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Felix Roth

by Cary Fagan

Toronto author Cary Fagan has steadily developed a reputation as a writer of articulate and entertaining novels and short stories. Felix Roth, his eighth work of fiction, confirms Fagan as a writer of measurable talent. Fagan writes with the grace of a master stylist, like an early Philip Roth. In his latest work, however, Fagan’s beautiful sentences tell a story that is less than original.

As the novel begins, 20-year-old Felix Roth sits beside his brother Aaron on an airplane descending into New York City circa 1979. Concerned about Aaron’s attraction to a community of Orthodox Jews, Felix’s Toronto-based family has sent him to chaperone his brother’s quest. Felix, who writes for a financial services newsletter, has other plans and Aaron all but disappears from the novel as our protagonist self-consciously unravels his own bildungsroman, exploring the New York he learned to love by reading that city’s great Jewish writers.

The action in the novel is driven forward by Felix’s desire to show a story he has written to his literary idol, the Nobel-winning Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashvis Singer. This event is repeatedly delayed by Felix’s numerous meetings with a slate of secondary characters. For example, Felix abandons his brother in their hotel room to rendezvous with his mistress (also his boss’s wife) who has arranged to be in New York during the Roth brothers’ sojourn. Other secondary characters include a pretty young Israeli, a paranoid elderly scholar, and a sexually liberated boarding house couple.

Felix’s encounters with each of these characters provides Fagan with fodder to explore the nuances of literary meaning and the role of literature in society. This exploration, however (much like Felix’s love life), simply repeats positions already seen a hundred times before. Felix Roth may include an interesting survey of New York’s Jewish literary history makers, but it is too busy revelling in the stories of the past to make a new contribution to the lineage. Fagan’s ambition is admirable; his originality is lacking.

 

Reviewer: Michael Bryson

Publisher: Stoddart

DETAILS

Price: $21.95

Page Count: 272 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-7737-6049-0

Released: Feb.

Issue Date: 1999-4

Categories: Fiction: Novels