounts how ‘I'd always messed up everything through clumsiness or inattention, or perhaps was evil’; his precisely remembered ‘minor transgression[s]’ had ‘grown from slips into systematic failings of my flawed character’; he threatens to cut off Marco's inheritance. He obeys his father's wish: ‘to take the handout is to become part of a story that's never entirely yours... You take on the customs of your class, as my father had when he performed the thoroughly ritualized theater of my disinheritance, and as I would too, someday.’ Much of the narrative drive of The Scientists comes out of the ways in which this mechanism, well tuned over centuries, of class reproduction, comes unstuck and biographical meaning dissipates into the meandering attempt to assert or discover the minor markers that demarcate a distinct identity.
For even during Marco's childhood, the culture of the class fraction in which his family was embedded was already beginning to dissolve. Roth's father is a doctor and medical researcher, his mother a sometime pianist and concert promoter; they belong to that socio-cultural peculiarity of New York, Jewish, liberal, cultured in literature and classical music, comfortably off but uninterested in too much comfort, describing themselves as ‘middle class’. This phrase ‘explained why my parents voted Democrat, why my father drove four-door Japanese compact cars’ and why they lived in the Upper West Side, ‘still considered edgy’ when his parents moved in. Roth is particularly vivid in his evocation of this now-lost world, a constellation of frozen objects and tableaux of New York landscapes that appear like studio sets. The young Roth (existing as a recollection of the older, bruised Roth) stared at ‘the maze of interconnected honeycomb moldings on the ceiling’ and ‘idly trace the arabesques of the Persian rug with my toe’:
When no one was around, the living room was a lost continent, an America I could enter only by swimming across an expanse of open parquet... I'd lie on the carpet underneath my mother's Steinway B. It was a warm place. If my mother came in to play a Scarlatti sonata, for instance, or the accompaniment for a Schubert song, I'd listen while feeling the vibrations of chords and the thump of the pedals push through me. Cadences and phrases flowed and mingled somehow with the patterns of the carpets ... They were as eternal to me as meadows, and they were my meadows.
Accompanying this closed childhood idyll is the striking, raw sense of awkwardness that being out of it, in the ‘real world’, entails, a condition I have hardly seen described better than here, and one which too often feed, as in Roth's narrative, into adult failure. (The assumption, reinforced by teen dramas, that nerdy, precocious or unworldly children ‘find their niche’ and prosper, in art school or higher education, is more laughable than ever in the age of £9,000-a-year university fees.) There is a quite proper hint of self-loathing to Roth's descriptions of how his teenage self ‘spent hours on push-ups and sit-ups in front of the mirror, attempting to will myself into some alternate body that someone might look at with something other than revulsion’, or made furtive glances ‘at the legs of the Dominican and Puerto Rican girls in Catholic school uniforms.’ The developmental narrative adopted by liberal-bourgeois parents, burnished by psychoanalysis but essentially not differing from their ancestors', in which a loved child becomes a personally and sexually successful and normal adult, fails almost as soon as it gets started, and not just because of the cataclysmic secret of Marco's father's disease.
The Scientists effectively joins a contemporary genre of fictions of middle-class abjection, the historic failure of neoliberalism to reproduce the classical bourgeoisie, with its layer of bohemian flotsam – finding its early ancestor in Douglas Coupland's Generation X (1991), and exemplified by Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture (2010) and Girls (2012-), Greta Gerwig and Noah Baum Bach’s Frances Ha (2013), Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2012), Sam Lipsyte's The Ask (2011) and Bravo's unerringly depressing Gallery Girls (2012). The protagonists of these fictions want to become artists, 'creativity' being the contemporary image of Aristotle's ‘good life’, but wind up in successive internships, temp jobs and frustrating relationships. But if these fictions tend to resort to what Raymond Williams called the ‘magical solutions’ of ideology – the part-time admin job that saves Frances in Frances Ha, the mysteriously sudden success of Hannah in season 3 of Girls – to break the deadlocks of narrative that real social contradiction imposes, The Scientists is bleakly clear-sighted about the reality of personal failure, which is always also class failure, a failure at ‘that very American thing, “becoming an individual.”’ In the last two chapters of the book, after Roth has been through Yale and marriage, he is living, aged 38, alone in Philadelphia (‘city of dead ends and vacant lots, all like an allegory of my failures’), away from family, friends and his N+1 colleagues (he is a senior editor at the magazine). He has long since failed to finish the study of father-son relationships in 19th-century fiction he started at Yale as a guiltily orthodox distraction from the adventure of Theory. The Scientists appears as an attempt to think through that deformation of a way of life, that dead end, as much as it is an outgrowth of the earlier project he conceived as a response to his father's death. It absorbs the knowledge of that failure formally: each stage in Marco's 'progress' is an attempt at knowledge or self-definition that is always one step forward and one step back, partly because knowledge and self-definition are not the same thing – the more Roth feels compelled to find out about his father, himself the ever-curious scientist who instilled such an instinct in the boy, the more he feels caught up in his father's legacy and the less he might become, as his parents remind him, ‘my own person’. Study at Columbia, at Yale, in Paris with Derrida, a visit to Morocco, the feverish readings of Ivan Gorchakov’s Oblomov, Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. All these attempts to produce meaning, or the selfhood that would guarantee it, find themselves circling back into the doubtful material of the past, undoing whatever narrative progression they might produce. Recalling the moment he learned of his father's illness, he details three different versions of the memory: ‘In the latest version, my father tells it as a bedtime story, as if I were a small child.’ The prologue takes place before Marco leaves for college, the narrative moving back to his childhood; Roth's father dies less than a third of the way into the book, but the mystery of his life, and his son's, occupies all of the rest of the memoir.
