The Great American Novel by Philip Roth

First published: 1973

Type of plot: Social satire

Time of work: 1943-1944, with flashbacks to the early decades of the twentieth century

Locale: Various cities in the eastern and midwestern United States

Principal Characters:

• Word Smith (Smitty), a retired baseball writer
• General Douglas O. Oakhart, president of the Patriot Baseball League
• Gil Gamesh, an all-star pitcher, banished from the league for purposely injuring an umpire
• Ulysses S. Fairsmith, the manager of the Ruppert Mundys
• Mike Masterson, the umpire injured by Gil Gamesh
• Roland Agni, a young star centerfielder for Ruppert Mundys
• Angela Whitling Trust, the owner of the Tri-City Tycoons

The Novel

The Great American Novel is the story of the bumbling Ruppert Mundys baseball club and of the Patriot Baseball League. In a lengthy prologue, aging sportswriter Word Smith (Smitty) recalls the greatness of the league, hints at the reasons for its demise, and bemoans the attempts by Americans of all walks of life to erase the league from memory. His mission is to preserve this part of American history: The story which makes up the novel proper is his account of the league’s demise.

The main action of the novel occurs in 1943 and 1944, though numerous flashbacks provide a sense of history necessary for the reader to understand the relationship of the Patriot League to the other major leagues and to provide the rationale for much of the action which takes place during this fateful baseball season. In these flashbacks, interspersed throughout the novel, the reader learns of the tragedy of umpire Mike Masterson, whose child was kidnapped and killed; the banishment of legendary pitcher Gil Gamesh; the missionary zeal of Mundys manager Ulysses S. Fairsmith; the conversion of Tri-City Tycoons owner Angela Whitling Trust from sexual profligate to dedicated American Communist hunter.

In 1943, the Ruppert Mundys find themselves without a home ballpark; the War Department has taken over their stadium as a training camp, and they are forced to play their entire season on the road. The ballplayers who make this season-long odyssey are a collection of men too old, too young, misfit, malformed, or maladapted for life in the big leagues. As they travel from city to city losing game after game and making fools of themselves, Roth offers numerous character studies of the people associated with the team and the league, both on and off the field. Consequently, the story of the Mundys’ miserable season is told in a series of episodic vignettes, each aimed at highlighting the pathetic nature of the club and those who are doomed to play for it.

The Mundys’ season is peppered with embarrassment both on and off the field, and a series of zany incidents makes the chronicle even more amusing. Big John Baal takes fourteen-year-old Nickname Damur to a special kind of prostitute who literally treats him like a baby, bathing and diapering him and singing lullabies to him. The Mundys play an exhibition game against inmates at an insane asylum. A rival owner introduces two dwarfs into the league; when one is traded to the Mundys, a major rivalry begins, leading to a tragedy of national consequence.

Having to suffer the ignominy of playing daily with such inept teammates wears down Roland Agni, the team’s only legitimate major leaguer. Roland schemes with the son of the owner of a rival team to doctor his teammates’ cereal with atomic-powered Wheaties; as a result, the Mundys start winning. Roland, who plays for no salary because his father wants to break his excessive pride, begins earning money so that he can buy his way off the club. The scheme fails, however, when he aborts the project because many high-ranking Americans, including the president, begin taking an interest in the team. On the day that the Mundys’ winning streak is finally broken, however, manager Fairsmith dies of a stroke, brought on by Nickname Damur’s attempt to steal a base with the club thirty-one runs behind.

Fairsmith is replaced by Gil Gamesh, who is restored to baseball because he convinces league president General Douglas O. Oakhart and Tycoons owner Angela Trust that he is the only man who can save the league from a Communist plot. In fact, Gamesh, while claiming to be a reformed Communist agent, infects the Mundys with a hatred of other teams, the fans, and everything American. There is a congressional investigation of the league, and numerous agents of the Red Menace are identified; the Mundys turn out to be a particular hotbed of Communism. The Patriot League is unable to withstand the scandal; fans desert the teams, and finally, in the late 1940’s, the league dies.

The Characters

Roth populates his novel with dozens of characters, no one of whom can be said to have a dominant role. None is drawn realistically; rather, all are exaggerations, tools of the satirist’s pen in this pointed fable about a mythical baseball league.

The character who first garners the reader’s attention is the narrator, Word Smith, a retired baseball writer who transcribes the story that forms the heart of the novel. Smitty is confined to an asylum, ostensibly because he suffers from a chronic and fatal affliction: He alliterates too much. His excessive concern with wordplay is a source of humor in the novel; moreover, it provides a forum for some of Roth’s more serious comments regarding the nature of fiction and the power of words to shape reality and convey truth.

