An American Type

The prologue to Henry Roth's posthumous novel, An American Type, contains a gripping description of a thoroughbred horse falling during a race and breaking one of its legs. The scene and its grim resolution serve as an unintentional—though no less poignant—metaphor for this, the final novel of Roth's Mercy of a Rude Stream quintet, which first saw the light of day in 1994. Carved out of an unfinished 1,900-page manuscript, An American Type continues the saga of Ira Stigman, a stand-in for Roth himself. The book focuses on Ira's excruciating efforts to free himself from an older lover while beginning life with a new one, find the proper story that will set him on his feet again as a writer and—as if that weren't enough—deal with his undeniable disillusionment with the Communist party. As Ira shifts from East Coast to West and back again, his restlessness and ruthless honesty are reflected in Roth's prose—a supple, polyglot voice of off-kilter rhythms, poetic fragments of subjective thought, and immigrant dialect. The pages of An American Type brim over with vitality, and provide ample evidence of Roth's talents, but the plot's vast scope, coupled with various storylines that don't resolve, work to squander any early momentum. Like the horse in the prologue, one roots for this book. That it stumbles before crossing the finish line, however, shouldn't be a deterrent to reading it.