Which brings us to the oddest and thorniest part of The Scientists. The young Marco is told that his father contracted HIV through accidental contact with contaminated blood at the Bronx hospital where he worked. Just over halfway through the book, Roth directs us to a memoir written by his maternal aunt, Anne Roiphe: she implicitly suggests that Marco's father was gay and contracted the disease from a partner. Intriguingly, as Roth quotes the passages, Roiphe traces this suggestion through the young Eugene Roth's cultural affectations and social ineptitude – he listened to opera, read Proust and Mann, was ‘awkward or indifferent around girls’ –as the narrator uses to mark out the contours of young Marco's angst and alterity. The narrative drive to uncover the reality – the very thing that, in the deconstructive theories Roth studies at Yale, should most have scare-quotes around it – coalesces and kicks up a gear. This leads to some rather odd moments: Marco's attention to male friends in relationships with women he fancies; his worries over his aunt's attitude to his protestations about her suggestion (‘wouldn't she think I was too complacent, and maybe also covering up something?’); his reaction to being propositioned during a trip to Morocco (‘I tried to imagine what the strange boy might have felt like, the smooth pectorals of his bared chest, the coarseness of his coppery black hair under my fondling hand’). It is here, rather than in the somewhat slight analyses of 19th-century fiction (texts that Marco's father introduced him to), that Roth's interest in narrative, sexuality and failure intersect: desire and its frustration appear as a kind of warping secret within the material of the past, forcing its reassessment, as in the gothic novel (cf. the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre, which Jenny Diski invoked in her review of The Scientists). One is inevitably reminded of the narrator's interest in Baron de Charlus' circle in In Search of Lost Time: though the narrator is attracted to women, his strenuous peeping, his vicarious satisfaction in the tryst of the opening scene of Sodom and Gomorrah, is more eloquent about what desire structures the narrative. The possibilities are left curiously hanging even as Marco goes on to (not very successful) marriage and fatherhood. The unpleasant subtext, of course, is that queerness is a condition one falls into because of a lack of masculinity, or a consolation prize of (fixed, meaningful) identity one receives for being unsuccessful at heterosexuality.
It is never quite clear what caused the dissolution of the idyllic micro-culture of Roth's childhood, although the things that afflict Roth's generation, and my own – gentrification (absurdly advanced in New York since the period of Giuliani), disappearing employment (particularly in the arts), the tightening thumbscrews of governmental austerity – are good candidates, reducing as they do liberal politics to impotent apologism for state violence. AIDS appears in this constellation as both symptom and metonym: the first major neoliberal assaults on New York – financial deregulation, gentrification, the abandonment of federal and state housing to drugs and poverty – was simultaneous with the city's collapse as the queer paradise of the eastern seaboard. (Sarah Schulman's recent memoir, The Gentrification of the Mind, records the part AIDS played in the social cleansing of the Lower East Side: landlords sold the properties of the dead and dying, marked-up, to the white and straight, chucking out the bereaved in the process.) As much as I appreciate Roth's boldness in telescoping together the personal and the social through this figure, a little more care and precision would be welcome – after all, the history of AIDS is not just that of his family. But it is here one senses again the shadow presence of Proust: the reality of historical class decomposition finds itself recollected in the slowly unwinding prose of the layabout son of the middle classes, not only failing at but uninterested in the bourgeois pursuit of industry, wasting his substance in riotous living, haunting the century's marginal spaces – the salon, the brothel, the cork-lined bedroom, the closet. The temps perdu of historical actuality finds itself again in what we might call the queer temporality of recollection: the unproductive fugue of memory, obsession, waiting for the brief moments of happiness to arrive again involuntarily. (Think of that other hurt child, Charles Foster Kane, mirrored by the ever-increasing piles of commodities – frozen memories – in the interior of Xanadu, the Kane family cabin writ large.) The Scientists accepts the darkness and difficulty of this pact with memory more than almost any memoir of recent years, and the acuity of its perception of how difficult and compromised it is too outside the bourgeois interior raises it above most contemporary literary fiction.