And he couldn' t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.
I just found out that he'd used almost the same construction in American Pastoral (his next novel):
The longing he would feel if he had to live in another country. Yes, everything that gave meaning to his accomplishments had been American. Everything he loved was here.It is a truism nowadays to say that Am. Past. is worse on every dimension than Sabbath, but I was amused to see how this is explicitly so even at the level of the sentence. (Am. Past. was the first Roth I read, I think I was altogether too tolerant of it at the time because of some good long sentences -- this one, perhaps? -- in the homecoming scene early in the novel.)
3 comments:
Oh geez. I read those years apart so I didn't notice. Sabbath's Theater was my first Roth and everything after disappointed.
Did you ever consider that the parallel construction was entirely deliberate?
Yes I considered this; it doesn't seem too unlikely to me, and it wouldn't affect my view of the relative merits of the two passages.
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