Into the emptiness

The feeling of emptiness comes and goes. Don’t fight it, don’t analyse it, don’t act on it. Just be still and sit with it. Hold it. Accept it and it will go away again after a while. And then sometime later it will come back. The thing to do is, again, sit with it, stand with it, lie with it, roll around with it and accept it. Allow it to be there however long it needs to be there, until it goes away again. It’s a cycle – don’t you see - that will go round and round. As long as you stay on the ride you can carry on with your life – as husband, father, dentist, brother, Jew, immigrant, non-immigrant, American, writer, fictional character and whatever else you happen to be.

Some though wont’ or can’t ignore the emptiness. And here’s what happens when you run into the emptiness in search of something – you run up against Roth’s Counterlife. For those of us who are self-destructive enough to have to explore what is there just because it’s there, the reward you get is a tangled mess of identities – what you are, what you’re trying to escape, your attempt at rewriting it or being rewritten by someone else and the totally alien one you’re trying to leap into – each one just as unsatisfying as the first, the one you would have had had you just stayed on the ride.

Yet we – the selfishly destructive curious ones – know there is something in the emptiness and the dissatisfaction. It may even be the dissatisfaction itself. It’s the universal constant. Anytime you try to define something by giving it an identity trouble bulges at the seams – whether that’s nationality, ethnicity, religion, or marital status. It is begging our pesky human need to rewrite things – and that’s where Counterlife gets so interesting and so clever – because all these bulging dissatisfactions are examined in parallel with the writer’s neurotic need to write and rewrite the narrative. The author who is trapped by his own fictions and the process of writing, the fictional characters trying to escape the author, the real characters trying to avoid being fictionalized. We are all of these things.