Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece,
, Henry Roth, a retired waterfowl farmer already in his late eighties, shocked the literary world with the announcement that he had written a second novel. It was called, he reported,
, the title inspired by Shakespeare, and it followed the travails of one Ira Stigman, whose family had just moved to New York’s Jewish Harlem in that "ominous summer of 1914."
"It is like hearing that…J. D. Salinger is preparing a sequel to
," the
pronounced, while
extolled Roth's new work as "the literary comeback of the century." Even more astonishing was that Roth had not just written a second novel but a total of four chronologically linked works, all part of
. Dying in 1995 at the age of eighty-nine, Roth would not live to see the final two volumes of this tetralogy published, yet the reappearance of
, a fulfillment of Roth's wish that these installments appear as one complete volume, allows for a twenty-first-century public to reappraise this late-in-life masterpiece, just as
was rediscovered by a new generation in 1964.
As the story unfolds, we follow the turbulent odyssey of Ira, along with his extended Jewish family, friends, and lovers, from the outbreak of World War I through his fateful decision to move into the Greenwich Village apartment of his muse and older lover, the seductive but ultimately tragic NYU professor Edith Welles. Set in both the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and the bohemian maelstrom of the Village,
echoes Nabokov in its portrayal of sexual deviance, and offers a harrowing and relentless family drama amid a grand panorama of New York City in the 1910s and Roaring 20s.
Yet in spite of a plot that is fraught with depictions of menace, violence, and intense self-loathing,
also contains a cathartic, even redemptive, overlay as "provocative as anything in the chapters of St. Augustine" (
), in which an elder Ira, haunted by the sins of his youth, communes with his computer, Ecclesias, as he recalls how his family's traditional piety became corrupted by the inexorable forces of modernity. As Ira finally decides to get "the hell out of Harlem," his Proustian act of recollection frees him from the ravages of old age, and suddenly he is in his prime again, the entire telling of
his final pronouncement.
Mercy of a Rude Stream Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels
A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, From Bondage
Requiem for Harlem