We hate it when our pets become unanimous

Depois do besuntado consenso que acolheu Philip Roth nas últimas semanas (até o barbeiro de Paio Pires se mostrou resignadamente cínico com o enésimo golpe de rins da Fundação Nobel) convém lembrar um detalhe menor: o homem não publica um bom livro desde 1998. The Dying Animal era aceitável, mas Roth-light; The Plot Against America era Roth-bored e, a espaços, Roth-boring; e Everyman era praticamente Roth-comatose. Pode parecer mesquinho apontar isto, não apenas porque o seu currículo prévio inclui pelo menos meia-dúzia de obras-primas, mas também porque Roth a meio-gás continua a ser melhor do que para aí 90% da hiper-actividade afectada pelo resto do pelotão. Não tenho nada contra a histeria: só contra a histeria uniforme.
Exit Ghost, que me chegou às mãos ontem à tarde (e aqui uma menção honrosa para a Amazon, que conseguiu decifrar o meu código postal antes da EDP, da PT Comunicações e dos taxistas do Seixal) apresenta todos os sinais de um regresso à boa forma, recuperando os três alicerces estruturais das melhores ficções de Roth: o rancor misógino, a estridência narrativa, e Zuckerman.
O melhor augúrio de todos foi a opinião negativa de Christopher "Soprano" Hitchens, cada vez mais inseguro sobre a sua própria classificação taxonómica (primata, sim, mas qual a sub-ordem?). Com o seu assombroso anti-talento para a imprecisão crítica, desperdiçou meia-dúzia de boas piadas a martelar o livro nas páginas da Atlantic. (O texto está disponível aqui e merece ser lido, de preferência em voz alta, com sotaque de Brooklyn e um revólver na peúga).
Para percepções astutas, como de costume, temos de consultar James Wood, que não tem tempo para se sentir ofendido com felattios compulsivos, e encapsula a essência de Roth (defeitos e virtudes) em duas passagens antológicas:

«The danger in Roth’s work has always been a slightly sentimental didacticism; an example is the coercive way he has leaned on the word “human” in the past few years—one of those words which always answer their own questions. In Roth’s world, to be human is to have the “human stain,” is to get things wrong, to get people wrong, to make mistakes, to have a sexual body, to be messy and vital and, above all, male. Roth has sometimes resembled a man standing on a corner wearing a huge sandwich board bearing the words, in irritatingly hectoring capitals, “WE ARE ONLY HUMAN”; “Everyman,” a book both deeply moving and somewhat self-pitying, seemed to switch the board for one with the message “WE ARE DYING.” His new novel is a better novel than “Everyman,” intricate, artful, and pressing, and avoids sentimentality with the comedy that the latter novel lacked.
(...)
Roth has been the great stealth postmodernist of American letters, able to have his cake and eat it without any evidence of crumbs. This is because he does not regard himself as a postmodernist. He is intensely interested in fabrication, in the performance of the self, in the reality that we make up in order to live; but his fiction examines this “without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or magic-realist gimmickry,” as Zuckerman approvingly says of Lonoff’s work. Roth does not want to use his games to remind us, tediously and self-consciously, that Nathan and Amy and Lonoff are just “invented characters.” Quite the opposite. Unstartled by their inventedness, he swims through depthless skepticism toward a series of questions that are gravely metaphysical, and more Jamesian than Pynchonian: How much of any self is pure invention? Isn’t such invention as real to us as reality? But then how much reality can we bear? Roth knows that this kind of inquiry, far from robbing his fiction of reality, provokes an intense desire in his readers to invest his invented characters with solid reality, just as Nathan once invested the opaque Amy Bellette with the reality of Anne Frank. In this kind of work, the reader and the writer do something similar—they are both creating real fictions.
Fiction, for Roth, is not what Plato thought mimesis was: an imitation of an imitation. Fiction is a rival life, a “counterlife,” to use the title of one of Roth’s greatest novels, and this is why his work has managed so brilliantly the paradox of being at once playfully artful and seriously real.»

A última afronta que um autor destes merece é unanimidade; gostava de ler mais reacções como as de Hitchens. E o Nobel, merece? Sinceramente, desde Dario Fo, deixei de fazer perguntas dessas em voz alta. Acho muito mais provável que lhe entreguem o da Paz, pelo projecto do Diasporismo desenvolvido em Operation Shylock.