Jewish-American Literature's Lost-and-Found Department: How Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Reimagine Their Significant Dead
Herzog's compulsive letter-writing is, of course, an index of his psychic agitation and of his tragicomic effort to "have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends" (2). After all, he is a man whose previously sustaining rolesÂ—as husband, as father, as intellectualÂ— have failed; he is a formerly brilliant scholar with more scribbled notes than manuscript pages. His compulsive letters are, in effect, a desperate effort to shore up fragments against his ruin. But that said, Herzog's lettersÂ—unmailed and often mental, filled with the alternating currents of high comedy and Big IdeasÂ—are also the very stuff of experimental fiction. If, as Bellow once suggested, Ulysses is a "comedy of information,"1 a novel in which popular science, snatches