Volume 41, Number 5 · March 3, 1994
Look Homeward, Ira
By Robert Towers
Mercy of a Rude Stream: Volume 1, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park
by Henry Roth
St. Martin's, 290 pp., $23.00
The oddity of Henry Roth's career keeps getting in the way as one reads Mercy of a Rude Stream. Had he written a number of novels during his eighty-seven years, one could try to place the new work by comparing it with the others. But we have only a single precocious masterpiece, Call It Sleep, published sixty years ago, and now generally recognized as the most moving and lyrical novel to come out of the Jewish immigration to America before and after the turn of the century. Even if we take account of the history of Roth's by now famous writing block or the fact that during the last fifteen years, he has, while crippled with arthritis, been able to write no fewer than six volumes of autobiographical fiction (of which the present volume is the first), the power of his first book unavoidably stays in the mind.
Review, 2471 words
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