A Diving Rock on the Hudson

A Diving Rock on the Hudson, the second book in Henry Roth's six-part epic Mercy of a Rude Stream, promises to he one of the most haunting works of our time. Painting a grand panorama of New York City in the Roaring Twenties, Roth draws us into the adolescent world of Ira Stigman whose impoverished neighborhood is so tough the kids play tiddlywinks with manhole covers. We Follow Ira from 1921 through 1925, as he encounters the harsh realities of high school, haplessly pursues jobs as a bus conductor and soda "hustler" at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, and awakens to the incandescent magic of modern literature in his freshman year at CCNY. Yet throughout this absorbing novel, Roth evokes a bygone time far less innocent than we had ever previously imagined, for the fateful story of Ira Stigman is that of a tormented teenager doomed to near madness by the twisted, violent urges that reside within his own heart. So intense, so consuming, so grave is a secret carried by the young Ira that it can only he revealed by the old man, seventy years later, often communing with his computer, Ecclesias, in streams of cathartic torrents that free him from the shackles of his past, yet never release him from his Faustian bargain. The innocent boy, victimized by his father in Roth's landmark novel Call It Sleep, has now become his own dark binary star, and the sins that visited a previous generation have become preponderant in his own. Incomparable and relentless, A Diving Rock on the Hudson re-creates within its harrowing family drama the duality of two Americas - one of immigrant families crowded into fetid slum tenements, the other of modish women sheathed in long white gloves gliding along in their new automobiles - that has not been rendered as powerfully in prose in many decades. "We don't believe in the Muse any longer," comments the old man Ira, as he reflects on the long-cracked mirror that has been his life. But perhaps that old man is wrong. Perhaps A Diving Roc