A series of larger-than-life heroes and villains populate the playing field and the behind-the-scenes operations of the Patriot Baseball League. Many of the characters are modeled loosely on real-life figures from the game: Luke Gofannon, the legendary hitter of the post-World War I era, is a composite of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The dwarfs who are introduced into the league by Frank Mazuma have their real-life counterpart in three-foot-seven-inch Eddie Gaedel, who was brought into the real major leagues in 1951 in a short-lived experiment by entrepreneur and self-professed iconoclast Bill Veeck. (In Gaedel’s only big-league at bat, he walked.) The avid baseball fan will recognize the outlines of many other real major leaguers in several of the characters in the novel. A few historical figures, such as President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, are included in the story to maintain the facade of realism which is a prerequisite of good satire.

By far the greater concern that Roth shows in his portraits is in developing parallels to literary characters and generic personality types. Roland Agni, the perfectly built and remarkably talented center fielder for the Ruppert Mundys team, suggests both Achilles (in his pride) and Coriolanus (in his vacillation to preserve his honor). The saintly Mundys Manager Ulysses S. Fairsmith is a mixture of Moses and the typical fundamentalist preacher, drawn to an extreme.

Gil Gamesh, whose name is taken from the Babylonian epic, has the perfections and faults that make him a superb archvillain. Stung by a mistake made by umpire Mike Masterson—a mistake that costs him a perfect season on the mound—Gamesh retaliates by breaking the rules and throwing at Masterson; the blow robs Masterson of his voice, and Gamesh is banished from the league. He returns, however, to manage the Mundys; a changed man, he brings with him to the job a Communist-inspired hatred for all things American and successfully topples the league that had not treated him with the respect that his skills so obviously warranted.

Roth’s Communist haters bear all the traits that Americans have come to associate with the worst aspects of McCarthyism. Self-righteous to a fault, General Douglas O. Oakhart and Angela Whitling Trust pursue the enemy relentlessly throughout the league. The lame and inept misfits of the Ruppert Mundys team are no match for their crusading vigilantism. Readers will recognize that these are not intended as realistic portraits; nevertheless, their actions will bring a shudder of recognition to those familiar with the historical events on which these satiric sketches are based.

Critical Context

Roth had already achieved a place in contemporary American fiction when The Great American Novel was published. Goodbye, Columbus (1959), had been made into a film, and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) had been a best-seller several years earlier. This novel is quite different, however, from earlier ones, in that autobiographical elements are less prevalent, and the satiric elements more pronounced.

Possibly the greatest significance of this novel lies in the author’s attempt to explore the notion of the American epic. It has long been a commonplace among critics and authors that American novelists have been especially desirous of creating a major American novel that would stand with works such as Homer’s Odyssey or Dante’s The Divine Comedy as exemplary of the best work of an age and a civilization. Roth pokes fun at this notion throughout the novel, but he is careful to include in his own work all the elements one might expect to find in an epic about America. He is particularly conscious of the epic tradition in literature, including most of the elements of the classical epic—modified to meet his contemporary needs.

Roth’s book is another reminder that sports can be the subject of serious literature, and that in sport Americans exhibit freely the characteristics—both good and bad— that make them distinct among peoples of the world.

Bibliography

Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Cooper explores the spectrum of Roth’s writing, including his early works, the “post-Portnoy seventies,” and the Zuckerman novels. An excellent overall critical view.

Gentry, Marshall B. “Ventriloquists’ Conversations: The Struggle for Gender Dialogue in E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth.” Contemporary Literature 34 (Fall, 1993): 512-537. Gentry contends that both Doctorow and Roth are different from other Jewish authors because of their incorporation of feminist thought into traditionally patriarchal Jewish literature. He notes that their reconciliation of feminism and Judaism could alienate them from both groups, but he commends their attempt.

Greenberg, Robert M. “Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth.” Twentieth Century Literature 43 (Winter, 1997): 487-506. Greenberg argues that the theme of transgression pervades Roth’s novels, and he demonstrates how this idea of infraction allows the author to penetrate places where he feels socially and psychologically excluded. An intriguing assessment of Roth’s work.

Halio, Jay L. Philip Roth Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. Halio offers a brief biographical sketch of Roth, as well as in-depth discussions of his works. Includes a chapter entitled “Tour de Farce: The Comedy of the Grotesque in The Great American Novel.” Also includes helpful notes and a selected bibliography for further reading.

Halkin, Hillel. “How to Read Philip Roth.” Commentary 97 (February, 1994): 43-48. Offering critical analyses of several of Roth’s books, Halkin explores Roth’s personal view of Jewishness, as well as other biographical elements in his works.

Podhoretz, Norman. “The Adventure of Philip Roth.” Commentary 106 (October, 1998): 25-36. Podhoretz discusses the Jewish motifs in Roth’s writing and compares Roth’s work to that of other Jewish authors, including Saul Bellow and Herman Wouk. He also voices his disappointment concerning Roth’s preoccupation with growing old as expressed in his later novels.